No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local.
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them.
The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise.
Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
