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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

Those suburbs outside the city limits still need money. They get it from state and federal funds which were mostly collected from people in the city limits. For example the Highway Trust Fund as one of many examples. If you check the per capita spending, it's higher for suburbanites than urbanites but the urbanites are putting in more money.

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Absolutely not in the case of the DC metro area, on both the MD and VA sides. Those counties subsidize DC proper in various ways, along with the less populated portions of their own states, and because the median household income is so high, they also pay a disproportionate amount of federal income taxes when compared to DC residents.

I also have no idea why you think city dwellers are the primary contributors per capita to the Highway Trust Fund which is funded via a tax on fuel (i.e. miles driven).

The tax on fuel has not been able to keep up with expenditures for the Highway Trust Fund for two decades; now a third of the money comes from the General Fund.

https://t4america.org/2025/05/22/the-highway-trust-fund-isnt...

That said, suburbs with high median household income are probably still putting a lot of money into the General Fund by income taxes.

they aren't putting as much in as the city by call kinds of measures. It generally cost up to 4-5x to maintain suburban areas vs urban. High income suburbanites don't make up that difference. They're subsubdized by the urban citizens.

The suburbanites pay for that maintenance, and there are many other costs to city living that urbanites like to ignore (significantly higher expenses on emergency and social services for example). It's not nearly as straightforward as urbanites like to claim.

One thing that is absolutely clear is that commercial districts subsidize residents in every jurisdiction, and urban commercial districts rely on commuters (from surrounding suburbs) to thrive.

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