And I don't want to subsidize your police force, welfare programs, or subway with my taxes, but I'm not out there complaining about urban hipsters. More power to them. If you don't like suburbs, don;t live there, and leave them alone.
Besides, many suburbanites work or take entertainment in the city, where they get utility from the city services.
Because of progressive taxation and the fact you have to pay people a lot more to live in dense cities. Any time you want to propose a flat tax you'll have my support.
But you miss the point: a large fraction of those suburban dwellers work and get paid in the city. Cities like London have literally millions of daily commuters.
Money flows out of cities because they contain a lot of taxpayers that consume resources efficiently. Collecting the garbage from a 200-unit condo building is way cheaper than visiting 200 houses in a suburban subdivision. Yet the dollar value of the house and condo are similar and they pay similar taxes. If the city condo dweller works at the next desk to commuting suburbanite, they get paid the same and pay the same taxes. The suburbanite costs more to service and consumes more energy, etc.
Also, cities have a higher ratio of taxpayers to non-taxpayers. There are fewer kids and retirees living there, for example.
I'm not against suburbs at all. Often a great place to live, particularly with kids. But it's helpful to understand their costs.
Yes, and they use fewer services than locals. They also pay transportation-related fees (commuters are a gold mine for San Francisco), and sometimes even income taxes (as in NYC). Hell, New York forces you to pay city income taxes if you telecommute to a company there even if you never set foot in the city.
In my local big city the two biggest budget items are "protection" (police and fire, mostly) and "health and welfare". Commuters don't require police or fire protection in the evenings, and they don't use the local methadone clinic. They don't use residential services either, which tend to be subsidized by businesses.
>Money flows out of cities because they contain a lot of taxpayers that consume resources efficiently. Collecting the garbage from a 200-unit condo building is way cheaper than visiting 200 houses in a suburban subdivision. Yet the dollar value of the house and condo are similar and they pay similar taxes. If the city condo dweller works at the next desk to commuting suburbanite, they get paid the same and pay the same taxes. The suburbanite costs more to service and consumes more energy, etc.
Suburban people pay the cost of their own trash pickup, as well as other utilities. At least where I live these kinds of services are done on a city-by-city contract basis, so nobody is subsidizing the water, trash, communications, or sewer for my suburban city. And yet, I pay less than the local urban people do, which implies it's not as efficient to provide services to built-up areas as proponents claim.
I work at a mobile provider, and for us urban customers cost many times what the suburban customers do. Everything in cities is crazy expensive, the permitting process always takes longer, and you can never put things where you want to put them. When I want to do a drive test it takes forever because of traffic, and people who work in the city have to be paid more. If I want to open a storefront for customer service the rent is many times what I pay in the suburbs.
Everyone who's providing services has to be running into the same sorts of costs.
>Also, cities have a higher ratio of taxpayers to non-taxpayers. There are fewer kids and retirees living there, for example.
That's because high density cities are too expensive to raise children or take care of grandpa. This is a counter-argument to the one you're trying to make, as it implies cities are forcing suburbs to take people who aren't a net tax benefit.
>I'm not against suburbs at all. Often a great place to live, particularly with kids. But it's helpful to understand their costs.
Yes, well, my argument is the costs you've enumerated are being paid by the people who incur them. Usually people who try to claim cities are subsidizing suburbs lean on highways, which are normally paid on a regional or national basis. But that argument rests on the fanciful notion that when California builds a highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco it's primarily a benefit to the people in the Central Valley.