Suburbia Is Subsidized: Here's the Math (opens in new tab)

This isn’t rocket science.

If you’re the mayor of a city, build density if you want to maximize incoming tax revenue compared to the costs of maintaining the infrastructure to support it. Of course you don’t want to have 1 Taco Bell when you could have 300 condos!

What this doesn’t mean, though, is that suburbs are inherently bad or insolvent. In fact, most American suburbs are separate tax entities altogether from cities and then do often have higher property tax rates as a necessity to pay for infrastructure.

I used to think that, but I was wrong. Bubba milking cows and fixing toilets is value. Finance, media, "the information economy", downloadable content, advertising/marketing, etc, are, for the most part, parasitism. Subsidizing suburban normiedom is a kludge to keep the system operational.

Starve the host, and the parasite will also suffer.