If you live in the US that can't be true. The Interstate Highway System, state highways, etc. are government funded infrastructure that isn't funded locally. The mortgage market is also distorted/subsidized nationwide by the federal government. I'm not sure about sewers.
You can only count the highway system as a subsidy if you pretend a highway between, say, San Francisco and Los Angeles is there to benefit the people of the Central Valley. And it's not.
Certainly the mortgage market is distorted by the federal government, but I have yet to see any evidence of subsidy for suburban borrowers.
It's a subsidy for all mortgages. More people would rent if not for this subsidy. Also any roady that connect your suburb to anywhere are heavily subsidized, to the tune of greater than 60%. If your suburb build its sewers with bonds, they too end up receiving various forms of subsidy. It would be truly unique in the whole of the US if your community's property taxes covered the full cost of local services and weren't partially covered from the state's general fund.
>t's a subsidy for all mortgages. More people would rent if not for this subsidy.
Well, okay. You still haven't made the case it disproportionately benefits the suburbs. People who buy houses in the city pay a lot more money, and presumably get to write off a lot more interest.
>Also any roady that connect your suburb to anywhere are heavily subsidized, to the tune of greater than 60%.
So what you're saying is cities benefit enormously from a subsidy that allows companies to employ people who don't work in the city and import products from other places?
>If your suburb build its sewers with bonds, they too end up receiving various forms of subsidy.
Oh? Do you have some evidence this is true?
>It would be truly unique in the whole of the US if your community's property taxes covered the full cost of local services and weren't partially covered from the state's general fund.
Well, sure, but we pay state taxes. I would expect some of that money to come back.
I expect you'll find that your city core pays for it. Every calculation I've ever seen about the expenses of suburbs ends up with downtown paying for suburban development. It's cheaper to service a downtown property, more expensive to service a suburban one; and the suburban properties are typically paying lower property taxes, not higher. Heavily subsidized suburban residents then go to their city council meetings and complain about property taxes going to mass transit and similar uses. shrug
How much has downtown Detroit paid for Auburn Hills the past 20 years or so?
Or, in another way: are these just recent calculations? There are a lot of places where downtown cores hollowed and had most of the big-financial-impact businesses move out to the suburbs a few decades ago, and now that reversed more recently, and will probably cycle around a few more times in the future.
>I expect you'll find that your city core pays for it.
I expect you're wrong about that.
> Every calculation I've ever seen about the expenses of suburbs ends up with downtown paying for suburban development.
It all depends on who is doing the accounting. Much of the infrastructure built outside cities isn't built for the local residents at all, but it's there to service the cities. As I pointed out above, you can't count a highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles as a subsidy for the Central Valley, and yet that's exactly what academics in at places like CUNY do. How convenient.
>Heavily subsidized suburban residents then go to their city council meetings and complain about property taxes going to mass transit and similar uses. shrug
I mostly see complaining by people who live in cities. People who state confidently how much more efficient cities are and then can't explain why everything they buy is more expensive. Shrug.
