Are you suggesting that a pleasant rural/exurban environment, perhaps within a reasonable driving distance of an urban downtown is not quality of life focused? It may not be your preference but it is for many people. Others even like suburbs though that's mostly not my thing.
That's fine if people want to live in the suburbs but... They need to start paying the full amount of what it costs to maintain those suburbs. As it is, the dense urban downtown is subsidizing all of it. That's not fair.
That seems like an incomplete accounting though, as it's looking at net revenue per acre.
When in reality, the productivity of an acre (and therefore its tax revenue) depends on that acre + all its inputs (people, services, etc).
Downtowns (aka central business districts) look wildly productive, but they're fueled by people who live... not there.
From this perspective, it's really more of a call for mixed use development [0], which is able to supply more of its own requirements AND benefit from locality.
The City of London is perhaps the most extreme example. I assume its revenues are astonishing. But hardly anyone lives there. It would be absurd to say that the City is subsidizing the rest of London.
It's not like a city exists in some impermeable bubble from the surrounding area. A great deal is shipped into a city through the suburbs and other surrounding area. Many workers commute in from suburbs which are often cheaper than the city even though they may have better school systems (even though the per student costs are often lower). Food comes in from generally more rural areas.
Cities and especially their denser and more walkable areas are dependent on the surrounding area in many ways. More dependent than the suburbs are on the city except perhaps for employment.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that while San Francisco was the original primary catalyst for development in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley (which is effectively suburban sprawl) would be just fine without the city at all. The same would have been true of the Boston area to a large degree especially 20 years or so ago, except perhaps for the universities.
It makes sense the downtown is where people in the suburbs go to work and that therefore downtown appears to be making more. But that's still ignoring the fact that there's a cost to maintain every road, water pipe, sewer, sidewalk, etc. Those suburbs still cost way more than downtown and the suburbs are not paying enough to maintain their costs. Cities are going bankrupt.
If you want to consider the entire thing one unit (suburbs + downtown = unit), you still have to figure out how to pay for all the services. The more spread out everything is the more those services cost.
So it still comes down to the same thing. If you want, blame it on the government zoning downtown for no residents and only zoning for single family housing and therefore leading to the only affordable thing being the suburbs. But, to maintain those suburbs they're going to have to raise taxes 4x to 8x on everyone in that unit.
