That general sentiment is unsupported by evidence and most of the time when you challenge it you get links to strongtowns.org which is a non-credible source run by a crank.
People constantly say that cities "subsidize" suburbs but when you look into it you find out that is only sometimes true, and that many of the people who do the most productive work in cities commute there from the suburbs, and that many of the world's most valuable companies, including all but one of the FAANG companies, are located in suburban areas.
Plus, if people really want to talk about "subsidies" they should admit that big dense cities get plenty of those too.
You'll also see a lot of commenters who think "suburban" and "rural" are the same thing, often without realizing it, to the extent that one particularly clueless comment I saw recently asserted that nobody in the suburbs had city utilities and all the houses had septic tanks.
Cities are actually very expensive to maintain, and they tend to have the worst concentration of problems such as crime and drug abuse, and NYC is one of the prime examples.
> and they tend to have the worst concentration of problems such as crime and drug abuse, and NYC is one of the prime examples.
Per capita drug use in NYC isn't as bad as many rural areas, where meth has become a huge problem. The fact is that more people mean smaller percentages can still mean lots of people.
Cities really aren't that expensive compared to the wealth they produce. Its just that with scale also means demand goes up, which increases prices because resources are still finite.
Cities don't produce wealth. People produce wealth. Many of the people who work in cities to produce wealth actually live in suburbs. For example, many of the people who drive NYC's economy live in New Jersey, Long Island, and the suburbs north of the Bronx and commute to work. It's wrong to give the city full credit for that wealth creation, which is the fundamental mistake that Strong Towns makes when they assert that cities subsidize the suburbs.
People working together create wealth. That used to require cities. But remote work certainly doesn't advantage suburbs, since at least in my experience, remote workers are moving to rural areas.
How are you calculating how expensive a suburb is to maintain versus a city? A suburb can't exist without a city, basically by definition. A city would have fewer wealthy commuters without the suburbs, which would reduce the size of the economy, but ultimately a city can exist without suburbs albeit in a diminished state. You cannot say suburbs are cheaper to maintain than cities when they cannot exist without cities.
While it is true that wealthy people live in suburbs and commute to the city and contribute to the economy, the same infrastructure is generally more expensive in a suburb than a city because it has to travel longer distances between houses. That is just geography and physics. Picking up garbage for a building with 10 apartments is going to be cheaper per household then driving between 10 different houses, for example.
The relationship between cities and suburbs is symbiotic in some ways, but in many ways suburbs rely on exporting costs onto cities. Suburbs exclude poor people by design (zoning rules and housing supply restrictions), so that they don't have to pay for all the social services used by poorer people. And when you say 'city infra is more expensive', a huge percentage of the city infrastructure (e.g. roads, trains, sewers) is used by people who commute into the city when they are in the city. Very few people living in the city go and use infrastructure in the suburbs on a daily basis.
Imagine if everyone in NYC tried to move out to the suburbs, it would not be remotely feasible. They wouldn't have the social services for the poor and wouldn't be able to get the tax revenue to maintain infrastructure between houses while preserving the spread out distances between houses without dramatically raising taxes. The rich would then probably just flee somewhere else and take their taxes with them. Additionally, lower income people couldn't even afford the houses/cars needed to live there in the first place.
> strongtowns.org which is a non-credible source run by a crank
I've yet to see a comprehensive takedown of the main points of Strong Towns that isn't addressed directly in the book. I don't think your argument amounts to one.
Suburban businesses can be highly productive, but municipalities do not directly benefit from this since taxes on business profits do not go to municipalities. They may indirectly benefit from higher property values - and therefore property taxes - near the business center, but in general the suburban development model spreads houses and businesses so far out (and splits them through zoning) that the maintenance burden on the city is still too high relative to municipal funding through taxes. Marohn devotes many pages to this in the book.
I'm not sure how Chuck Marohn is a crank. Is it because of the complaint against him from the licensing board? His PE license lapsed from 2018-2020. He filed to have it renewed [0] before he was aware of the Minnesota licensing board's complaint. He should not have called himself a PE while his license was lapsed, but I don't think it negates any of his arguments and I think it's a stretch to say he is deliberately misleading.
> Cities are actually very expensive to maintain
Tremendously so, but some of them seem to do very well with defeasing those expenses (see NYC's significant budget surplus) [0]. The difference is that cities do not have a fundamentally broken development pattern that is guaranteed to always depend on external funding or growth.
> and they tend to have the worst concentration of problems such as crime and drug abuse, and NYC is one of the prime examples
This is a complex conversation, and I disagree with your conclusion. There were 433 homicides in NYC in 2022 [2] and 8.5 million people [3], for a murder rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people. This is worse than that of Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire, but similar to the murder rate in Wyoming (4.9), less than that of Texas or Montana (6.6 and 7.1), and significantly lower than that of almost the entire American South (7.8 to 20.5) [4].
To your point about drug abuse in NYC, I disagree. There were <2168 fatal overdoses in NYC in 2020 [5], which works out to 25.675 per 100,000 people. One look at the overdose fatality map [6] tells you that this is middle of the road, and dwarfed by rural states in the region like Vermont, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. The drug crisis in America is terrible, but urbanicity does not exacerbate it.
The right conclusion, I think, is that urbanicity does not drive murder rates or drug abuse - poverty, deprivation, lack of opportunity, and other factors do. This is why NYC is relatively safe despite being the most urban place in America, while other states and cities (hello Texas, Mississippi, Chicago, New Orleans, and Flint) of various levels of urbanization are much more dangerous. These places are poor, for reasons that are, ironically enough, frequently addressed by Strong Towns.
The only thing that makes it expensive is the desire to be there. If you move that "desire" to a rural location, its going to cost the same but have larger distances to travel, a la Los Angeles.
Not if the supply dramatically outstrips demand. If you want to live in a walkable city in America with decent public transit (to the point where car ownership is optional), low to moderate crime, and lots of jobs, relatively few places meet that demand. If there were twenty American cities with the same economic abundance and amenities as New York City, New York City rent would be lower.
This was almost word for word my decision process when picking where to live. "I'm not going to buy a car, so I want to live somewhere designed for that, and I want to live somewhere with local tech jobs." I also don't like the heat too much, so that gives me a couple of cities in America, or I could move to another country.
Yep. I live in NYC because the my thought process was the same, with the additional constraint that I needed to be close-ish to family. Have not regretted it for a second
There aren't many places with the access to as many high-paying jobs and the desirable walkability of NYC. That makes demand to live here high, and then we have on top of that artificial constraints on building new housing. Additionally, the suburbs outside of the city also have artificial constraints on building housing, and generally other cities that could become alternatives to NYC also have artificial constraints on building housing (and also don't build enough transit). All of that makes NYC more expensive and makes cities remotely like it (e.g. S.F.) more expensive.
> If this was true, shouldn't efficiency make living there cheaper?
You make more money in cities, and it is easier to find a job. Living in a small town in Montana sounds great, until you realize that you can't find a job and are starving to death. Smaller towns and cities are cheaper simply because people have less money to spend on housing. But try going to Aspen CO or Jackson WY, and its crushing because so many rich people are living in those places and the only jobs to be had are low paying ones serving those rich people.
It doesn't because of the constrained housing regime. All marginally available money flows to landlords. Anything that begins to cost less simply raises rents.
Landlords are able to capture the efficiency gains through higher rents. What makes it so much more expensive to live in NYC is not that (e.g.) construction costs are that much higher, it's because the land costs so much more because it is more desirable.
It increases efficacy, but most of the efficiency gains probably goes to the landlords, property owners and a few lucky percentage who win the subsidized housing lotteries.
If this was true, shouldn't efficiency make living there cheaper?