Maybe not directly, but that's the cause. Most people want to live somewhere clean, with low crime, good infrastructure, and jobs. Most cities have tax-funded programs for all of those things. If they aren't on par, then there's two culprits: a) not enough tax dollars, b) taxes aren't being used effectively. Personally, I think it's almost always the latter. You can look at the historical effectiveness of most programs, and coincidentally, they seem to get less effective as more money becomes available.