You haven’t seen Seattle, have you? 75% of total area of the city is zoned for single family houses. Sure, it might not literally be “suburban”, but the development pattern is just the same.

Of course, the same thing is true in the actual suburbs. Consider Lynnwood, a town of 35 000. It’s annual revenues are around $300M, and road maintenance is around $6-8M. It spends around 7 times as much on its police force as it does on roads. When does it go bankrupt?

Those SFH zones are getting infilled by apartment buildings and townhouses and ADUs and people selling their backyards to create a new lot. It's nothing like vast surburban tracts.

Lynnwood has 35K people in 8 square miles, 5 Kpeople/sqmi.

KC has 500K people 310 square miles, 1.4 Kpeople/sqmi.

In most towns, education is a huge chunk of the budget. In my semi-rural Massachusetts town of about 7,000, 62% of the budget goes to the town's elementary school and its share of the regional high school. Public works is only about 8% and public safely is a bit under twice that.

As far as I know that's pretty common--in fact, I expected the educational spend to be higher, which it probably is in some places. (Per student spend for the regional high school is about half the spending in Cambridge for example.)

How does a town of 35K people raise $300MM in annual tax? $8,500 per capita seems very, very high.

It has a biennial budget of 197 million usd. That is to say a budget for every 2 years.

It has a population of 38,511. The budget works out to aprox $2558 per person.

Per capita income is just shy of 20k