Per capita, rural and suburban are much less efficient and more costly. Infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive and resource demanding to build as distances spread. Water, sewer, electricity, internet, roads, etc. That’s without even looking at the supplies and movement of people.

Sure, if you can afford to build yourself a self sufficient off grid home, you may perceive it as more efficient in day to day costs.

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

What are these numbers comparing? Property taxes?

Don’t discount the many sources of funding in America. The state and federal governments can and do pay for infrastructure, along with long term bonds paid using sales and other taxes. The suburbs benefit from the highways to the suburbs, but the suburbs don’t fund them.

Can you point out for me then where the order of magnitude suburban inefficiencies are accounted for?

Sure, here’s an analysis from Australia:

https://www.crcsi.com.au/assets/Resources/b6e1625f-d90b-433d...

Orders of magnitude may be hyperbolic, but costs alone are twice as much from that study. Note that some of those costs are directly paid by households and not through taxes. For example, you need a car and drive further distances increasing fuel and maintenance costs.

We're not talking about taxes, but environmental cost. San Francisco provides a bunch of (human) services walnut creek does not.

As one example, muni costs money and sf pays more for BART than WC does. These are still cheaper and more environmentally efficient than everyone owning cars.

If Walnut Creek paid an extra $9000/year for each resident then they could easily offset whatever extra environmental cost. Carbon offsets etc are not all that expensive.

1. Carbon offsets do not reduce emissions

2. Bart and muni are not the majority of the $9000 difference. The majority of the cost is various social services. The actual cost of muni per sf resident is something like $500, which is still significant (muni is not a great rapid transit system), but that's far less than the cost of carbon offsets for every resident.

There's not enough tax base to support infrastructure like installing broadband, repairing and winter upkeep of roads and electric grid, fire stations, hospitals. Even businesses like nursing homes which one expects would benefit from lower property costs do not prosper due to lack of population and supportive medical services. Lower COL areas are net users of tax revenue from the country due to inefficiency, cities are net generators to the country.

That's only a result of the resources made available by the inhabitation of rural lands being under-valued on the market due to subsidies. Say goodbye to affordable food prices if we don't subsidize rural locales.

If you have to subsidize something, you only want to subsidize as much as necessary. Farmers can get their subsidies. A remote worker moving out of SF with a fat paycheck doesn't need the subsidy.

Utilities, deliveries, etc... Urban areas are way better in many ways.

Heck just roads. At a certain level of rural you are paving and patching 10 miles of road per person. In the city you are paving like a few feet per person.

But add on top of that the cost of public transit infrastructure. 1 mile of underground BART line cost $1,500 per person. And that ignores maintenance.

Pro-tip, most US cities don't have anything like that. Midwest are all buses except Chicago. I can't think of a single Southern city with a rail transit system.

You’re ignoring the fact that people take up space.

Every single cabin in the woods running off solar used to be an area with trees.

EDIT: And don’t even get me started on those cabin dwellers buying cats and letting them roam the forest like the invasive bird and mammal eating machine that they are.