In almost every part of the US and almost every situation, the taxes you pay are based on the place you live, not where you work. For most cities, commuters who drive into the city just to work and then drive out are a terrible liability, because they wear out the roads driving in and out every day, then pay their property taxes (which is typically the large majority of local revenue) to a different city.

I believe NYC may be a partial exception to this as I know it has local income tax (which is very rare), but I'm not sure if they charge that to people who don't also live in the city.

Other exceptions are some towns that have almost no residential and a lot of commercial, and collect almost all their income from sales tax.

But, again, those are the few exceptions, not the norm.

> commuters who drive into the city just to work and then drive out are a terrible liability, because they wear out the roads driving in and out every day

Heavy trucks actually do the majority of damage to road infrastructure.

From the linked article: The registration fee seems steep. However,a B-Double can cause, per kilometre travelled, 20,000 times the road wear and tear that a family car does

https://theconversation.com/trucks-are-destroying-our-roads-...

1. aren't highway/interstate maintenance (which are used by commuters) funded at a federal and state level? so there should be much difference.

2. property taxes go to fund schools/utilities/services - and it makes sense to send taxes to where you live, not work. I want to fund schools where my kids go to, this seems perfectly logical to me. It would be a huge waste of resources to do otherwise.

As a former NYC resident who now lives in it’s burbs, you only pay the city tax when living in the five boroughs.

Plenty of cities collect income tax from workers who do not reside in the city. Our is half the amount collected from city residents.

> In almost every part of the US and almost every situation, the taxes you pay are based on the place you live, not where you work.

Income tax is typically based on both where you live and where you work. Property tax is based on where you own property. Payroll taxes (state unemployment, etc.) is mostly based on where you work. Sales/use tax is based on where you physically shop or where you live for other shopping.

If you live in NYC you pay their resident surtax no matter where you work.

If you live in NY and work in NYC you pay NY state taxes.

If you live in NJ and work in NYC you pay NY state taxes. I believe Connecticut works the same way.

NY state taxation helps out NYC.

NYC has a broad, implicit tax base well beyond the city borders in addition to their tax base inside them.

That’s not what that means. It has nothing to do where income is earned. Suburbs are expensive to maintain (and incredibly harmful for the environment), and so of two people working in the city centre, the one living in the burbs receives far more subsidies than the one living in the city. The taxes of the city dweller (which are higher than those in suburbia) are used to subsidize suburban infrastructure.

If it’s so much more efficient to live in a city then why are city budgets so much higher than suburban budgets?

And, it’s not like the people that live in the burbs are the only ones that benefit. Those roads and highways are the same ones used to ship food to cities.

Cities provide more services, like museums and transit; and also tend to have wealthier tax bases (because of positive externalities cities create), meaning they can spend more and often do so. Though the additional spending isn't linear, which is why residents in so-called "tax and spend" jurisdictions still tend to have greater than average post-tax income. (The real problem is wealth distribution.)

But for basic services such as schools, fire, and sewer, what matters is geographic (horizontal) compactness. The more compact the area, the better the economies of scale, reducing per capita costs. However, at some point vertical density (i.e. building up) can overcome economies of scale provided by compactness by increasing infrastructure costs. Thus the per capita cost curve can end up being U-shaped within a fixed geographic area. See https://www.cgoodman.com/files/papers/national-sprawl-expend...

Housing has a similar U-shaped cost curve: skyscrapers have very high per unit construction and maintenance costs because of the need to switch to steel and other more expensive techniques. AFAIU, the most efficient form of housing in the U.S. is mid-rise developments, approx. 3 to 6 stories, though it varies according to available materials and allowed construction techniques. See https://urbanize.city/la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s... (EDIT: Actually, that article describes the "missing middle" as 2-3 story developments, not 3-6. 3-6 is probably closer to what older, denser cities like San Francisco need more of, as most single-family homes are already tightly spaced 2-3 story buildings.)

Advocates of density from industry and academia are often misunderstood as demanding the type of developments you see in the inner core of large cities, such as skyscrapers. (As opposed to cityphile advocates who want live above French bakeries and near subway stations.[1]) But small rural and suburban towns can also be dense, and historically they were dense, even in the United States. If you've traveled enough around the U.S., especially on the old U.S. Highway system and away from the U.S. Interstate system (because Interstates were built to avoid small towns and thus in the present day most any town near an Interstates was likely developed after the 1950s), you'll see that most U.S. towns were built with relatively compact neighborhoods hugging dense commercial areas. (Especially true in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Patterns of development in the American South seemed to have been historically distinct, a direct and indirect consequence of plantation culture.) And this was the pattern even after the U.S. became a car culture, though before white flight, enabled by the Interstate system, fundamentally changed expectations regarding geographic proximity to work and commercial services.

Perhaps the better term to use when promoting more cost efficient development is "compact", not "density". Too much density isn't cheap, though often desirable nonetheless. But when it comes to RoI, the characteristic to strive for is compactness. Having two skyscrapers a quarter mile apart with nothing in between is stupid. What you want is compactness, which in addition to providing economies of scale also, politically, minimizes the ability for developers and owners to externalize inefficient infrastructure costs; and then let the market decide vertical density.

[1] OTOH, this describes Paris, a city of mostly mid-rises. I think it's just that Americans in general, even urbanites, have a skewed perception of density informed by our culture, such as the prominence of major cities like New York and Chicago, and especially their downtowns, in depicting urbanity.

The subsidies come in the form of infrastructure spending per capita when the spending source is at the state or national level:

Roads that serve few cars.

Electricity infrastructure from the power plant to the suburbs.

Water infrastructure (pipes need to bring clean water in and sewage out)

Not to mention the racist history of the reasons for subsidizing suburbs. White flight followed by redlining and deeds that prevented suburban housing from being sold to African-Americans. Followed by a neglect of city infrastructure as black residents moved in.

Edit: Since I’m being downvoted for daring to suggest that suburbs have a racist history, I’ll leave a recent stratchery article to explain.

https://stratechery.com/2020/dust-in-the-light/