The difference with suburbs/cities is the awareness, the expectation, and societal cost.
People living in the suburbs are generally unaware that they're being subsidized by the cities they live adjacent to, and have the expectation that their infrastructure and services be prioritized - generally to the detriment of the entire geographic region.
Going beyond that, the car-centric suburbia mindset has become the legal defacto design pattern, increasing costs and reducing livability for everyone.
So it's less that they should "pay-out" for themselves, and more that they should stop forcing their lifestyle choices on the rest of the population, and understand the costs associated with their lifestyle.
Without that, America would have much denser "European style" urban hubs, and likely more active small cities than currently exist.
You could of course calculate business taxes proportionally to the work suburbs deliver, but that would be quite dishonest.
You can always say that only the most densely populated place carries its own... but that isn't convincing. I am not from the US, but we have similar discussions here. That people have to live in the city if they want to live efficient. Problem is that few want to and I think at that point the discussion should be almost ended.
The same groups/organizations you named will often end activities or sub-groups that have a cost above a certain threshold.
I believe the overall intent here is to show the true cost of suburbs and evaluate if it's a pattern that cities can keep supporting. Ie, is the desire to live in the conditions suburbs create worth the cost of those arrangements?
As much as I like living in a dense area and riding my bike, the rise of the YouTube educated urban planner has led to a lot conclusions that aren’t particularly sound. Doing a flaw P&L on a small town and deciding, in so many words, that it shouldn’t exist is peak smugness.
But, I was talking about the city, society, or the greater good. Whatever you call it. Higher density is more efficient and uses less resources per capita. Period. Same reason private planes are so bad for the environment.
But do you really pay for suburbs? As I said, the cost intensive positions scale with the number of people. Schools, utilities, ...
At what cost, especially relative to other options. Lower density may end up costing more over the long term:
* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...
Urban living ≠ Manhattan:
But ultimately in these threads, the elephant in the room is that the suburbs are subsidized† by the cities they don't pay taxes into.
So why don't the cities expand their boundaries to include the suburbs, instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
† Side note: I have not found to be true, personally. Suburbs are paid for by the people who live there and the county, into whom we pay our taxes. In truth, a lot of our money goes into businesses in the city (who will in turn pay taxes to the city), since that's where we all go for our goods.
Why would anyone want to absorb something that costs more to run to provide the same services?
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
> […] instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
Perhaps they want to kill them because they are wasteful of area (often paving over perfectly good agricultural land), and cause climate change due to their reliance on cars.
Further, how much "choice" did suburban dwellers actually have? Post-WW2 most zoning has forced the creation of car-centric, low-density sprawl. Perhaps there are folks in the suburbs that want higher density neighbourhoods but because of the limited supply (due to lack of new build) the prices have gone up and they're priced out. Whose to say that walkable neighbourhoods wouldn't be popular if purchased in the "suburbs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
> † Side note: I have not found to be true, personally.
I think this depends on the municipal boundaries involved. Depending on where the border is, on one side it could be that things built in the "old" / pre-WW2 way and on the other the "new" / post-WW2 way, and the taxes go to each municipality appropriately. In other places there could be the pre-WW2 Old Downtown and is walkable, but everything new is non-walkable. In those latter situations the more walkable parts are probably subsidizing the less walkable ones:
If to take an example Google insisted every development be independently paying out immediately, there wouldn't be any Maps, Docs, Drive...
If there was a similar insistance by Xerox, probably no personal computing.
Amd even at a state level, even in the US, there are states that pay more to the nation and there are states that get more. In the rest of the world - particularly in Asia, we just consider this support costs for maintaining nationhood.