Cherry picking cities can show anything. Let's look at SF compared to suburbs like Palo Alto. Separate cities with their own budgets and SF has one the highest tax revenues per resident in the US but since SF has high density and lacks of car access goes up, costs explode including labor. SF average city employee salary is $180k. SF infrastructure is below palo alto. Palo alto has better streets, better schools, better maintained parks even with standford paying no property taxes.

You can see also see this in New York.