Summary: it cannot pay for itself in taxes because the income is too spread out.

To the downvoter: I don't know what more you want. That's the synopsis. The density is too low, so they don't get enough money to sustain themselves with all the infrastructure that is required to have suburbia

(Not parent poster) Suburbs generally need more money for their sprawling infrastructure than they can supply with tax revenue from the suburbs.

This means that they exist because they're being subsidized by revenue collected from elsewhere, such as from cities.

Whether this is fair or exploitative depends on how you figure the math for "it's being collected from people who live in the suburbs and just happen to work in the city."

That's not true for Texas. In Texas, the entire costs of suburbs are paid for in property taxes and utility district fees and bonds. Texas is one of the few states where the majority of taxes collected by the state are property taxes. Or so I was told by a coworker living in Texas when I brought this up.

> In Texas, the entire costs of suburbs are paid for in property taxes and utility district fees and bonds.

The question is how long they can keep taking out more and more debt against the promise of never-ending growth and income from one-time development sales. The answer probably isn't "forever".

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/21/choose-your-f...

This is a predicament everywhere in the US, the suburbs are not alone in this issue of debt financing for... everything...

When housing is spread out, each house is responsible for so much infrastructure, taxes by the one property can’t hope to cover it.