More typically, the tax districts for the areas with McMansions are entirely separate from those with a high concentration of apartments and urban housing. In this situation, the residents in a particular area bear the tax burden for the services that they consume. My particular metropolitan area is divided into several "cities" (I put it in quotes because they really all run together) that serve to ensure that each area's residents bear the cost of their services. Even in this situation, due to taxes levied by the state government, the flow of capital still tends to go from the suburbs to the urban areas.

In fact, I suspect that most house dwellers would be hugely in favor of further segregating the tax system so that funds paid by a group of individuals are used for services desired by that same group. In my area this would, however, result in the defunding of most public transportation (which is largely financed by people who do not use it), urban schools, the community college (which is funded by the whole county, but mostly used by lower income residents), etc. As an example, the public bus system recently appropriated lanes on many busy streets that were paid for by gas taxes. Since those with longer commutes pay more in gas tax, it stands to reason that these lanes were originally paid for by suburban commuters, and are now being used by the apartment dwellers and urban residents who are the primary clientele of the bus system (use fees make up only a small part of the funding for public transit in my area).

I am not stating that the existence of any of these things is bad, but simply that your belief that apartment dwellers are subsidizing the lives of McMansion residents is entirely incorrect.

This way "most families living in a half million dollar McMansions" get their own road-heavy city budget, and a "typical apartment dweller" gets his parks/libraries/schools/transportation fix.

That's a grand theory, of course. In reality, outside of a few cities, most American urban downtowns are proverbial dumps.

https://www.google.com.au/url?q=http://newclimateeconomy.rep...

All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.

For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.

That is the point of the article.

Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."

If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

edit: though living in an apartment will be more expensive, so that wasn't a great example.

Except for the massive externalities involved, sure, they're willing to pay for it. Urban dwellers largely subsidize your suburbia, and have since its inception.

Like with everything, there must be a balance (we need scientific research,) but having suburbia and infrasture is not automatically bad in my opinion.

Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.

> Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?

Don't think it's that absolute.

Think about tax dollars collected from a given square mile vs tax dollars spent on a given square mile. Suburbs tend to decrease the former and increase the latter, high-density projects tend to move the money in the opposite direction.