I used to believe this but then you run the numbers and you find out that in practice its not true at all. The most dense cities in the US have *higher*, not lower, municipal spend per person. There's basically an inverse to cost savings in practice.
Partly this is because as you increase density you increase municipal demands. You're doing more with more.
But part of it is that as you make a more dense city you bring brand new problems and costs that couldn't exist before that you now have to spend on.
Looking at the extreme example, NYC's municipal social spending alone is the same as San Antonio's entire spend.
That's fine, its a choice a city can make. But if a city decides to expand scope then that ruins any tax efficiency argument, and it seems regularly true.
"Look how much money we could save if we were a city"
"Does the city spend less per person?"
"Well, no, they spend more"
Struck me as odd when I first found it. It seems pertinent to infrastructure discussions. Infrastructure is not built in a vacuum.
These are total spend which has some data problems (NYC's includes schools, many others do not, etc)
I asked Gemini to include a few more including SF, some data may be suspect but it mostly looks good, here:
man school districts are a great mangler of data. They obfuscate so much
This is actually something LLMs are pretty great at now so I hope these numbers are correct. This is a more fair comparison with education spend removed.
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