Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples:
* Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner.
* The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task.
* Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit.
* Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.
* Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive.
* Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.
(edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.
> * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit.
There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy.
Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense.
> * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.
Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes.
> * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.
In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero.
The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.
>The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true.
I'm not sure even that is trivially true. Infrastructure projects in dense cities (which is what most people are talking about here when they say "cities") can be extremely expensive. See Boston Big Dig, Manhattan Second Avenue Subway, etc. Yes, they serve a lot of people. Cheap they ain't.
Extremely expensive but used by millions a day. The reason they are expensive is because so many people are already there, and construction has to limit impact to very significant economic activity that must still go on while the work is done. "Ya we could do it cheaper if we just cut off traffic for a couple of years, we'd save a few billion at the cost of a hundred billion in lost opportunity."
It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/.
1. Infrastructure is incredibly expensive in dense urban areas.
A road/rail tunnel can cost upwards of $100 million per mile (a few projects have run at close to $1 billion per mile).
Likewise buying back land to add an extra lane to a road can run into hundreds of millions of $$$.
Infrastructure like electricity is indeed more expensive for rural areas but often cheaper for low-medium density cities - overhead power lines are 5-10x cheaper than underground lines.
2. A lot of the subsidies for rural areas are actually to help businesses and farming and benefit the major cities.
E.g. Prices in our cities would increase enourmosly if we didn't have a good interstate highway system.
And gas subsidies mostly benefit trucking and farmers.
* Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner.
* The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task.
* Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit.
* Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.
* Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive.
* Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.
(edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.