Not the original commenter but I will outline a couple of specific areas where suburbs are receiving subsidies in excess of the urban centers they surround (at least in the US). I will say up front that it is my impression that suburban living is more subsidized than the urban alternative but I am not a scholar of such things and don't have any proof.

1) It is pretty clearly documented that suburban development is much more environmentally impactful than urban infill development. If nothing else, the non captured externalities of this environmental impact acts as a subsidy to the suburbs.

2) The mortgage interest tax subsidy is non-proportionately paid to suburban home owners than to urban ones.

3) On a per rider, and a per trip basis, suburban mass transit is more subsidized than urban mass transit (you will notice that suburban transit systems always want to use "per mile" statistics.)

4) By nearly every economic statistic you can find, urban centers generate more productivity than suburban ones.

All that said, you can definitely find lots of subsidies that are disproportionately paid from suburban areas to urban ones, but even the ones that seem obvious (subsidized food, crime, education, etc) are actually trending towards suburban subsidies.

This article is a good explanation: http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/

There are economies of scale involved in building infrastructure for many people. If you have a low population density in an area (like a suburb) you can't collect enough tax to pay for the infrastructure (which is more spread out, while there are fewer people to pay for it). That money has to come from somewhere. In the article it's Federal grants. Where do you think the money for those Federal grants comes from?

Suburbs are fundamentally unsustainable. There are not enough people there to pay for the infrastructure. That infrastructure is more expensive because it has to cover a larger area to serve a given number of people.

A major subsidy to the suburban lifestyle is free parking[1]. In heavily urban areas like New York, the space required for parking is priced (mostly) according to the market. In less dense cities with a higher percentage of car owners, street parking is often free when it should not be. Free parking causes three main problems:

* Tons of street space is provided by the public for parking that would otherwise be used more efficiently.

* Parking spots become scarce, causing drivers to waste a lot of time and cause extra congestion while searching for parking spots. It's nice for people who have more time than money, but taxpayers can't collect that wasted time.

* Because voters have an expectation of unlimited free parking, local government requires new construction to include parking spaces so the additional residents don't consume existing street parking. This increases the cost of construction and wastes space, and it reduces the possibilities for land use. You can't have dense communities when half the space is consumed by parking garages.

[1] "The High Cost of Free Parking" http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

Street parking has almost no place in the suburban lifestyle.

In my experience, every urban street in Australia is full of parked cars. It wasn't like this when I was growing up and we would ride up and down our cul-de-sac or kick a football, but now that same street would have 12-20 cars parked within a one block segment at any given time.

People can afford more cars and would rather make use of the public space for parking than fill their driveway or have to shuffle cars if they're parked behind one another.

I leave my second car parked out front because it's slightly more convenient than using my double driveway (crammed to get kids in the car when two cars are parked there), and because I have a pool table and table tennis table in my double garage. I am a part of the problem!

Also not the original poster, but I give you this graphic:

http://www.thestranger.com/binary/ea57/CityLead-CLICK.jpg

It depicts the denser, more urban, and/or more populated counties of Washington State contributing more and receiving less from the overall state pool of revenue than less populated, rural counties. (The graphic frames it as Democratic-voting versus Republican-voting but the population difference is also similar.)

Here are some examples from my own time living in an urban setting versus the suburbs:

- Road packages are always a given and almost never subject to a vote unless, as in the case of Washington State, someone bothers to get an initiative or ratification on the ballot. Urban mass transit, like buses and light rail, always come with a vote. So transit has to clear the legislature, the governor, and then the people. That presupposes that the legislature actually does anything. Roads only get stuck with the first two and "building the future" is wildly popular.

- Going back to roads for a second dip: Road funding for rural and suburban areas tends to be at the state level. A highway through Okanogan or Ferry counties is paid for by King county residents. In contrast, cities in King county tend to fund their road needs through local taxes--usually through the much-hated vehicle registration tax--and have to do so in a series of piecemeal ballot votes. So rural areas get taxed once, urban areas twice or three times depending on how many taxing jurisdictions are at play and how much roads versus transit is needed.

- Services which would be inefficient to fund through direct charges, like sewer systems or electric, get paid for at the state or county level and the urban areas pay into those pools but get little back.

In Texas, there is a saying that "build the houses and the roads [or electric lines or what have you] will follow." I have lost count of the number of times my electric bill in my former residence went up because the poles-and-wires company needed to serve more far-flung suburban sprawl.

There is a lot to be said for taxing ourselves as a society to pay for our shared good. Education, clean water, sanitary sewers, transportation; all good topics. The problem comes with, as inevitably happens, those folks in the suburban and rural areas both declaring that they "did it all by themselves" and also denying the urban areas the ability to tax ourselves to build what we now need.

Is it an intentional act by the individuals who move to the suburbs? No, but it sure feels that way when the ballots are cast.

Generally, state legislatures provide representation in proportion to districts rather than population. Urban centers often represent a large portion of a state's population but only cover a handful of districts.

... yes, this is not a direct explanation, but you can extrapolate how subsidies arise for the suburbs when calculated on a per capita rather than per district basis.

> Generally, state legislatures provide representation in proportion to districts rather than population. Urban centers often represent a large portion of a state's population but only cover a handful of districts.

This was often true -- up until the 1960s. However, under the rule laid down in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), state legislative districts were required to be apportioned so as to provide "substantially equal state legislative representation for all citizens".