If you read the short book / media project (http://www.strongtowns.org/ http://www.strongtowns.org/) referred to in the post, you'd see that the author (not th

If you read the short book / media project (http://www.strongtowns.org/ http://www.strongtowns.org/) referred to in the post, you'd see that the author (not the blogger) covers this issue amply. It's not a ra-ra-cities-good-burbs-bad book. It explains why the infrastructure in suburbs is not financially sustainable without reference to speculations of higher energy prices (like a Kunstler would) and how political leadership often goes awry in how it pursues development. The tl;dr which I'll do in three paragraphs is that suburbs tend to overestimate how much tax revenue they're going to get from the development pattern that involves a lot of corporate brand name stores popping up off of main roads. The taxes don't pay for the roads so the towns have to lean on the Federal government for funding. The suggestion is that towns and businesses need to redevelop downtown areas which have more efficient infrastructure costs because they will no longer be able to externalize those infrastructure costs onto large state governments or the federal government. Also, across the board, politicians and developers tend to emphasize the benefits of new developments while minimizing the presentations of the costs of maintenance. The book also kills some new-urbanist sacred cows like bike lanes because they are usually both insane from a financial perspective and extremely dangerous for both cyclists and drivers. So the thrust of it is that if you thought the cities were bad, the suburbs are often worse. It will also make you rethink a lot of the media hoopla over urban development in countries like China which make supersized versions of these kinds of errors. A $100 million infrastructure project sounds awesome until you realize that it will cost $500 million without generating that much in taxes to prevent it from collapsing into a blighted ruin in less than a decade.