Downtown housing stock tends to be old in most cities. It's prohibitively expensive to buy a building, tear it down, rebuild something bigger and hope that it'

Downtown housing stock tends to be old in most cities. It's prohibitively expensive to buy a building, tear it down, rebuild something bigger and hope that it's worth enough to pay for the above. It's cheaper to buy unused land and build on it. Well, cheaper to the homeowner anyways. The costs of maintaining ambulance/fire/police/sewage/electricity infrastructure are huge, but born by the whole city usually. If you want to stop sprawl, have city/state taxes be based on the cost to provide service to your address. Taxes in the cities will likely go down (there's probably a customer per few feet of sewage pipe), and taxes in the suburbs will be astronomical (where there's probably a hundred feet of piping per customer). The amount of resources allocated per-consumer in the suburbs is bad, and in rural areas is crazy. I'm in the suburbs and there's probably 50 feet of clearance between houses on all sides. That's 100 feet of piping to connect our houses, 100 feet of electrical wiring, etc. And yet I pay the same taxes as I did when I lived downtown in an apartment complex, where each resident probably had 1/2" of city-owned piping connected to it.