alt Hacker NewsI've looked a few times, and it quickly (at least to me) appeared to depend on what you bucket and where you can torture the data and make it confess.
Single buildings can cost as much as my entire "city" - one World Trade Center alone cost $4 billion.
An example of how you can bucket things is do you look at property tax, income tax (and if you do, is it where the "nexus of generation" is done, where the worker lives, where he works, where she's headquartered, etc). Around here basically none of what we would call "support" is paid for by property tax except schools (95% or so) and sewer (which is billed as a property "tax" though it's actually per connection/size).
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That's exactly the point. On big vertical building covers 1 acre of land but it has 80 acres of interior space. There's one honking water pipe in the basement that will never need to be replaced, instead of mile after mile of water pipes with leaky fittings every 50 feet.
In my town schools aren’t 95% of property taxes but they are the majority. Add emergency services, water (though that’s a separate bill), same for electricity. Less familiar with road and bridge maintenance. Assume some comes from the state and feds but at least some is local.