One of the things that isn't talked about, my guess is because urbanists also tend to be liberals, is reforming welfare policy. States have largely succeeded in, and the federal government has condoned, treating cities as the primary welfare distribution organ. Public housing is mostly built in the cities, most federal school aid goes into the cities, etc. This concentrates the social problems which welfare attempts to remedy in the cities, and has the impact of driving families out of the city when they have kids.
For example, until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments. The idea was to limit the economic segregation of schools. Such policies are ultimately counter productive, because all they do is drive wealthier families, and their tax dollars, out into the suburbs. Peoples' egalitarian ideas tend to come crashing down when their kids are involved.
> until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments
San Francisco still does and middle class families continue to move away (not just due to public schools but housing prices) -- the others spend $25k-40k per year per kid on private schools. SFUSD uses a lottery approach and at one elementary school, 1210 children applied for 22 open slots -- a 1.8% acceptance rate. One of the major critiques of the city is how many of the tech workers in the city wouldn't be there today if they had gone through the SF public school system.
Until the US has a tiered system like Germany which allows high-achieving students to be challenged for the university and regular students to go through an extensive apprenticeship program guaranteeing well-paid jobs, people will continue to move to the suburbs for better schools.
I'm dubious. Urban centers suck down huge welfare dollars, but that's what you'd expect because they have huge populations.
If you read a list of all the federal welfare programs, the only one that sticks out as predominantly "urban" is Section 8. Section 8 is a big program, but it's a rounding error compared to Medicaid, SSDI, and the EITC, which all flow equally to rural areas. Even the food stamp program, which benefits rural households, eclipses HUD and Section 8.
As for education benefits: if you break Title 1 grants down per pupil, it's not the case that the urban states uniformly get more money than the rural ones. North Dakota, for instance, appears to get almost twice as much per pupil as California.
The data is hard to analyze on this point, because the government has a very different definition of "urban" than I think we're using in this thread. In particular, it tends to lump what we think of as urban areas and suburban areas into one "urban" category.
For example, until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments. The idea was to limit the economic segregation of schools. Such policies are ultimately counter productive, because all they do is drive wealthier families, and their tax dollars, out into the suburbs. Peoples' egalitarian ideas tend to come crashing down when their kids are involved.