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Suburbs work better
One difference between the suburbs and the inner city is that suburban developers, in every way that counts, outperform the inner city and its developers. It's not a question simply of the suburbs being "subsidized." The first inner-city project we did . . . we applied to it everything we had learned from suburban practice, and lo and behold, within two years it has become the hottest place. Every shop is filled, the city lowered the tax rate. What did we do? We applied suburban management techniques to the city. What's happened in America is not that the cities are worse than they ever were; it's that our expectations of municipal performance are much higher. Americans are spoiled. What we expect in terms of safety, of cleanliness, of government responsiveness, of sophistication in retail management, is now so drastically escalated that most cities do not meet our expectations. . . . If you study what cities were like in their heyday, you find that there was crime and dirt and inconvenience. But today, American middle-class standards are higher, having been raised by the superior management techniques of suburban developers. Duany 1997, 59