The answer is: sprawl is expensive and wasteful

I shake my head a lot, thinking about how DC and other center cities close schools, while new schools are being built at a furious pace in the outer suburbs, to meet the demand. Directing development and population to places where infrastructure of all kinds already exists makes the most sense.

The Toronto Star editorializes about how people in the suburbs of Toronto are being underserved, that they need more money for hospitals, social services, etc., to be on par with people who live in Toronto proper. See "Shameful neglect of 905 residents."

But failing to look at the entire cost structure necessary to support new development does society a disservice. Often, the costs for servicing the new areas comes at the expense of the existing areas, especially center cities.

In our area, see this piece from the Post about new schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, "Loudoun Students Return to Classroom." Although part of the problem in DC is that charter schools continue to take students away from the traditional public system. This has a lot of cost as well in terms of using buildings inefficiently and leading to deaccessioning of DCPS school buildings, not to mention the broader problems of sprawl and deconcentration. See "A Boom for D.C. Charter Schools" and I can't seem to find the recent article about this year's school enrollment numbers, which experienced a drop of maybe 4,000 students over two weeks.