Phrased another way, people don’t like living in grimy and dangerous cities so they are free to leave. Those with means do so and those places go bankrupt. Obviously the solution would be to forbid people to leave. (/s)
One of the first ways Bob Moses (cite The Power Broker) exfiltrated money out of the city was jacking up the subway fees to finance his Long Island parkways, creating the original auto centric suburbs. Once he figured out how to continuously roll over the debts financed by the bridge tolls, things really took off.
The burden of the tolls and tokens were mostly borne by the middle and working classes.
Everyone today moans about how terrible mass transit became. But no one reports that those services were looted, denied investment, and those resources diverted to highways.
At the same time, the working class neighborhoods went without many other needful things which those monies could have paid for. Hospitals, schools, police, fire stations, and so forth.
In an alternate universe, today's level of urbanization would have happened decades earlier, by simply building more urban housing, and using city revenues to pay for city amenities. Sure, some sprawl would have happened. But in addition to, not at the expense of, city development.
