Citations are needed here.

> strongtowns.org which is a non-credible source run by a crank

I've yet to see a comprehensive takedown of the main points of Strong Towns that isn't addressed directly in the book. I don't think your argument amounts to one.

Suburban businesses can be highly productive, but municipalities do not directly benefit from this since taxes on business profits do not go to municipalities. They may indirectly benefit from higher property values - and therefore property taxes - near the business center, but in general the suburban development model spreads houses and businesses so far out (and splits them through zoning) that the maintenance burden on the city is still too high relative to municipal funding through taxes. Marohn devotes many pages to this in the book.

I'm not sure how Chuck Marohn is a crank. Is it because of the complaint against him from the licensing board? His PE license lapsed from 2018-2020. He filed to have it renewed [0] before he was aware of the Minnesota licensing board's complaint. He should not have called himself a PE while his license was lapsed, but I don't think it negates any of his arguments and I think it's a stretch to say he is deliberately misleading.

> Cities are actually very expensive to maintain

Tremendously so, but some of them seem to do very well with defeasing those expenses (see NYC's significant budget surplus) [0]. The difference is that cities do not have a fundamentally broken development pattern that is guaranteed to always depend on external funding or growth.

> and they tend to have the worst concentration of problems such as crime and drug abuse, and NYC is one of the prime examples

This is a complex conversation, and I disagree with your conclusion. There were 433 homicides in NYC in 2022 [2] and 8.5 million people [3], for a murder rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people. This is worse than that of Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire, but similar to the murder rate in Wyoming (4.9), less than that of Texas or Montana (6.6 and 7.1), and significantly lower than that of almost the entire American South (7.8 to 20.5) [4].

To your point about drug abuse in NYC, I disagree. There were <2168 fatal overdoses in NYC in 2020 [5], which works out to 25.675 per 100,000 people. One look at the overdose fatality map [6] tells you that this is middle of the road, and dwarfed by rural states in the region like Vermont, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. The drug crisis in America is terrible, but urbanicity does not exacerbate it.

The right conclusion, I think, is that urbanicity does not drive murder rates or drug abuse - poverty, deprivation, lack of opportunity, and other factors do. This is why NYC is relatively safe despite being the most urban place in America, while other states and cities (hello Texas, Mississippi, Chicago, New Orleans, and Flint) of various levels of urbanization are much more dangerous. These places are poor, for reasons that are, ironically enough, frequently addressed by Strong Towns.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27296177
[1] https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2022/06/new-york-citys...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00071/nypd-citywide-crim...
[3] https://www.populationu.com/cities/new-york-city-population (not the best source, but seems close)
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/nyregion/new-york-overdos...
[6] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...