Nonsense. If that were the case, the City would not be approving every voluntary annexation petition that comes its way. But the City does, even into Durham County. If the City really believed it loses money on suburbs, it would stop in a heartbeat. Of course, Cary is 100% suburb with no downtown – yet they are doing quite fine financially.
$68M sounds like a lot, but how many are there? My single subdivision in north Raleigh has a $600M tax base without counting the adjacent commercial buildings. You count high-rises, I count subdivisions, and I guarantee that I’ll win. And new subdivisions continue to grow just as fast as new high-rises, without even noting that some of the high-rises are in North Hills which isn’t downtown.
The City certainly does provide services to downtown… security, repairs to an outdated and undersized water sewer infrastructure (which the high-rise developers are not paying for, by the way), transportation (which is nearly all downtown centric), etc.