Desirable to who? It's not like folks have much of a choice in the density of housing and transportation.

I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.

There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.

https://www.urbanthree.com/services/revenue-modeling/

Citation needed. Everything I have seen shows that suburbs are a net drain in contrast to dense urban areas. Infrastructure has very high fixed costs that require more people to net even.

> that subsidize urban cores

Subsidized by urban cores.

Who do you think is paying for those $50M highway exits and overpasses so everyone can quickly get to their strip malls? Its not the local residents.