yeah, a lot of Texas could be an exception to this kind of rule. nonetheless if you really dug into the numbers of your city I think you'd see some interesting things. one of the biggest issues, which has been alluded to several times on this thread, is the great divergence in property tax/acre for big box stores vs. more dense commercial districts. That may or may not be an issue in Plano, I don't know, but I bet Plano has a gazillion acres of big box retail. think about how much infrastructure is required to support that land use - the massive intersections, running the sewer and water out to each new giant site, perhaps adding police and fire stations to keep response times acceptable as the city expands. It's very expensive. Now look up how much property tax the Best Buy or Walmart pays divided by the acreage it occupies. Then do the same calculation for a more dense commercial use elsewhere in the city. Even in Plano, I bet you will find that the denser commercial use pays substantially more property tax/acre than Walmart, and also uses substantially less infrastructure. In that case, the dense commercial users are effectively subsidizing their competitors. But that's only part of it; it's also an issue of how cities should spend their money and what kind of development they should encourage/discourage through zoning. encouraging big box retail and sprawly single-family housing requires more investment of public dollars for substantially less return, and, in many cases, that kind of development will never pay enough in property tax during its life cycle to pay back the up front infrastructure cost plus the annual maintenance plus the major replacement (repaving, for example) of the infrastructure it uses.
Actually a good example is Ferguson, MO. From what I have read, the entire place is one big sprawly suburb. It doesn't have any dense uses to pay the property taxes it needs to actually run itself, and so in the end they resorted to basically turning their cops and courts into a giant collections mill to balance the city budget. It's a case study in what eventually happens to a city that's nearly 100% sprawl.