Glaeser complains that Napoleon III’s height limitations on Paris (basically, the core of the city is all six stories high) has meant that tall buildings have gone up only on the periphery. But he seems to miss the point that goal of the rulers of Paris is to keep peripheral people on the periphery, where they can amuse themselves setting fire to cars without pestering the real Parisians.

In general, it’s hard to get American middle class families to live in high rises because, outside of Manhattan, without restrictive zoning it’s hard to get a high enough percentage of middle class children together in one spot to dominate a public school. For example, Glaeser celebrates the reasonably cheap highrises along Chicago’s lakefront, but they seldom have “good” schools, in contrast to certain thoroughly gentrified districts of three story buildings. Restrictive zoning is crucial to “good” public schools, but you aren’t supposed to talk about that.

He also notes that engineers like nature, and that may explain the prevalence of Silicon Valley campuses. I’d say that many people like nature, especially parents with children, and that may explain the prevalence of suburbs across the country.

Anyway, what struck me about Glaeser was his tone-deafness to issues of aesthetics and quality of life. You like Paris? Imagine how nice it would be if five times as many people got to live in Skyscraper-Paris! Non merci.