Triumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011)

Hard-charging, outspoken Boston mayor James Curley’s angry defense of the city’s poor Irish Americans so alienated well-off local Anglo-Saxon Protestants that they moved away, leaving Boston with a population largely of poor people and little investment money to create jobs for them. Glaeser calls this type of ethnic politics “The Curley Effect,” and he uses it to characterize Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s alienation of that city’s white population, especially its wealthy elite, most of whom moved out, leaving behind a town with few financial resources and a population that could no longer find enough jobs. 

Externalities are unintended side effects of activities, often borne by people other than those who benefit from the activity. Cars offer convenient transportation but generate pollution that everyone must breathe; clear-cutting of forests provides cheap and useful wood but also causes soil erosion and ecological destruction; popular destinations cause traffic jams. Sometimes laws pass to control externalities; at other times, technical solutions resolve these problems—pollution control devices on cars, plantation-style forest management, and improved parking and traffic control systems, for example. 

Jevon’s Paradox states that, when a resource finds more efficient use, people will use it more often. More fuel-efficient transportation vehicles, for example, will find use more often, negating the resource savings. Jevon’s Complementarity Corollary states that, when greater efficiency leads to greater use of a resource, related activities also will increase. Thus, if trains get more efficient, hotel bookings will go up, and if workplace electronic communications—email, texting, teleconferences—get more efficient, in-person work sessions also will become more valuable and therefore engaged in more often.

Somewhere between the density of a big city and the sprawl of suburbia lies the New Urbanism, a design movement that values small-town neighborliness, diversity, a mix of homes and businesses, greater use of walking, biking, and public transit, and respect for the environment. Several planned communities, including Poundbury in England and Celebration in Florida, attempt to meld suburban and urban values. Glaeser believes, though, that these experiments largely fail because residents still make heavy use of cars, and because the houses tend to be large and energy-intensive. 

NIMBYism, or “Not In My Back Yard” politics (260), is a form of political resistance to new urban development. NIMBYism takes many forms, including zoning laws, preservationism, environmentalism, and restrictions on new construction. Though NIMBYism helps protect a city’s historical treasures and can put a lid on unbridled construction, it causes a rise in real estate costs and reduces access to a neighborhood by minorities and the poor. It thus can be a form of elitism and racism masquerading as civic virtue. 

Russia’s empress Catherine the Great, traveling with foreign dignitaries on a tour of her newly acquired province in the south of the country, pointed out prosperous-looking villages lining the route. These hamlets were fake, mere facades assembled to impress the dignitaries. Since then, Potemkin Village refers to anything erected to convince outsiders that things are better than they seem—new construction in an economically struggling city, for example, or an expensive transit system that almost no one uses. 

For regulators who struggle with dense urban areas, Glaeser suggests three simple rules. The first is to replace construction-permit labyrinths with a system of fees that offset any damage caused by construction—for example, to compensate neighbors for noise, obstructed views, blocked sunlight, increased traffic, and the like. The second is to limit the number of preserved buildings to the most emblematic or cherished examples rather than to entire neighborhoods, or to set aside nearby areas for dense development. The third rule is to give neighborhoods more say in the character of their areas—architectural styles, or number and type of entertainment establishments, for example—as long as they don’t close off new construction.