Triumph of the City

by Edward Glaeser

  In 1965, despite vigorous opposition from the real estate industry, the Landmarks Preservation Commission became permanent. It initially seemed like a small sop to the preservationists. The number of landmarked buildings, seven hundred, was modest, and the commission’s power was checked by the mayor, who could and can veto any one of their decisions.

  Yet, like entropy, the reach of governmental agencies often increases over time, so that a mild, almost symbolic, group can come to hold sway over vast swaths of a city. By the spring of 2010, the New York Landmarks Commission had jurisdiction over twenty-five thousand landmarked buildings and one hundred historic districts. More than 15 percent of Manhattan’s nonpark land south of Ninety-sixth Street is now in a historic district, where every external change must be approved by the Landmarks Commission.

  In 2006, the developer Aby Rosen proposed putting a twenty-two-story glass tower atop the old Sotheby-Parke-Bernet Building at 980 Madison Avenue, in the heart of the massive Upper East Side Historic District. The building itself was not landmarked, but Rosen and his Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Lord Norman Foster, proposed keeping the original building’s facade intact. The tower would have risen above the old structure, much as the former Pan Am Building rises above Grand Central Terminal. Well-connected neighbors didn’t like the idea of more height, and they took their complaints to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Tom Wolfe, who has written brilliantly about both the foibles of New York and the real estate industry, penned a 1,500-word piece in the New York Times insinuating that if the Landmarks Commission gave approval to the project, it would betray its mission. Wolfe & Co. won.

  In response to his critics in the 980 Madison Avenue case, of which I was one, Mr. Wolfe replied in the Village Voice that “To take their theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park.... When you consider the thousands and thousands of people who could be housed in Central Park if they would only allow them to build it up, boy, the problem is on the way to being solved!” But one of the advantages of building up in already dense neighborhoods is that you don’t have to build in green areas, whether in Central Park or somewhere far from an urban center. From the preservationist perspective, building up in one area reduces the pressure to take down other older buildings. One could quite plausibly argue that if the Landmarks Commission has decided that a building can be razed, then they should demand that its replacement be as tall as possible.

  The cost of restricting development is that protected areas become more expensive and more exclusive. On average, people who live in historic districts in Manhattan are almost 74 percent wealthier than people who live outside such areas. Almost three quarters of the adults living in historic districts have college degrees, as opposed to 54 percent outside them. People living in historic districts are 20 percent more likely to be white. The well-heeled denizens of historic districts convincing the Landmarks Preservation Commission to stop taller structures have become the urban equivalent of those restrictive suburbanites who want to mandate five-acre lot sizes in order to keep out the riffraff. It’s not that poorer people could ever afford 980 Madison Avenue, but restricting new supply anywhere makes it more difficult for the city to accommodate demand, and that pushes up prices everywhere.

  The basic economics of housing prices are pretty simple—supply and demand. New York and Mumbai and London all face increasing demand for their housing, but how that demand affects prices depends on supply. Building enough homes eases the impact of rising demand on prices and makes cities more affordable. That’s the lesson of New York in the 1920s, when New York built hundreds of thousands of homes and the city stayed affordable, and of affordable pro-growth cities, like Chicago and Houston, today. In the postwar boom years between 1955 and 1964, Manhattan permitted more than 11,000 units each year. Between 1980 and 1999, when the city’s prices were soaring, Manhattan permitted an average of 3,120 units per year. Fewer new homes meant higher prices, and between 1970 and 2000, the median price of a Manhattan housing unit increased by 284 percent in constant dollars.

  In New York City, the price of building an additional square foot of living space on the top of a tall building is less than $400. Prices do rise substantially in ultratall buildings, say over fifty stories, but for ordinary skyscrapers, it doesn’t cost more than $500,000 to put up a nice, new 1,200-square-foot apartment. The land costs something, but in a forty-story building, a 1,200-square-foot unit is only using 30 square feet of Manhattan, less than a thousandth of an acre. At those heights, the land costs become pretty small. If there were no rules restricting new construction, then prices would eventually come down to somewhere near construction costs, about a half million dollars for a new apartment. That’s a lot more than the $200,000 that it costs to put up a nice 2,500-square-foot house in Houston but a lot less than the $1 million or more that such an apartment now costs in New York.

  Land is also pretty limited in Chicago’s Gold Coast, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Demand may not be the same as in Manhattan, but it’s still pretty high. Yet you can buy a beautiful condominium with a lake view for roughly half the cost of a similar unit in Manhattan. The cost of building in Chicago is cheaper than in New York, but not half as cheap. The big difference is that Chicago’s leadership has always encouraged new construction more than New York’s, at least before the Bloomberg administration. The forest of cranes along Lake Michigan keeps Chicago affordable.

  Most people who fight to stop a new development think of themselves as heroes, not villains. After all, putting up a new building on Madison Avenue clearly bugs a lot of famous people, and one building isn’t going to make much difference to the city as a whole. The problem is that all those independent decisions to prevent construction add up. Zoning rules, air rights, height restrictions, and landmarks boards together form a web of regulation that has made it more and more difficult to build. The increasing wave of regulations was, until the Bloomberg administration, making New York shorter. In a sample of condominium buildings, I found that more than 80 percent of structures erected in the 1970s had more than twenty stories, while fewer than 40 percent of the buildings erected in the 1990s were that tall. The elevator and the steel-frame skyscraper made it possible to get vast amounts of living space out of tiny amounts of land, but New York’s building rules were stopping that process.

  The growth in housing supply determines not only prices but the number of people in a city. The statistical relationship between new building and population growth across areas is almost perfect, so that when an area increases its housing stock by 1 percent, its population rises by almost exactly that amount. As a result, when New York or Boston or Paris restricts new construction, those places’ populations will be smaller. If the restrictions become strong enough, then places can even lose population, despite rising demand, as wealthier, smaller families replace poorer, larger ones.

  Jane Jacobs’s insights into the pleasures and strengths of older, lower urban neighborhoods were certainly correct, but she had too little faith in the strengths of higher density levels. I was born a year before Jacobs left New York for Toronto, and I lived in Manhattan for the next seventeen years. My neighborhood looked nothing like low-rise Greenwich Village. I grew up surrounded by white, glazed towers built after World War II to provide affordable housing for middle-income people like my parents. The neighborhood may not have been as charming as Greenwich Village, but it had plenty of reasonably fun restaurants and quirky stores and even quirkier pedestrians. The streets were reasonably safe. It was certainly a functioning, vibrant urban space, albeit one with plenty of skyscrapers. Hong Kong, which has embraced verticality and change, is an even more extreme case, where exciting street life is perfectly compatible with soaring structures.

  Not everyone should live in a high-rise. Plenty of urbanites, like Jane Jacobs, prefer older, shorter neighborhoods. However, plenty of others enjoy living in urban aeries, and government shouldn’t stop skyscrapers from fulfilling their dreams either. Limiting
high-rise development doesn’t guarantee interesting, heterogeneous neighborhoods. It just guarantees high prices.

  People in an affluent society want and expect comfortable, spacious homes. Today America builds those homes in the suburbs of the Sunbelt, which pulls people out of cities and toward Texas. But spacious, affordable homes can also be built in our older cities. There can be an urban future where more people live in central cities, but to do that, the most desirable of those cities must reduce the regulatory barriers that limit the construction of taller buildings.

  Rethinking Paris

  A century ago, Paris and New York offered completely different visions of urban development. Paris was built from the top down. The emperor had his vision, and his bureaucrat-baron made it so. New York’s skyline was made by thousands of relatively unregulated builders putting up whatever the market would bear. New York was a chaotic but splendid jam session in which superb musicians paid only the slightest attention to what was going on around them, but Paris was a carefully composed symphony. New York’s chaos was more dynamic, but Parisian order produced safer buildings. In 1900, fires were far more common in American cities than they were in Europe. Today it’s hard to argue that new skyscrapers would in any way change the essential glory of New York. But opponents of change in Paris have a better argument.

  Paris wasn’t always that orderly or that beautiful. Before 1850, hundreds of thousands of poor Parisians crowded into narrow streets and ancient buildings. Paris had had land-use regulations for centuries. When Henry IV established the Bourbon dynasty in 1589, he also established building codes and built the Place des Vosges, which may be Paris’s most perfect piazza. But the city’s few early attempts at planning were lost in an urban maze. Dense Parisian chaos provided protection both for criminals and for the revolutionaries who toppled three monarchs in sixty years, starting in 1789. Early nineteenth-century Paris might well have appealed to Jane Jacobs, but it didn’t seem so ideal to Napoléon III, which is why he turned to Baron Haussmann.

  Karl Marx described the reign of Napoléon III as a farcical repetition of the tragedy of his uncle, Napoléon I, but the Second Empire’s urban-renewal policies were no laughing matter. The younger Bonaparte’s place in the world of city-building is as robust as the first Napoléon’s place as a military strategist. There are many explanations for Napoléon III’s devotion to reconstructing Paris. He wanted to clear the city of the dense warren of streets that harbored revolutionaries and to create large boulevards for his cavalry to mow down urban rebels. Still, the emperor wasn’t just building defensible space. He hoped his public works would bring him both popularity and a place in history.

  The emperor was a busy man, with wars to fight and a beautiful empress to impress. He needed an ultracompetent bureaucrat who would be loyal to him and would share his willingness to spend and move to remake his capital. Baron Haussmann was his man. Born in Paris in 1809, a few months before the first Napoléon demolished the Austrians at Wagram, Haussmann came from a family of outsiders, Protestants from Germany, who rose in the rough meritocracy of Napoleonic France. Haussmann’s grandfather was a general turned into a baron by the emperor. His father supplied Napoléon’s army.

  Haussmann was educated in the elite Lycée Henri-IV, which is still one of the world’s great schools, and then studied law and music. In 1830, when revolution brought in the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, Haussmann entered the Civil Service and was sent to Nérac, a small town outside of Bordeaux. He toiled for years in the provinces, until the return of a Bonaparte brought him opportunity. When the previous prefect of the Seine was relieved of his post for trying to stymie Napoléon III’s grandiose urban plans, the ambitious baron leaped at the chance to become his replacement.

  If you want to rebuild a city, it helps to have an autocrat behind you, and Haussmann did things that would be unthinkable in a more democratic age. He evicted vast numbers of the poor, turning their homes into the wide boulevards that made Paris monumental. He lopped off a good chunk of the Luxembourg Gardens to create city streets. He tore down ancient landmarks, like the prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He spent 2.5 billion francs on his efforts, which was forty-four times the total budget of Paris in 1851. All that spending and upheaval turned Paris from an ancient and somewhat dilapidated city of immense poverty into an urban resort for the growing haute bourgeoisie.

  Some of Haussmann’s innovations, like the Bois de Boulogne, were public spaces meant to make Paris both more beautiful and healthier. Other innovations were attempts to retrofit a pedestrian city for newer forms of transportation, like rail and omnibuses. Haussmann also made Paris a bit taller. In 1859, the city’s height limit was increased from fifty-four feet to sixty-two feet. Still, relative to later cities built in the elevator-rich twentieth century, Haussmann’s Paris stayed short because people needed to climb stairs. In those days, top floors went at a discount because of all those stairs, which is why starving artists dying of consumption in Parisian garrets had great views.

  Haussmann built before the elevator, but after the omnibus and steam train. He was trying to accommodate those faster modes of travel by providing bigger, straighter streets. When Haussmann cut his boulevards, he was accommodating those new technologies, foreshadowing the expressways that Jane Jacobs opposed in lower Manhattan. Like later builders, Haussmann had his critics, who sought to discredit his projects by accusing him of corruption and fictitious accounting. There were many legitimate reasons to oppose Haussmannization, but the stolid Alsatian bureaucrat was nothing if not honest. His spending was prodigious but legal.

  Gustave Caillebotte’s famous 1877 picture of a Haussmann-built Parisian street in the rain, now in the Chicago Art Institute, depicts an excessively monumental, anonymous city where disconnected men lived aimless lives surrounded by sterile grandeur. This picture would have been an apt illustration for Jane Jacobs’s description of the breakdown in street life that comes from standardization and overly long city blocks. Other critics disliked the monotonous gray of all those apartment buildings. Some spoke out against the suffering that came from displacing so many Parisian families. The anti-imperialists saw Napoléon III’s many monuments as the silly self-aggrandizement of a puffed-up pretender.

  Yet if the purpose of architecture is to bring joy to the people who experience it, then Haussmann’s remake was a rousing success. Before him, observers would write of the ugliness of Paris. After him, Paris became widely synonymous with urban beauty. Millions of tourists come every year to look at Haussmann’s legacy. Millions of Parisians spend a fortune to live in the city that he built. Not only did Haussmann solve technical problems, like how to get clean water and trains into Paris, but he also left behind a city cherished by much of humankind.

  Haussmann brought more change to Paris than any other older city in the world had yet experienced, and the result is his unified urban masterpiece. But by the twentieth century, Haussmann’s work became an architectural icon not subject to revision. He had gotten an extra floor added with the maximum height regulations in 1859, but in 1902, heights were limited to ninety-eight feet on large thoroughfares and less on narrower streets, a restriction that would remain in effect for over half a century.

  The regulations of Paris didn’t matter much during the four terrible decades that started with Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. The population and prosperity of France were grievously damaged by the German invasion the same year, which came so close to conquering Paris. There was little interest in rebuilding the city during the demographically challenged 1920s or the Depression-wracked 1930s. The 1940s brought another war that again left France in poverty. Only in the 1950s did the French economy come back, and with it the desire to modernize the country’s long-stagnant capital. In 1967, the Paris City Council lifted the city’s height restrictions. Empowered technocrats wanted newer, taller buildings and also wanted to eliminate alleged eyesores like the old central market, Les Halles.

  Und
er de Gaulle and Pompidou, Paris built a little bit. Paris in the 1960s was not like New York in the 1920s, but the city did finally erect a proper skyscraper. Construction of the 689-foot Maine-Montparnasse Tower started in 1969. Two years later, Les Halles was wiped away, and the futuristic Pompidou Centre museum was built in the same year. But this change rankled Parisians who had gotten used to a static city. The Montparnasse Tower was widely loathed, and the lesson drawn was that skyscrapers must never again mar central Paris. Les Halles was sorely missed, in much the same way that many New Yorkers mourned the demise of the old Penn Station. France is a far more regulatory country than America, and when its rulers decide they don’t want change, change will not occur. A 1974 regulation imposed a height limit of 83 feet in central Paris, a restriction that remains in effect as of 2010.

  While rules stopped height in old Paris, building was allowed on the periphery. Today, the majority of Paris’s skyscrapers are in relatively dense but far-flung complexes like La Défense. Today, La Défense is as vertical as central Paris is flat. It has close to 40 million square feet of commercial space and the feel of an American office park. Except for the distant view of the Arc de Triomphe, administrative assistants drinking lattes in a La Défense Starbucks could easily be in a bigger version of Crystal City, Virginia.

  La Défense addresses the need to balance preservation and growth by segregating skyscrapers. In some senses, it is an inspired solution. People working there can still get to old Paris in about twenty minutes by Métro or an hour by foot. That Métro ride also means that businesses in La Défense can connect with the all-important French bureaucracy that remains centered in the old city. La Défense is one of Europe’s most concentrated commercial centers, and it seems to have all of the economic excitement that we would expect from such a mass of skilled workers. The sector makes it possible for Paris to grow, while keeping the old city pristine.