Triumph of the City

by Edward Glaeser

  But building in La Défense is not a perfect substitute for new construction in the more desirable central areas of Paris, where short supply keeps prices astronomical. The natural thing is to have tall buildings in the center, where demand is greatest, not on the edge. The lack of new housing in central Paris means that small apartments sell for a million dollars or more. Hotel rooms often cost more than $500 per night. If you want to be in the center of the city, you’ll have to pay for it. People are willing to pay those high prices because Paris is so charming, but they must pay those prices because the city’s rulers have decided to limit the amount of housing that can be built in the area. Average people are barred from living in central Paris just as surely as if the city had put up a gate and said that no middle-income people can enter.

  In the world’s oldest, most beautiful cities, La Défense provides a viable model. Keep the core areas historic, but let millions of square feet be built nearby. As long as building in the high-rise district is sufficiently unfettered, then that area provides a safety valve for the region as a whole. The key issue with La Défense is whether it is too far away. Its distance from the old city keeps central Paris pristine but deprives too many people of the pleasures of strolling to a historic café for lunch.

  Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to balance the benefits of providing more desirable space with the desire to preserve a beautiful older city. My preferences lead me to wish that some developments like La Défense had been built closer to the center of Paris, perhaps where Pompidou wanted to build, right around the Gare Montparnasse. But I also understand those who think that Paris is so precious that there should be more space between them and Haussmann’s boulevards. Still, Paris is an extreme case. In much of the rest of the world, the argument for restricting development is far weaker, and nowhere have limits on development done more harm than in the Indian megacity of Mumbai.

  Mismanagement in Mumbai

  It’s a pity that too few ordinary people can afford to live in central Paris or Manhattan, but France and the United States will survive. The problems caused by arbitrarily restricting height in the developing world are far more serious, because they handicap the metropolises that help turn desperately poor nations into middle-income countries. The rules that keep India’s cities too short and too expensive mean that too few Indians can connect with each other and with the outside world. Because poverty often means death in the developing world, and because restricting city growth ensures more poverty, it is not hyperbole to say that land-use planning in India can be a matter of life and death.

  Mumbai is a city of astonishing human energy and entrepreneurship, from the high reaches of finance and film to the jam-packed spaces of the Dharavi slum. If all this private talent got the government it deserved, it would get a public sector that performed well the core tasks of city government, like providing sewers and safe water, without overreaching and overregulating. One curse of the developing world is that governments take on too much and fail at their core responsibilities. Countries that cannot provide clean water for their citizens should not be in the business of regulating currency exchanges.

  The public failures in Mumbai are as obvious as the private successes. Western tourists can avoid the open defecation in Mumbai’s slums, but they can’t avoid the city’s failed transportation network. It can easily take you ninety minutes to drive the fourteen miles from the airport to the city’s old downtown, with its landmark Gateway to India arch. There is a train that could speed up your trip, but few Westerners have the courage to brave its crowds during rush hour. In 2008, more than three people each day were pushed out of that train to their death. Average commute times in Mumbai are about fifty minutes each way, which is about double the average American commute.

  The city has tried to build its way out of traffic congestion. Its elevated highways make things a little better, but I’ve already mentioned the research that shows that the total number of miles traveled increases essentially one-for-one with highway miles built. Mumbai has so many potential drivers that new roads alone can never eliminate congestion. The most cost-effective means of opening up overcrowded city streets would be to follow Singapore and charge more for their use.

  If you give something away for free, people will use too much of it. Mumbai’s roads are just too valuable to be clogged by oxcarts at rush hour, and the easiest way to get flexible drivers off the road is to charge them for their use of public space. Congestion charges aren’t just for rich cities; they are appropriate anywhere roads come to a standstill. After all, Singapore was not wealthy in 1975 when it started charging drivers for using downtown streets. Like Singapore then, Mumbai could just require people to buy paper day-licenses to drive downtown and require them to show those licenses in their windows. Politics, however, not technology, would make this strategy difficult. Despite the fact that the poor would benefit enormously from more open streets, I suspect the city would lack the political will to fine drivers who violate the rules.

  Mumbai’s traffic problems reflect not just poor transportation policy, but a deeper and more fundamental failure of urban planning. In 1964, Mumbai fixed a maximum floor area ratio of 1.33 in most of the city. In those years, India was enthusiastic about all sorts of regulation, and limiting building heights seemed to offer a way to limit urban growth that was in keeping with fashionable ideas of English urban planning.

  But Mumbai’s height restrictions meant that, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, buildings could have an average height of only one-and-a-third stories. People still came; Mumbai’s economic energy drew them even when living conditions were awful. Limiting heights didn’t stop urban growth; it just ensured that migrants had to squeeze into less space. Keeping Mumbai flat also ensures longer commutes, and that makes the congestion that comes with crowding more severe.

  Singapore is another former outpost of the British East India Company, but unlike Mumbai, its government is among the most competent in the world. While Singapore does amazing things to provide clean water, it doesn’t stop tall buildings, and as a result, Singapore’s downtown functions well, because it’s tall and connected. Businesspeople work close to one another and can easily trot to a meeting. Hong Kong is even more vertical and even friendlier to pedestrians, who can walk in air-conditioned comfort from skyscraper to skyscraper. It takes only a few minutes to get around Wall Street or Manhattan’s Midtown area. Even vast Tokyo can be traversed largely on foot. These great cities function because their height enables a vast number of people to work, and sometimes live, on a tiny sliver of land. But Mumbai is short, so everyone sits in traffic and pays dearly for space.

  A city of 14 million people occupying a tiny land mass could be housed by corridors of skyscrapers. An abundance of close and connected vertical real estate would decrease the pressure on roads, ease the connections that are the lifeblood of a twenty-first-century city, and reduce Mumbai’s extraordinarily high cost of space. Yet instead of encouraging compact development, Mumbai is pushing people out. According to Emporis.com, three of the six buildings in Mumbai that rise above 490 feet are being built this year, and more are on the way, because some of the height restrictions have been slightly eased, especially outside of the traditional downtown.

  Mumbai’s floor-area-ratio requirements have eased recently, but the change has been modest. Their continuing power explains why many of the new skyscrapers are surrounded by swaths of green space. That space places tall buildings in splendid isolation, so that cars, rather than feet, are still needed to get around. If Mumbai was trying to promote affordability and ease congestion, it should make developers use their land to the fullest, requiring any new downtown development to have at least forty stories. By requiring developers to create more, not less, floor space, the government would encourage more housing, less sprawl, and lower prices.

  As long as Mumbai remains an extraordinarily productive place to live and work, new residents will flock there. Height restrictions just
force people to crowd into squalid, illegal slums rather than legal apartment buildings. One study estimates that Mumbai’s homes have only about 30 square feet per person, as opposed to 140 square feet per person in urban China. People are forced into so little space in Mumbai because real estate is more expensive there than in far richer places, like Singapore. Singapore is cheaper than Mumbai not because demand for that prosperous place is low, but because Singapore allows builders to put more floor space on the same amount of land.

  Historically, Mumbai’s residents couldn’t afford such height, but many can today, and they would live in taller buildings if those buildings were abundant and affordable. Canyons of glass and steel and concrete, such as those along New York’s Fifth Avenue, aren’t an urban problem; they are a perfectly reasonable way to fit a large amount of people and commerce on a small amount of land. Only poor policy prevents a long row of fifty-story buildings from lining Mumbai’s seafront, much as high-rises adorn Chicago’s lakefront.

  The magic of cities comes from their people, but those people must be well served by the bricks and mortar that surround them. Cities need roads and buildings that enable people to live well and to connect easily with one another. Tall towers, like Henry Ford II’s Renaissance Center in Detroit, make little sense in places with abundant space and slack demand. But in the most desirable cities, whether they’re on the Hudson River or the Indian Ocean, height is the best way to keep prices affordable and living standards high.

  Three Simple Rules

  The success of our cities, the world’s economic engines, increasingly depends on abstruse decisions made by zoning boards and preservation committees. It certainly makes sense to control construction in dense urban spaces, but I would replace the maze of regulations now limiting building with three simple rules.

  First, cities should replace the current lengthy and uncertain permitting process with a simple system of fees. If tall heights create costs by blocking light or views, then form a reasonable estimate of those costs and charge the builder appropriately. If certain activities are noxious to neighbors, then we should estimate the social costs and charge builders for them, just as we should charge drivers for the costs of their congestion. Those taxes could then be given to the people who are suffering, such as the neighbors who lose light from a new construction project.

  I don’t mean to suggest that such a system would be easy to design. There is plenty of room for debate about the costs associated with buildings of different heights. People would certainly disagree about the size of the neighboring areas that would receive compensation. But reasonable rules could be developed that would then be universally applied. For example, the developer of every new building in New York would pay some number of dollars per square foot in compensation costs in exchange for a speedy permit. Some share of the money could go to the city treasury and the rest would go to people within a block of the new edifice.

  A simple tax system would be far more transparent and targeted than the current regulatory maze. Today, many builders negotiate our current system by hiring expensive lawyers and lobbyists and purchasing political influence. It would be far better for them to just write a check to the rest of us. Allowing more building doesn’t have to be a windfall for developers; sensible, straightforward regulations can make new development good for the neighborhood and the city as a whole.

  Second, historic preservation should be limited and well defined. Landmarking a masterpiece like the Flatiron Building or the old Penn Station is sensible. Preserving vast numbers of postwar glazed-brick buildings is absurd. But where do you draw the line between those two extremes?

  My own preference is that in a city like New York, the landmarks commission should have a fixed number of buildings, perhaps five thousand, that it may protect. The commission can change its chosen architectural gems, but it needs to do that slowly. It shouldn’t be able to change its rules overnight to stop construction in some previously unprotected area. If the commission wants to preserve a whole district, then let it spread its five-thousand-building mandate across the area. Perhaps five thousand buildings are too few, but without some sort of limit, the scope of any regulatory agency will try to constantly increase, either because of bureaucratic empire building or in response to community pressure.

  The problem gets thornier when practically an entire city, like Paris, is beloved worldwide. In such cases, the key is to find some sizable body of land, reasonably close to the city center, that can be used for ultradense development. Ideally, this space would be near enough to allow its residents to enjoy walking to the beautiful streets of the older city.

  Finally, individual neighborhoods should have some clearly delineated power to protect their special character. People in some blocks might really want to exclude bars; people in others might want to encourage them. Rather than regulate neighborhoods entirely from the top down, it would make more sense to allow individual neighborhoods to craft their own, limited set of rules about building styles and uses that are adopted only with the approval of a very large share of residents. But communities should not have the power to completely prevent construction, by restricting heights or imposing excessive regulations, lest local communities become NIMBYist enclaves. Ordinary citizens, rather than the planners in City Hall, should have more say over what happens next to them, but community control must unfortunately be limited, because local communities often fail to consider the adverse citywide consequences of banning building.

  Great cities are not static—they constantly change and take the world along with them. When New York and Chicago and Paris experienced great spurts of creativity and growth, the cities reshaped themselves to provide new structures that could house new talent and new ideas. Cities can’t force change with new buildings; the experience of the Rust Belt refutes that view. But if change is happening, the right kind of new building can help that process.

  Yet many of the world’s cities, both old and new, have arrayed rules that prevent new construction at higher densities. Sometimes these rules have a good justification, such as preserving truly important works of architecture. However, sometimes these rules are mindless NIMBYism or a misguided attempt at stopping urban growth. In all cases, construction restrictions tie cities to their past and limit the possibilities for their future. If cities can’t build up, then they will build out. If building in a city is frozen, then growth will happen somewhere else.

  The failure of places like New York and San Francisco to build up has pushed Americans elsewhere, to places that embrace new construction. In such areas, like Houston and Phoenix, development is unfettered, and as a result, prices stay low. The lure—and consequences—of affordable sprawl is the topic of the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 7

  Why Has Sprawl Spread?

  The streets of downtown Houston feel eerily reminiscent of downtown Detroit. Neither city has the pedestrian life of New York, London, Boston, or San Francisco. You wouldn’t know from strolling the streets that while Detroit practically defines decline, Houston remains a great boomtown. The Houston metropolitan area had a million more inhabitants in 2009 than it did in 2000, making it the third-fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country, after Atlanta and Dallas.

  To see Houston’s masses of people, you have to leave the downtown and go elsewhere, like the Galleria shopping mall on the city’s western edge. Twenty-four million people visit this 2.4-million-square-foot complex each year, making it the city’s most popular attraction. On any given Saturday, the mall is mobbed with shoppers, tourists, and people just enjoying its public spaces. Even in sprawling Houston, the desire to experience density doesn’t disappear. The Galleria has citylike features—plenty of pedestrians, offices, apartments, an ice-skating rink. The mall was, after all, modeled on hallowed urban space: Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, diagonally across the main square from the Duomo, the Milan Cathedral. But unlike its Milanese predecessor, the Houston Galleria is comprehensively air-conditioned, walled off fro
m the outside world, and surrounded by vast garages.

  Almost all of Houston is built to accommodate heat and cars. Arguably, the defining characteristic of American cities built in the late twentieth century is their accommodation of the automobile. Just as the winding streets of Bruges or Boston were designed around pedestrian pathways, and New York’s grid supported the omnibus, today’s newer cities reflect the dominant form of transportation of our age: the car. Car-loathers may detest Houston, but millions of Americans who enjoy driving, warmth, and big, cheap homes find the place pretty attractive.

  Many of our most “progressive” states and cities, supposedly the great champions of those with modest means, have become the least hospitable places for middle-income Americans. In the Northeast, large minimum lot sizes mean that the average single-family home in 2008 sat on more than an acre, more than twice the national average. By contrast, the deep red state of Texas is far more affordable, not because the state is pro-poor, but because it isn’t anticonstruction. Sunbelt sprawl would attract millions even without benighted local housing policies, but it doesn’t help that older cities are foolishly turning people away.

  I lived in older urban areas—Manhattan, Chicago, Washington, D.C.—for thirty-two of my first thirty-seven years on this planet. My only nonurban experiences were in college towns, like Princeton and Palo Alto. I had walked to work almost every day of my life. But then I was blessed with three usually delightful children, and I did what millions of other Americans have done facing an expanding household. I moved to a suburb and started driving.

  There is nothing unusual in a middle-aged man leaving the city. As we’ve seen, cities disproportionately attract the young. Almost one fifth of Manhattan’s residents are between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, while only 13 percent of the nation is in that age category. Still, given my love of cities, my decision to suburbanize deserves a bit more explanation. What terrible bout of insanity induced me to choose deer ticks as neighbors instead of people?