Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser
★★★ Good content, but not the most captivating read. A book for those already interested in cities, urbanism, and housing who want a complete survey of the space in one package.
Edward Glaeser is an economist at Harvard and an important figure in pro-housing circles. I’ve read several of his papers, like Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up? (2005) and The Economic Implications of Housing Supply (2018). I’m a big fan.
Triumph of the City covers the entire range of pro-urban, pro-housing arguments, fleshing out the usual points with historical perspectives, global comparisons, and lots of data points. In short, it’s what you’d expect from an economist. The writing is also what you’d expect from an economist: fairly dry, with a bit of a muddled structure. It might have been more successful as a set of independent papers, although even within individual chapters I felt like I lost the thread at times. It’s clear Glaeser lovers cities, but it comes across mostly at a theoretical level, not the inspiring, human-scale love someone like Jane Jacobs manages to capture.
A few interesting notes I took down on the fiction of affordable housing in a world of supply constraints:
- A middle class family in Houston making $10,000 less than a New York City family has is 58% higher real income, due to cost of living including housing.
- Homes typically cost no more than 25% over cost of construction. Los Angeles cost of construction is 25% higher than in Houston, but homes cost 350% more. Prices of new Manhattan condos are more than 100% above the cost of construction.
- “Houston’s freewheeling growth machine [almost no zoning restrictions or permitting process] has actually done a better job of providing affordable housing than all of the progressive reformers on America’s East and West costs.”
- “In the early 1920s New York was also a builder’s paradise, and as a result housing stayed affordable. In the post war years New York increasingly restricted development and tried to make up for the lack of private supply with rent control and public housing. This strategy failed miserably, as it has throughout Europe. The only way to provide cheap housing on a mass scale is to unleash the developers.”
- “Mass production has made clothing and cars affordable for everyone. It has the same effect in the housing market. Places like New York and San Francisco, which claim to care about providing low cost housing for the poor, are generally unaffordable. Texas, which has never shown any commitment to social housing, leads the country in building inexpensive homes.”
