Quotes from Edward L. Glaeser

It's hard not to empathize with the mayor's anger, given the injustices he'd suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.

The tendency to think that a city can build itself out of decline is an example of the edifice error, the tendency to think that abundant new building leads to urban success. Successful cities typically do build, because economic vitality makes people willing to pay for space and builders are happy to accommodate. But building is the result, not the cause, of success. Overbuilding a declining city that already has more structures than it needs is nothing but folly.

The failures of urban renewal reflect a failure at all levels of government to realize that people, not structures, really determine a city's success.

Cities don't make people poor; they attract poor people.

Shiny new real estate may dress up a declining city, but it doesn't solve its underlying problems. The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies. With all that supply of structure and so little demand, it makes no sense to use public money to build more supply. The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren't structures; cities are people.

Historically, most people were far too poor to let their tastes in entertainment guide where they chose to live, and cities were hardly pleasure zones. Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.

The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren't structures; cities are people.

twentieth-century urban America didn't belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car.

Department of Energy data confirms that New York State's per capita energy consumption is next to last in the country, which largely reflects public transit use in New York City.

Infrastructure eventually becomes obsolete, but education perpetuates itself as one smart generation teaches the next. In the United States and Europe, industrialization rarely encouraged education.

Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They're even the same if we take individual workers' IQs into account. The income gap between urban and rural areas is just as large in other rich countries, and even

whether in London's ornate arcades or Rio's fractious favelas, whether in the high-rises of Hong Kong or the dusty workspaces of Dharavi, our culture, our prosperity, and our freedom are all ultimately gifts of people living, working, and thinking together—the ultimate triumph of the city.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Between 1950 and 2008, Detroit lost over a million people—58 percent of its population. Today one third of its citizens live in poverty. Detroit's median family income is $33,000, about half the U.S. average. In 2009, the city's unemployment rate was 25 percent, which was 9 percentage points more than any other large city and more than 2.5 times the national average. In