Density is good. That’s the message from Ryan Avent, a writer for The Economist, whose new ebook, The Gated City, received a boost from a promotional op ed in the New York Times.
Density, according to Avent, makes people wealthier, happier, and more productive. The data he uses to support these ideas, however, are suspect. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to grasp the distinction between metropolitan area and urbanized area. He understands that metropolitan area is the wrong measure of an urban area’s density, so he uses a weighted-average density of census tracts in a metropolitan area. A metropolitan area such as San Jose, whose urban area density is the third-densest in the nation, ends up appearing less dense than New York, whose urban area is considerably less dense but which has a high density core.
