» Ryan Avent’s The Gated City provides insight into the workings of the urban economy, but its proposals to increase the supply of housing in the country’s biggest cities are unreasonable.

Ryan Avent’s new book, The Gated City, provides one of the most readable summaries of urban economics available; for that alone, the book is more than worth its low price. In highlighting the work of Edward Glaeser among others, this author shows how the density of metropolitan regions can play an essential role in increasing the productivity of workers and expand the economy in general. It is Avent’s quite plausible thesis

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» In terms of residential growth, U.S. downtowns are coming back, even in the face of continued sprawl and trouble elsewhere in center cities.

For many inner cities in the United States, the ten years that opened the third millennium were not easy. In the face of declining employment and ever-increasing suburban sprawl, the populations of many of the nation’s largest cities — especially in the Midwest — declined. According to the U.S. government, which has begun to release data from the 2010 Census, the troubles for a number of municipalities that have not successfully transitioned from industrial-age employment paradigms to information

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