MICHAEL BARONE REVIEWS JOEL KOTKIN’S THE HUMAN CITY:

Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing policies that would concentrate new housing in high-rise clusters around mass transit stations, with ready access to bike paths and walking trails but not to streets and roads for private cars. It’s a good thing to offer people such a choice. It’s a bad thing to deny them any others.

The result is that housing costs in coastal metropolises have skyrocketed far above the level affordable for median-income singles, much less married couples with children. These cities are increasingly the home of the connected rich and the disconnected poor. They have the nation’s highest levels of economic inequality and the highest percentage of singles. The central city of San Francisco has 80,000 more dogs than children.

Plus:

[The focus of urban planners] is typically visual, and on the exterior of buildings and cityscape, easily reproduced in glossy coffee-table books, rather than on the interiors where people spend most of their hours. They take their cues from 20th century architects like Le Corbusier, who wanted to knock down all of Paris’ historic structures and replace them with a few skyscrapers rising from parkland.

As Jane Jacobs and Tom Wolfe have noted, that worked out just swell for all concerned when tried as low-income housing in America: Two word: Pruitt-Igoe.