Great minds think alike. And so it was that this weekend the country’s two most prestigious daily newspapers both brought us stories of how sleepy, prosperous suburbs of their respective cities are developing hip downtowns with all the accoutrements of a gentrified urban neighborhood. Out with the chain store surrounded by parking lots, in with the yoga studio and “vintage” clothing boutique on Main Street.

The New York Times reports that hipsters are fleeing Brooklyn and Manhattan’s East Village for towns along the Hudson River. “You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia,” the Times claims. “Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a story about Montgomery County, Md., a collection of leafy, wealthy suburbs, that, in the hopes of appealing to young professionals, is making plans to build pedestrian-friendly downtown areas and seeking trendy stores to fill them. “For all its prosperity and family-friendly suburban appeal, Montgomery is in the throes of a midlife crisis,” the Post writes. “That angst has led to a new item at the top of the public policy agenda: a yearning to be hip.”

The Times piece was widely mocked. As Slate’s Jessica Grose pointed out, young parents with children leaving their cramped apartments for spacious suburban homes is as old as the suburbs themselves. The only difference is that until recently, the vast majority of young artists and professionals in New York City lived in Manhattan and went straight to suburbia from there without stopping in the outer boroughs.

Blogger Dana Goldstein observed that the demographic inversion pricing the young white creative classes out of Brooklyn neighborhoods that their ilk would never have set foot in 20 years ago is actually driving far more minorities and poor people than rich white people to the suburbs. (Case in point: Just last week, in a little-noticed article, The Brooklyn Paper reported that many residents of mostly black sections of central and southeastern Brooklyn are moving to the Poconos, the Pennsylvania region 90 minutes from New York City.)

The blogosphere ignored the Post story, but it contained some actual news: “County Executive Isiah Leggett wants to make Montgomery more competitive with the District and Arlington County for the coveted millennial demographic, or ‘Generation Y’ — roughly defined as those between ages 18 and 34,” the Post reports.

That’s different than the married parents of small children, in their 30s and 40s, who are moving to “Hipsturbia” on the Hudson because they can afford a big Victorian house with a yoga studio nearby.

Despite their differences, these stories are two sides of the same coin: The young and highly educated, even though they overwhelmingly grew up in the suburbs, want to be able walk to an independent coffee bar, passing other people with tattoos, order a soy-milk chai latte and vegan pastry, and crack open their Macbook to enjoy some free public wi-fi. As they outgrow the city, like generations before them, they go looking for the same amenities in a more suburban setting. Some areas will attract these people naturally; others are going to have to work for it.

That the Hudson River towns would be the most popular suburbs among that cohort makes intuitive sense. They were settled relatively early as independent villages, so they have railroad stations, walkable downtowns, and a handful charming old buildings. That is why they have character, that elusive quality that D.C.’s suburbs — sprawling, 20th-century autopias — are trying to insert ex post facto.

From both stories you can take the same lesson: that the suburbs with the best prospects will be those with walkability and transit access. Cool stores and good restaurants, which often depend on walk-in traffic, are actually a symptom, rather than the cause, of such vibrancy. The interstitial step isn’t to attract funky stores, but the people who would open and patronize them.

But a careful reading of these stories raises more interesting questions about the future of inner-cities than of suburbia. As Ariella Cohen explains in Next City, the urbanist hope for gentrification was that it would not just turn formerly working-class minority neighborhoods into temporary playgrounds for wealthy whites for the decade or two between their graduation from college and procreation. Rather, the goal is to create cities, and transit-accessible inner-ring suburbs, that are economically diverse and integrated, commercially vibrant, and ecologically sustainable.

The subjects of the Times piece, although they praise their new homes’ ample charms, mostly emphasize that they gave up on Brooklyn because they could not afford a sizable enough home in a neighborhood like Greenpoint. But why didn’t they venture deeper into the borough? There are areas of cheaper, ungentrified Brooklyn where they could afford a brownstone for the price of a similar-sized detached home in Tarrytown. Why do they choose a town on the Hudson over Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, or Sunset Park? Is it because crime is still a concern? Are those fears statistically justified? Are New York City public schools still perceived as vastly inferior to their suburban counterparts, and is that accurate? Or is it just because, at some very basic level, many young people still want the comforts they grew up with, like garages and lawns and large, separate houses?

Whatever it is, the suburbs still call to many Americans, and the smart ones are rebuilding for a new generation. And cities? If they want to retain their new residents into middle age, they’ll need to face these questions, and also address the spiraling cost of housing. Loosening zoning regulations and other development restrictions, such as D.C.’s building height limit, will help supply rise to meet demand. And if New York doesn’t want the gentrifiers of Crown Heights and Ditmas Park to push every longtime resident out to the Poconos, it will have to create more units of affordable housing.

The Times and Post stories show that is that there is a demand for a future with healthier cities and less sucky suburbs. But getting there won’t just happen on its own: Policies that both remove obstacles and invent solutions will determine the fate of all our communities.

The most famous cliché of editorial advice — “write what you know” — has always served me in good stead. I’ve often regretted ill-advised ventures outside my areas of expertise. (In 2006 I wrote a screed complaining that critics over-rate Ghostface Killah, based on my deep knowledge of hip-hop circa 1997. And don’t ask me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ever. Please.) Ed Glaeser, Harvard economist and author of Triumph of the City, has just made such a mistake. While Glaeser knows free-market economics, he clearly knows nothing about the people who live in cities.

In the current issue of City Journal — house organ of Rudy Giuliani-style neoconservatism — Glaeser contends that it is time for cities and Republicans to put aside their history of animosity and come together. He makes three arguments, each less true than the next: that Republicans would benefit politically from appealing to urbanites, that urbanites will be receptive to their entreaties, and that Republican policy ideas would substantively benefit cities. Glaeser writes:

The GOP has an urban problem. And it’s partly a self-created one. The party, nationally and even locally, has focused on winning suburban and rural votes and has stopped reaching out to city dwellers.

The cities-as-foreign-territory approach is bad politics for the Republicans: after all, successful cities like New York and Houston surge with ambitious strivers and entrepreneurs, who should instinctively sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry. The Republican move away from the cities is also bad for the cities themselves, which have hugely benefited — and could benefit a lot more — from right-of-center ideas.

Let’s take these assertions one at a time.

• “The cities-as-foreign-territory approach is bad politics for the Republicans.”

This is a good example of the Pundit’s Fallacy. The Pundit’s Fallacy is the convenient belief that whatever you believe in must surely also be in the political best interest of the party you seek to influence. Conservative talk radio hosts, for example, frequently insist that truer conservatism would help Republicans win. Glaeser, a libertarian who lives in Massachusetts and grew up in Manhattan, naturally wants the fiscally conservative party to appeal more to cosmopolitan conservatives like him instead of the proverbial pickup-truck-driving, gun-toting, uneducated, white voters who constitute the Republican base. And so, surely, it must be in the best interest of Republicans to do so.

But it isn’t. As anyone familiar with the electoral college could explain, wasting time and money campaigning in New York City, Los Angeles, or Boston, only to lose by a smaller margin in New York state, California, or Massachusetts would be a terrible misuse of resources for the GOP.

More to the point, it is precisely Republican demonization of cities and their residents that attracts the culturally conservative suburban and rural voters. Having covered Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign, I can tell you that appeals to resentment of young people, urbanites, atheists, and racial minorities helped him win the South Carolina presidential primary. And when Gingrich attacks “elites” who live in Manhattan and ride the subway as a defense of the home mortgage interest deduction (a tax policy that benefits the suburbs at the expense of cities), that is a pure expression of modern Republicanism: It is identity politics for older white people in suburbs and rural areas, stripped of any connection to conservatism as legitimate or consistent ideology.

Glaeser actually mentions the fact that President Obama has left the home mortgage interest deduction alone as a rebuttal to the Republican platform’s false assertion that Obama “pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” Glaeser does not bother to reflect, however, on the irrational spite for cities and their inhabitants that this quote evinces. If he did, he might realize that he is asking a group of people who are deeply biased against cities to embrace a more urban agenda — and then realize how silly that is.

Republicans have a number of positions — opposition to immigration, opposition to gun control, subsidizing farms and oil production, demagoguing cuts to Medicare providers, wasting enormous sums of money on the military — that flow from these cultural politics. They often contradict the supposed Republican commitment to free markets and fiscal discipline. But they are designed to appeal to the constituency that provides Republicans with their votes. Abandon these positions — or the anti-immigrant, fear-mongering, rurally biased frame for the whole Republican platform — and their voters may abandon them for a third party, or stay at home.

• “Successful cities like New York and Houston surge with ambitious strivers and entrepreneurs, who should instinctively sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry.”

This is a variation of a complaint one frequently hears from conservative intellectuals in the wake of their second consecutive thumping in a presidential election. Typically, the target demographic is Latinos or Asians, who are hailed as natural Republican constituencies owing to their supposed industriousness.

Conservatives making these arguments simply treat it as self-evident that entrepreneurs would “sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry.” But why would they? Faith in private industry is not a policy; it is, as the word faith implies, an anti-empirical mindset. Republicans are indeed a party of blind faiths — in God as the creator of humans in their present form, in private industry as preferable to government, and so on. But one usually gets ahead in business by making informed decisions based on dispassionate reading of data, not on unwavering faith.

Not all entrepreneurs necessarily share Glaeser’s and the GOP’s ideologically rigid, and unwarranted, faith in the free market. Empirically speaking, private industry does not always meet all of society’s needs. Consider, for example, the case of providing health insurance for the ill or elderly.

Living in a city — as opposed to Glaeser’s 6.5-acre spread in Weston, Mass. — tends to help one understand areas where the private market fails. See homeless people; note that private schools do not serve the poor; use sidewalks, subways, and roads; or call the police after being mugged, and you are likely to lose your faith in private industry to solve all problems.

Glaeser also does not consider who actually lives in cities. They are not actually all wealthy entrepreneurs. Many of them have economic interests that clearly lie with the Democratic Party. Let’s use Glaeser’s own examples of New York and Hoston: 19.4 percent of New York City residents, and 21.5 percent of Houstonians, live below the federal poverty line. These are the people whose food stamps and Medicaid benefits House Republicans are trying to cut.

Here are a few other interesting facts about Houston and New York: They are both about a quarter African American and even more Latino. And more than 45 percent of residents in both cities speak a language other than English in their home. Glaeser, naturally, thinks they would be inclined to vote for the party pushing an “English-only” bill in Congress.

Cities are filled with racial minorities, immigrants, gays, and unmarried women, and Republicans oppose equal rights for all of these groups. They oppose banning discrimination against gays in the workplace and allowing them to marry or even serve in the military. They encourage cops to stop any Latino and demanding to see his immigration papers. They have blocked laws to protect women from pay discrimination and they seek to outlaw abortion. Republican appointees to the Justice Department [PDF] and federal bench are chosen for their hostility to civil rights. Republicans have also passed laws designed to disenfranchise large numbers of young people, poor people, city dwellers, and minorities by requiring possesion of a government-issued photo ID (aka a driver’s license) to vote.

Even if Republicans deserved all the credit Glaeser gives them on economic, criminal justice, and crime-fighting policy, the Republican platform is generally more hostile than helpful to most urbanites.

• “[Cities] have hugely benefited — and could benefit a lot more — from right-of-center ideas.”

See the sleight of hand? Suddenly we’re talking about “right-of-center ideas” as if that were synonymous with “Republican governance.” Glaeser burnishes this point by noting that Richard Nixon and his HUD secretary, George Romney, moved from public housing to housing vouchers for low-income families, and increased flexible block grants to cities. Well, yes, Richard Nixon also famously created the Environmental Protection Agency. Alas, that tells us nothing about the modern Republican Party, except how far right it has moved. Someone with Nixon’s or Romney’s politics today would be a Democrat.

It is Democrats who have expanded housing voucher programs such as Section 8, and applied its lessons of dispersing low-income housing through President Clinton’s Hope VI program. Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed to do nothing with Section 8 vouchers or Community Development Block Grants, except to cut them.

So what qualified in 1970 as a right-of-center idea can be helpful to cities. But Republicans no longer support those ideas. It is telling that Glaeser has to go so far back to offer a Republican contribution to urban policy.

And those policies are arguably not even right-of-center. They are based on the premise that government can and should offer assistance to disadvantaged families and urban communities. They simply believe in using free market approaches rather than top-down government. One might properly term that center-left, or neoliberal, rather than right-of-center or conservative. Certainly, the politicians promoting such ideas today — an individual mandate to buy health insurance, a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions — are Democrats. (OK, with one notable exception, former Rep. Bob Inglis [R-S.C.] — but you’ll recall that he got chased out of office by the Tea Party.) Most Republicans refer to such proposals, inaccurately, as “socialism.”

Glaeser goes on to credit Republicans such as Giuliani for making cities safer. “The GOP, historically the party of law and order, can convincingly make the case for urban crime reduction,” he writes. He mentions New York’s vaunted Compstat system for identifying crime hot spots, and adds, “Simply hiring more cops also helps.”

More cops? Far be it from me to offer a mathematics lesson to a professor of economics, but hiring cops requires paying them, and paying them requires money, and that money has to be raised through taxes. And yet it is Republicans like Glaeser and Giuliani who claim ad nauseum that high taxes to provide such social services chase businesses and high earners out of cities.

It is Democrats such as Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama who have offered funds for cities to retain and hire more police officers. Mitt Romney, George’s son, mocked that notion on the campaign trail, snorting, “[Obama] wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

Things get truly surreal when Glaeser labels congestion pricing – in which drivers pay a fee for using traffic-clogged streets in a city’s central business district — a Republican idea. It has had proponents and opponents in both parties. But Glaeser clearly has no appreciation for the larger debate about transportation policy. The Republican position on transportation boils down to: Mass transit bad, roads good, but we don’t want to raise gasoline taxes to pay for them. The gasoline tax has the same principles as congestion pricing, in that it taxes driving to reduce it and raise funds from users for the transportation system.

Congestion pricing is indeed a good idea, and one that follows free-market principles of eliminating a wasteful subsidy and putting a price on a negative externality. (Negative externalities are unfortunate byproducts, such as pollution, of doing the things we we will do to excess if we are not forced to pay for them. In this case, the main externality is traffic jams created when we all drive to the same place at the same time.) But Republicans don’t believe in taxing negative externalities! Just ask them about cap-and-trade or carbon pricing. The sad truth is that these days, Republicans are not a party of innovative policy ideas from anywhere on the political spectrum.

A much more serious, honest take on Republicans and cities was offered in The New Geography by Aaron M. Renn. Renn argues that Republicans should try to actually understand and respect people who live in cities and their values, such as their need for more government, and more environmental regulation, and their appreciation for diversity.

Renn is correct in his understanding of some of the Republicans’ problem with urban voters. But Republicans do not lash out against density and environmental initiatives in a vacuum. It is how they keep sucking up money from the oil, coal, and construction industries. It would be nice if adopting a greener, more urban agenda were in the GOP’s interest, as Glaeser and Renn argue it is. But that just may not be the case.

You’re probably aware that the federal government spends money on some things you like (national parks), and some things you may not care for (imprisoning non-violent drug offenders). But you probably don’t know that the feds actually spend more money on real estate than practically anything else other than defense.

How so? As a new report illustrates, a variety of federal policies that go by other names are actually public investments in housing and other development. The report, “Federal involvement in real estate: A call for examination,” by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Smart Growth America, adds it all up and finds approximately $450 billion each year in subsidies.

These public dollars, the report argues, collectively create an incentive for suburban sprawl and redistribute income from the poor to the rich. So much for the “war on suburbia.”

“Local governments are finding it hard to develop the walkable urban housing that is so in demand, and to leverage federal resources [for it],” said John McIlwain, senior housing fellow at the Urban Land Institute, on a conference call discussing the report.

Consider, for instance, the “mortgage interest tax deduction,” which allows people to deduct the interest on their home loan from their tax bill. The nominal purpose of the deduction is to promote home ownership. What it actually does is promote the over-consumption of housing relative to other forms of spending, savings, and investment, because it taxes a dollar spent on housing less than a dollar put elsewhere. It’s one reason that the average American house grew from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,480 square feet in 2011.

How much do we taxpayers pour into the mortgage income tax deduction, you wonder? Only about $396 billion from 2007-2011, according to the report.

And that’s not all. Over the same five-year period, homeowners wrote off $106 billion in federal income tax liability using rules that allow you to deduct state and local property taxes from your taxable income. And then there is the exclusion of taxes on capital gains on the first $250,000, or $500,000 for a married couple, from the sale of a home. That accounted for another $94 billion in lost revenue over five years.

Collectively, these policies amount to a $680 billion federal subsidy to the housing sector over five years.

The even bigger federal investment in housing is the panoply of supports for obtaining home loans. The biggest, by far, is the Federal Housing Administration’s single-family loan program. The FHA guarantees mortgages, thus making credit available and mortgage interest rates lower. From 2007 through 2011 the FHA cost the government $1.1 trillion.

And the program is biased against mixed-use development in walkable urban environments: The FHA has historically refused to back mortgages for condos in buildings that are more than 25 percent commercial. They recently raised the limit to 35 percent — a step in the right direction, but on the whole, the program still tilts strongly toward houses (read: suburban-style development).

These subsidies also favor buying a home rather than renting. “Support for multifamily rental opportunities makes up only 15 percent of total housing support, despite the fact that 32 percent of U.S. households are renters,” says the Smart Growth report. Chalk it up as another pro-suburban bias, as a much higher proportion of suburbanites own their homes than do city dwellers. (It’s also biased against poor people, as renters also have a median household income of slightly less than half that of owners.)

Again, by putting their thumb on the scale when Americans decide between renting and buying, the government is pushing them out to the ’burbs.

These policies also discourage reinvigorating urban neighborhoods with old, undervalued housing stock. Imagine you have $1 million to spend on a house. If you spend $500,000 on buying a grand old Victorian house in the inner-city, needing $500,000 worth of renovations, you’ll get worse tax treatment than if you just spend the full $1 million on a new house in the suburbs.

The only support for renters comes through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provided $184 billion in direct subsidies and credits for low-income families over five years.

If we are going to spend all this money on the housing sector — a dubious proposition in the first place — it ought to go on helping those in need and generating the biggest return on our investment. That would mean investing in affordable housing near job opportunities, or mass transit to take you there, and filling in cities that could support more density.

“Federal funds are not targeted to those most in need, are not targeted to strengthen existing communities and are not targeted to places where people have economic opportunities,” says the Smart Growth report. As McIlwain said, “The focus on single family suburban development is misplaced.”

Instead, Smart Growth America argues, “Federal real estate spending and commitments should be coordinated around a clear set of goals to support thriving economies in communities across the country.”

Smart Growth America’s math demonstrates that President Obama’s celebrated efforts to make more intelligent federal investments in regional development are a drop in the bucket compared with the overflowing river of tax dollars propping up suburban sprawl and the market for single family homes. The White House’s request for the Sustainable Communities Initiative for 2011 was a paltry $150 million.

Grants of a few million dollars here or there to help build an apartment building next to a rail station are good, but creating a level playing field for different housing types, by removing all these counter-productive subsidies, would accomplish a lot more.

If you’ve ever looked at the skyline of Washington, D.C., you know what it’s lacking: tall buildings. While other cities of D.C.’s population size and economic stature have at least a few high-rise office and apartment buildings in central locations, D.C. is just a collection of squat boxes. In fact, it’s illegal to build anything over 130 feet tall. That may soon change, however — and it’s about time.

A widely cited urban myth holds that D.C. law prohibits buildings taller than the Capitol dome. In fact, preserving views of the Capitol and Washington Monument is one of the law’s few virtues, but the height restriction is actually the result of some old-fashioned NIMBYism. Height restrictions were first approved by Congress in 1899 in response to neighbors’ complaints about construction of a 160-foot-tall apartment building. In 1910, Congress passed the Height of Buildings Act, which established that the height of a building on a commercial street cannot exceed the width of the street by more than 20 feet and cannot exceed 130 feet overall. As a result, the tallest office and apartment buildings downtown are typically not more than 12 stories.

As demand to live and work in Washington has risen in recent years, after decades of decline, academics and journalists who favor smart growth have started to examine the law’s unintended consequences. Critics include Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, and Ryan Avent of The Economist. The Height Act has also come under critical scrutiny in The Atlantic Cities, Greater Greater Washington, and Washington City Paper, which called for repealing the law in a 2010 cover story. On Nov. 8, D.C.’s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, requested a study of the Height Act’s costs and benefits.

The case against the law is mostly one of straightforward economics. If you limit the supply of something, including space, you will increase its price. D.C. is one of the most expensive cities in the country for housing and hotel rooms. Downtown D.C. has the second highest average rental price for office space in the U.S., after Midtown Manhattan. Consequently, residential and commercial development has been dispersed across the D.C. region, rather than being concentrated in the downtown core. Translation: The Height Act causes sprawl.

Cross the Potomac River from Washington to Arlington, Va., and you will see a mass of high-rise office and apartment towers. Some of the tenants may be looking for the commanding views of a 30th story window, but for the most part, they’re just looking for cheaper rents than they can find in D.C. proper. And if you care about minimizing car travel and greenhouse gas emissions, that’s bad.

Even though Arlington has a metro line, it is not as environmentally efficient a place to locate offices as downtown D.C. In Washington’s hub-and-spoke mass transit system, downtown is the hub and Arlington is one of many spokes. That means commuters to Arlington from other spokes in the region face a much longer journey by mass transit than by driving. The result? Wasted time, more cars on the road, and more people with an incentive to live out in the Virginia suburbs, closer to their offices.

It gets worse than Arlington. Tyson’s Corner, Va., is a massive exurban edge city of high-rise offices and shopping malls the size of football stadiums, and the Metro does not go there at all. As Yglesias writes, “[T]he existing regional transportation infrastructure already goes downtown and we should be maximizing the value of that infrastructure.”

In the city itself, high rents for housing and offices are not the Height Act’s only drawback. It may even be to blame for downtown D.C.’s notoriously mediocre and uninspiring architecture. And a 2009 M.I.T. master’s thesis, reported in Washington City Paper, found that the law “puts a damper on the kind of commercial vitality that comes with residential density.” By nightfall, its restaurants and stores are mostly closed, due to lack of demand.

So why would D.C. want to keep the height restrictions around? In a word: nostalgia.

Last week, NRDC’s prolific urbanist writer (and sometime Grist contributor) Kaid Benfield penned “The Urbanist Case for Keeping D.C.’s Height Restrictions.” Benfield, who has lived in D.C. for several decades, argues that the district’s character is inextricably tied to its low-rise residential neighborhoods and views of landmarks. “The importance of Washington’s vistas and distinctiveness should not be underestimated,” he writes.

But the height restriction can cause the city to lose its identity in other ways. Lydia DePillis, writing in Washington City Paper, says that the MIT study showed that “[The Height Act] also puts more development pressure on older buildings — when you can’t build up, you demolish buildings in desirable areas that are shorter than they’re allowed to be, even if they’re still perfectly good structures.”

D.C. is also seeing massive out-migration of African-Americans, who long made up a majority of District residents, due to rising housing prices. If the height restrictions aren’t lifted, the cost of living will continue to go up, and D.C. could lose much of its diversity. “If D.C. grows too affluent, providing for a luxury market but not the density that makes low-income housing possible, too, then it won’t be the District anymore,” writes Kriston Capps in Architect magazine.

Benfield claims that taller buildings would not increase affordability. “If affordability were closely related to building height and density, New York City and San Francisco would be the two most affordable big cities in America,” he writes. He is getting causality backwards. New York and San Francisco have tall buildings because the high demand to locate there has driven up prices to the point that it is profitable to build upwards. They are still expensive because there are not enough tall buildings, or not enough land left on which to build them.

To prove that D.C. has not lost economic growth due to the Height Act, Benfield writes, “Washington is the richest and best-educated metro area in America.” But the problem with D.C.’s height restriction is not that it necessarily drives economic activity to other regions, it’s that it clearly drives people and jobs to the suburbs. D.C.’s suburbs are much richer than the city itself.

Benfield is right to note the slight perversity of urbanists attacking already dense cities such as New York and D.C. for not being even denser still, when by far the bigger environmental problem is much lower density in most suburbs and Sunbelt cities. But none of this is a compelling enough reason to keep the height restrictions entirely in place.

The Height Act is an outdated blunt instrument — and anyway, Congress need not dictate to D.C. how tall its buildings may be. Let the residents of the District, through the democratic process, determine the tradeoff between being able to see the Capitol from their roof and the cheaper rents and greater tax revenues that lifting the height restrictions would bring.

So it was with considerable amusement that I heard that Newt Gingrich inveighed again last Friday against “elites” in Manhattan who live in high rises and “ride the subway.” As every New Yorker knows, the measure of true privilege is being centrally located and flush enough that you never have to depend on the loud, dirty, unreliable mass transit system. If you live in an outer borough, it can be difficult to find a cab, or one that is willing to take you where you want to go. And the cost of cabbing everywhere would be ruinous for all but the very wealthy.

Of course, many people who are objectively rich and arguably elite take the subway in New York. But while Gingrich views this as a sign of moral decrepitude, it is part of what makes the city so great. The kind of elites Gingrich prefers — the sort who live in suburban Atlanta and get into an Escalade every time they leave the house — rarely come into contact with the less fortunate. If you live on Park Avenue, on the other hand, riding the subway is the great equalizer of your life experience. No matter how rich you are, you will suffer the delays and indignities of the subway just like the middle-class and poor riders from the Bronx and Harlem sitting next to you.

Although this doesn’t guarantee with 100 percent certainty that you will develop a more empathetic attitude toward the travails of the less fortunate, it certainly helps. That is presumably one reason that rich New Yorkers are so much more likely to vote for the same candidates as their poor neighbors than are suburbanites of the same means.

And that is what Gingrich finds so offensive about the subway: It breeds liberalism.

As far as he is concerned, universal means of transportation are no doubt just the beginning of a slippery slope toward universal health insurance. The fact that pooling our collective transportation budgets in the form of a subway system makes traveling vastly cheaper for individuals and society as a whole — much like, say, Canada’s national health insurance — is of little interest to demagogues who want to keep society divided along racial and cultural lines.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives apparently feel the same way. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), who chairs the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, recently introduced a proposal for the long overdue reauthorization of the Surface Transportation law. Much like Gingrich’s nonsensical comments, it is driven (pun intended) by suburban identity politics rather than rational policy analysis. It would, as Greg Hanscom writes, “cut all designated funding for bike and pedestrian infrastructure, the Safe Routes to School program, and grants that have encouraged ‘complete streets’ projects.” In addition, House Speaker John Boehner “proposed killing a longstanding rule that sets aside a portion of the gas tax to fund trains and buses and other public transportation systems.”

A cynic might say that Gingrich, who has based his campaign largely on an appeal to the racial and cultural resentments of older white suburbanites, knows perfectly well that elites are not the only people riding the subway. In South Carolina last month, he invoked “elites in New York and Washington,” who “live in high-rise apartment buildings writing for fancy newspapers in the middle of town after they ride the metro,” he may have been also playing to the fearful image of blacks and Latinos that “New York” and “subway” conjures in the minds of his supporters.

His imagery is outdated, if not a little offensive. Back in the 1990s, when Gingrich was last relevant, “media elites” who resided in New York City were concentrated in Manhattan. In recent years they’ve become more dispersed into the outer-boroughs. Today, Manhattan is home to a good number of hedge fund managers, whose effective tax rate Gingrich wants to cut to zero by eliminating the capital gains tax.

Next time Gingrich wants to raise the specter of liberal intellectuals he might want to name-check the outer-borough neighborhoods of Fort Greene or Astoria. But if he wants to call out the real elitists, he should look at his supporters who live in detached houses in segregated suburbs and drive everywhere, instead of making nonsensical jabs at the people riding the subway.