Density is good and top-down density is usually bad

I agree with almost everything the urbanists say about outcomes and almost nothing about method. The cities people actually love grew incrementally, with thousands of small decisions by people who had to live with the result. The cities people flee were master-planned by someone confident and distant. So when I hear an excellent argument for density delivered as a plan to be imposed, I get nervous, because being right about the endpoint has never been sufficient. The mechanism is the argument, and we keep skipping it.