In continuing to read Edward Glaeser’s treatise on urban planning in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly, I’ve grown irritated. While my irritation doesn’t run as deeply as my intellectual libido ran yesterday, I have found more than one point of contention.
This guy is an economist and specializes in real estate/urban development. He’s no dummy. However, I take umbrage with this particular sentence: ‘The forest of cranes along Lake Michigan keeps Chicago affordable.’
A collection of cranes, whether you’re discussing the bird or the construction equipment, is called a sedge, not a forest. Forests are for trees, silly kid! And, having just been to Chicago last week I can say this with certainty as well: there was no forest– or sedge– of cranes.
Meanwhile I’ll keep my thoughts to myself about his heartless, hyper-pragmatic dogma that there should be no restrictions whatsoever on development and construction. This man is the antithesis is Jane Jacobs. Maybe he and Donald ‘Egomaniac’ Trump should sit in Trump’s new international hotel in Chicago’s Loop and discuss the glory of money.