Speaking of density

This is a couple paragraphs from a paper that David Rusk wrote in a long study of New Orleans in 1999.

New Orleans must become more densely developed. Higher density residential communities are not the enemy, but the key to a high quality of urban life. (It is the high density of poverty that destroys the livability of city neighborhoods.)

Many of the country’s best urban neighborhoods are relatively high density. Examples that I myself have experienced include Old Town Alexandria (8,000 residents per square mile), Historic Annapolis (9,000), Central West End in St. Louis (10,500), Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill (12,000) and Georgetown (15,000), and the entire city of San Francisco (16,500). Most of these still have a significant number of low-income households as part of their communities.

New Orleans once had 625,000 residents. It has hollowed out to less than 470,000 residents. At the residential density of an Old Town Alexandria or Historic Annapolis, the city of New Orleans would be home to 700,000 to 800,000 people – a vibrant, exciting, cosmopolitan community, building on its unique heritage to achieve an even more commanding position as a special place within American society.
_________
Someone made the point that overall density figures for San Francisco are misleading, because the industrial areas have little population, so that density in attractive neighborhoods is actually higher than these figures.