Call it the Ferrari Fallacy – that few people buy Ferraris, so few people must like them. That’s ludicrous, of course. But with more abstract subjects, people are apt to invoke the Ferrari Fallacy. Among urbanists, Joel Kotkin is infamous for this syllogism. As Matthew Yglesias has noted, Kotkin writes constantly about America’s supposed preference for sprawl, while ignoring the regulatory and price structures that make sprawl the only choice for many consumers.

Now Kotkin has found a disciple – Richard Florida.

“Many Americans still want space,” wrote Florida in Friday’s New York Times, citing a survey. “Two-thirds of people born since 1997, including those who live in cities, want to live in single-family suburban homes.”

He’s not entirely wrong. Most Americans would love to have a large house, backyard and garage…and a 15 minute commute, with Central Park on their doorstep. So when confronted with a pie-in-the-sky survey, it’s no surprise that Americans will say they like houses and grass. When money – and jobs and traffic – are no object, we retreat to demands that may as well be fantasy. Preferences without prices are meaningless.

I suspect Florida knows all this. As he himself admits, the price is the problem – and housing prices in cities are inflated by obstruction. If people didn’t like cities, prices wouldn’t be as high as they are. But because prices are high in cities, their population growth remains underwhelming, and Florida is, like Kotkin, misinterpreting this to mean that demand for them is low.

“The much-ballyhooed new age of the city,” he writes, “might be giving way to a great urban stall-out.”

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