In his Times blog, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser discusses the question of why New York housing prices have fallen relatively little recently compared to other cities around the country.

The statistics are pretty interesting.

Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.

Why is New York doing better than other cities? Glaeser’s answer is that the very nature of New York makes it resilient.

The secret of New York’s post-1970 reinvention was that smart people, who knew each other and learned from each, innovated in ways that made billions in financial services. The same density that once served to get hogsheads onto clipper ships served to spread ideas.

New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.

This is interesting enough, and optimistic as well. But is it convincing? Certainly many New Yorkers would not feel so bullish about the city’s financial services industry, which may have paid for much of the city’s recent boom but is now responsible for many if not most of its current problems.

I’m sure it’s true that the concentration of people in New York is a great asset for the city. Manhattan in particular is an incredibly competitive place, and as a result the people who succed here tend to be the best in their fields.

But does all this explain why housing prices haven’t dropped? Glaeser says that buyers remain optimistic about the future of the city, and so they are propping up prices. Maybe. I tend to think of more mundane explanations: People who can’t believe that their apartments have plunged so much in value that they’re simply refusing to sell, for example, or simply a general decline in buying and selling—in hard times, people don’t move as much.

Perhaps on a micro level, Glaeser is right that people are optimistic about New York’s future; we’re certainly no Detroit. But I don’t think his piece truly satisfies the question of why housing prices here haven’t fallen further than they have.