The thing to remember about condo towers is: Ultimately, more height means more room for people.

Boston is in the midst of a high-rise condominium development boom, and some things about it are ridiculous. The gauzy artist’s renderings — for instance, a velvety blanket draped over a chaise longue on the balcony of a 60th-floor penthouse at the Millennium Tower. The goofily breathless marketing — “luxury,” “ultra luxury,” “the evolution of luxury residential living.” Oh, and the eye-popping sticker prices approaching $2,900 per square foot.

But there’s also a major upside to all those upscale condo tower developments: Boston, the third-densest big city in the country, is accepting its destiny as a place where lots of people live hundreds of feet above the ground.

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Older Bostonians remember a time when nothing in town was taller than the Custom House Tower. The prototypical 20th-century Boston skyscraper was a corporate office building; the insurance and banking behemoths that ordered up those structures were paragons of boring respectability whose employees drove home to the suburbs in the afternoon. Sure, there were complaints about shadows and wind (and windows falling out and crashing to the ground). But for some reason, high, dense housing sets off alarm bells that buildings full of 8½-by-11 paper do not.

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As residents of one of the more historic US cities, many Bostonians romanticize old European capitals like Paris — all those quaint cafes and intimate streetscapes without any of the tall buildings. But those cafes would not exist if there weren’t lots of Parisians to patronize them; relatively low-slung Paris, not coincidentally, is almost as dense as Manhattan.

Bringing in enough brainpower to feed the local knowledge industries, and enough people to sustain the bustle of city life, means building high into the sky. Living in the middle of everything isn’t for everyone, but the stiff prices condo towers command suggest a strong demand for it.

Because land and labor are expensive, new-construction housing is typically marketed to wealthier residents, and that touches lots of nerves: the ancient New England aversion to garish displays of wealth; the chip-on-the-shoulder class consciousness of James Michael Curley’s Boston; the middle-class economic anxiety of the Elizabeth Warren era. The thought of one percenters up in their glassy aeries, literally looking down on the rest of us, turns each new tower into a provocation.

The emergence of a global elite from iffy authoritarian countries only adds to the tension. The new crop of residential towers might well attract a few Russian and Chinese oligarchs who’d never invest in crazy old brownstones with settling foundations. Of course, if they turn out to be absentee owners, they’ll pay lots of property taxes for public services they don’t use — not a terrible outcome for Boston. And if these plutocrats were planning to move to town anyway, better that they buy up new units than outbid the local finance bros and well-heeled suburban empty nesters for existing ones.

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Homes built for the very rich don’t always stay that way, as the up-and-down history of the Back Bay and South End in the 19th and 20th centuries shows. Especially if Boston lets developers put up a lot of condo towers, some of these buildings may democratize in time. When new supply hits the market, prices of older properties will adjust accordingly.

That’s one reason people in existing towers can be as NIMBYish as anyone else. Residents of the 400-foot-tallHarbor Towers complex want any new construction next door to abide by a 200-foot height limit. Almost as soon as the 33-story Clarendon went up on Stuart Street in the Back Bay in 2013, its inhabitants were fighting a proposed mixed-use tower of similar height a few doors down.

In truth, it’s a good thing Boston’s condo tower boom is arriving later than in some other cities, because it’s clearer which conditions the city should ask developers to meet. For instance, ground-floor retail. Maybe you’ve seen the lifeless rows of beachfront condos lining the Florida coast. They’re upright versions of the gated suburban subdivisions where there’s not so much as a coffee shop. Let’s not replicate that here.

But in the meantime, let’s also reframe the way we talk about residential towers by considering the upside, not just the lost light and obscured views.

Recently, I visited someone living on the 26th floor of Tremont on the Common, which was built in the late 1960s and went condo in the ’80s. Not long ago, I was told, you could look out the window and see the harbor and Fort Point Channel. Residential buildings, such as the Millennium Tower now under construction at Downtown Crossing, increasingly fill up that view.

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But the new view’s great, too: an increasingly inhabited, animated downtown landscape. When those buildings are full, the people in them will make street life pulsate below. Some of those strangers could even end up as your friends.

Sure, we’ll keep wringing our hands about these towers. But in the end, there’s only one direction for Boston to go.

Up.

Dante Ramos is a Boston Globe Op-Ed columnist. Send comments to magazine@globe.com