It's surprisingly dense given it has had a prohibition on tall buildings since forever. Of course, some buildings are more equal than others and their project went through: tour Montparnasse, some residential projects. If this restriction was removed, I'm pretty sure new developments would resemble dense asian cities and real estate prices would drop. But hey, falling housing prices are bad in political economics, 'mkay ?
Many European cities have height restrictions for buildings within the old city center to preserve the traditional architecture. The financial district just outside the center has no height limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_D%C3%A9fense
NYC and Tokyo are very tall and dense and mor expensive than Seattle which has height limits. You are overlooking the factor of how density begets density.
