We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers.
The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency.
Many good cities, like Paris, limit skyscrapers by policy on purpose because it's not actually the best human environment. Good urban environments involve a lot of mid-rise buildings clusters together, not a lot of skyscrapers.
that Roman residential buildings (insulae) maxed out at around 7 or 8 storeys, with 5 or 6 storeys being more common.
One of the reasons for that is that apartment buildings could not include kitchens. Cooking tech was based on using fire to cook and you couldn't build a multi story building with kitchens in every unit because you couldn't put fireplaces in the units.
Poor people in Roman cities bought prepared meals from street vendors. They didn't cook at home.
Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. This article seems to fail to adequately understand the ways in which human habitation and human use drive such things far more than physics, technology and similar.
I have a human need to live among skyscrapers. From the time I was a little kid, my favorite thing to do on a weekend was anything downtown. I found it incredibly depressing when we would go back to our postwar-sprawl house at the end of the day. Later we moved to an older inner-ring suburb, and that was a little better, but only some. Day trips to the nearest proper city would be the highlight of a year. New York was one of the best experiences of an entire childhood. It still boggles the mind that people refer to Manhattan like a cautionary tale. To me it's nirvana.
This obsession never went away. I can't really explain it. Maybe the sensory stimulation, maybe the comforting premise of an active hive of other human life, maybe something else, but it remains as important to me as ever. I think the skyscraper city is a little like the symphony orchestra: it has an object-level aesthetic, but on the meta level it's a celebration of civilization itself.
It is incredibly fortunate that my interest in computers translates to one of the few jobs in America that will pay enough to live in a place like this. By the same token, it's distressing that such places are so precious and so rare.
I shared this feeling when I was young, but a disillusionment with skyscrapers crept in as I increasingly recognized that although they are symbolically prominent and physically dense, they don't operate as communities that integrate in a broader sense. Office districts are ghost towns after commute hours; condo tower residents mostly stay behind their doors. The built infrastructure is reduced to the functional aspect of warehousing people like so many goods, and other types of spaces are found only by leaving the tower, turning walks into commutes. On many levels, they are industrial achievements, equivalents to the factory and railroad. And each of these structures has their beauty, but in all cases, they remind us of ourselves, and not of nature.
A world of steel-glass-concrete is incomplete in this sense, and I now see the appeal of low-rise neighborhoods that can distill a mixture of energies and create lively street scenes, quiet parks, and so forth.
> Office districts are ghost towns after commute hours; condo tower residents mostly stay behind their doors
Don’t blame skyscrapers for bad architecture and urban planning.
I live in a 76-story tower and people are pretty friendly and you say hello by the pool, etc. There’s more community here than in most of the blocks of 4-5-story houses I’ve lived on. You also have the staff around, so even when you are alone you can still say g’day to a few people, which is a big deal for instance in lockdowns.
And because the towers are surrounded by smaller buildings (not everyone can afford to live in the towers) there is plenty of vibrant life out on the street. Arguably more so than in the more spread-out areas, with the exception of Chinatown.
Sure, SF FiDi is an apocalypse after dark, but that’s not about skyscrapers, it’s about cynical and uncaring planners.
I live in a 76-story tower and people are pretty friendly and you say hello by the pool, etc
Admittedly I'm British so my view on things is a bit skewed but I'd definitely call that polite rather than friendly. Here in the UK we say a happy, cheery hello to people even if we actively hate them.
I love in a 44-story building (Warsaw) and people are definitely more friendly than just polite - I know more neighbours after 2 years of living here than in all my previous places of living combined (childhood excluded, I lived in 10-story building in a new neighborhood, and we had a ton of children in my age)
That's just the thing in Eastern Europe, definitely bigger sense of community than on the West. (Born and raised in the "southeast", lived in few eastern countries, as well in several western ones).
I've never felt the sense of community in the northwestern europe like in the (south)east, and I'm fairly engaged in local ongoings.
Maybe that's because condos have windows that only face away from the building. Perhaps if they were built with interior common areas (like a town square) with windows facing them, that would change everything.
That’s an interesting point. In Europe at least a lot of buildings have big courtyards and windows face there. In Germany it’s less desirable to have a view of the street, unless you’re on a really high floor.
I currently am on the 40th with a view away from the building. I am trying to move to the 12th with a view across the facilities (pools mostly, it’s Asia). I’m curious whether that will change how I feel about the building.
We have a ton of those in Europe, and it’s a terrible idea generally - you have way too little privacy, lower floors have little sunlight, but above all - if anyone throws a party, or even has guests on a balcony, everyone else can hear it.
I lived for a year in 12 story apartment block that was U shaped, I lived on the inner part of the U and this was exactly my experience. If anyone of the 72 inner apartments was having a party or just some late night drinks with friends you couldn’t sleep. Happened about 1-2 times a week.
I was surprised that building codes allowed such construction here in the UK as there’s lots of rules about sound insulation between units.
I don't think the privacy would be any more of an issue than it would be if the windows faced the street. That works because the apartment windows are not at eye level, they are a storey up. The ground floor would be shops, a bar, a coffee shop, arcade, etc.
Think town square.
Sunlight could be dealt with by not enclosing all sides of the common area, have the south side be windows to the outside.
>That works because the apartment windows are not at eye level, they are a storey up
But in an enclosed courtyard, there would be apartments across the way at eye level. Though that's solved by scale. With a large enough complex, the courtyard distance isn't much different than apartments across the street.
Are windows that face adjacent buildings (same side of the street) that big of a problem?
They're likely much closer together than any opposing courtyard windows would be.
It's a bit different since you have two separate, not necessarily functionally or aesthetically compatible, structures. But that almost certainly makes it worse than if you were able to design opposing views simultaneously.
I wonder if we could deal with sunlight by using mirror panels on the internal walls. As long as the internal place is not formed of curved walls, it should be fine.
If it is formed of curved walls, it could be a nice place to put a solar-thermal plant.
I've seen enough ghost town courtyards to know they don't change everything. If the building is completely devoid of any sense of community otherwise, the courtyard just feels like being in the spotlight of a bunch of strangers.
I do love courtyards though, and am always a little heartbroken when I visit someone at a place that has one and realize that no one really uses it.
Le Corbusier had a very specific view of towers though.
Tower social housing failed, mostly because it turns out concentrating poverty is a terrible idea, but that would be true if it were towers or two-story houses. And separating uses aggravated the problems by providing less diversity of people who could keep "eyes on the street" active. But none of that is really inherent to tower design.
I guess I don't really look to the building or the street for friends, but it is very nice when I meet people at work or other activities, and it turns out they live only a few buildings away from mine. That happens pretty often, because the chances of any given housing unit being within a few blocks of me is pretty high. Walking to and from dinners and parties is pretty nice. Sometimes I meet people who live in more internally close-knit low rise neighborhoods, and it's a big slog to go and see them.
> condo tower residents mostly stay behind their doors.
Where I grew up, where apartment buildings are very common middle class options, kids often socialised in the common areas - gardens, swimming pool, etc. Where I live now it’s a concern to buy where my daughter can have a nice community of kids to hang out with (we now live in a rented house that has a large common lawn connecting the backs of the block and kids play in this space all day long).
I think I would feel the same if I had grown up in America, because I do find suburban sprawl depressing and from what I've seen in most American cities I've visited, there's hardly any middle ground between that and the skyscrapers. So given that choice, I would greatly prefer the skyscrapers too.
But note that in other places there is plenty of middle ground. I live in a city where most buildings are in the range of 4 to 12 stories (someone actually computed the average height of a building and it's 5.15 stories) and it's enough for streets to be bustling with activity, and for being able to live without a car.
I do like the skyscraper aesthetic, but I also feel that once you go beyond a certain threshold, buildings start becoming soulless, and it also starts becoming harder to have regular, non-luxury shops at the street level due to that space being incredibly scarce, so the level of "boringness" goes up again (although not to the levels of suburbs, of course). So to me, mid-rise buildings (maybe with a few skyscrapers here are an there) are a good equilibrium. YMMV, of course.
I'm not advocating that anyone tear down the skyscrapers that currently exist. But I certainly do not agree with the idea that skyscrapers are the only or even the best solution to the problems we currently have rooted in trying to figure out how to make life work for roughly eight billion humans on planet earth.
Skyscrapers solve several really hard problems. For example, dense sidewalks have higher throughput than city streets or even subways, unfortunately people don’t walk very quickly and most sidewalks see little use. However, the number of places you can walk to directly correlates to building height. So, in effect someone walking surrounded by skyscrapers is doing the equivalent of highway speeds when surrounded by 6 story buildings.
Which is why NYC sidewalks get used so much, they are a very useful form of transportation. Which has positive knock on effects in terms of human health etc.
> However, the number of places you can walk to directly correlates to building height.
Except every floor doesn't have an equal effect? Lower levels and rooftops are going to host the majority of destinations, while mid-levels are most likely to be homes and offices that are adding to the pool of people able to walk to those destinations.
The ground floor of a 6 story building can’t support a full set of shops with just the people inside the building. This shows up as cities like Paris having clusters of destinations and then seemingly dead space streets filled with buildings only residents visit. It can still be “walkable”, but you’re walking farther with fewer destinations within walking distance.
It’s a basic economic reality is if a restaurant needs X customers to be viable a city will have some constant * population/X restaurants. Be they in 5 story buildings or 50.
A restaurant's capacity isn't limited to the amount of customers that make it viable. There can be enough population to support two restaurants, but if the first restaurant has the capacity to serve them all and the customers prefer it, only one of them will actually survive.
So once you hit the point where the foot traffic retail is all viable, there's a stretch where there's not a real need for new businesses and any new competitors would face a large disadvantage from location.
Not that there aren't ways to design around that to make very high density areas viable, but it's not a simple line graph correlation.
Businesses can always acquire new customers by diversifying away from what the competition is providing. This means that larger markets can inherently "support" a higher variety - there simply isn't a point where new business must inherently fail. This is not a new observation; it has been made repeatedly since ancient times.
But it's going to take a whole hell of a lot of special sauce to survive when you're the first random mid-level restaurant competing against places that can attract customers through line of sight.
You can't simplify away the varying value of certain land for certain uses and still pretend you're doing economics.
Clearly I overly simplified things, but the point was doubling a cities population should roughly double the number of restaurants. That doesn’t hold for towns, but you see multiple McDonalds in the same city because being the closest McDonalds is a useful difference. Similarly at scale you see more specialization such as Thai vs Chinese vs Pho etc etc.
Add cost and you can have almost unlimited density without inherently limiting the number of restaurants much like how a mall can have 100 stores all selling different kinds of clothing.
It's important to note that this does not just apply to retail business, but to jobs and economic/social interactions of all kinds. Don't get me wrong, increased density is expensive all other things being equal, which is why the highest density can only be sustained in but a few very unusual places. But this is the stuff that actual agglomeration dynamics are driven by.
I can see how walking between buildings and then riding elevators is a good local maximum, but I wonder if there’s another local maximum where you drive between buildings but climb stairs once you get to them.
If nothing else, skyscrapers are expensive; I don't think they would ever pencil out as the default mode of housing for most people. The 5-story model you talked about is pretty good - I went to college in a neighborhood like that - and that's what I'd like to see displace the suburbs for the greatest number of people in economically unspectacular places.
Still, I think it's important to have skyscraper cores and we should build them closer to the economic limits than the present legal limits.
There is no shortage of space for people. Only a shortage of places people actually want to live. Everyone flocks to mega-cities because that's where the jobs are.
Are you me? :) Glad to hear someone else with the exact same viewpoint.
Ever since I was a little kid I dreamed of living in a city with skyscrapers, and my partner's demand that we move out to the suburbs nearly ended our relationship.
But it did help me discover that the most important thing for me was walkability. I could compromise on the highrise living, but we moved to a car-dependent neighborhood, and that's the part I despised most, and it significantly negatively affected my physical health, and thus then my mental health. I strongly believe that car-dependent suburbs are just plain awful.
In the end, money cured it for the most part. We rented a small studio pied-à-terre downtown and would spend a couple days there a week. We actually didn't do this for too long because it wasn't long until Covid hit and downtown basically died, so we didn't renew our lease. Not sure what's next.
Sounds like a Russel's conjugation [0]. When you're banning the buildings I like it is because of "human needs," when I say I like them it is just a "want."
I do think mountains give a similar effect, having interesting variations in height and a sense of being "walled in." I reliably feel like crap at elevation though.
I had exactly opposite feeling when, at 30, I visited Manhattan. The downtown (from the street level) was just depressing, all these skyscraper walls around you. Then subway (which looks like a cellar, I couldn't find the station entrance despite looking at it) to 103rd street where I had hostel, not much better feeling with dense high-rise appartments. I had to take a quick walk into central park to recuperate, although it was not recommended to stay after dark there.
I wouldn't want to live there. And mind you, I was born in the center of Prague's Jizni mesto, which is a district designed in the 70s by communist government (to solve a housing crisis), build with cookie-cutter, 8-12 store, grey and boxy appartment buildings. Certainly not ideal urbanistically, very little commercial zoning, but still quite a bit of greenery (and from the 6th floor, we can actually view about 30 km to the countryside). In fact, some claim there was more space dedicated to greenery when it was built than in modern capitalist "luxury residential" developments.
Do you really? There are lots of cities outside the US with 6-story or 12-story buildings that are very vibrant. We don't really need skyscrapers for that.
It's clearly a personal preference. Many people adore old historical districts of Europe, dream of living in Paris or Florence. Some can't stand the buzz of the city and prefer to have a place in the countryside. Some just like modern tall metal and glass buildings.
[1] “the study found that the CO2 intensity (tons of CO2 emissions per dollar of output) of lumber production is about 20 percent less than that of fabricated metal products, under 50 percent that of iron and steel, and under 25 percent that of cement. In addition, shifting construction toward lumber products lowers the GDP cost of meeting the emissions cap by approximately $500 million and reduces the carbon price.”
This is an oversimplification. Building lower you get lower population density, and need to spend way more co2 on transportation and infrastructure.
If you’re comparing a 4-story building made of wood compared to comcrete then sure it has less emissions. But if you want to build four 4-story wood instead of one 16-story concrete, it’s not mecessarily so.
Not necessarily. One of the problems with high density is how to handle peak loads, like for rush hour.
There's a limit to how many people can be on a metro, grocery store, etc. There's also a hard limit on how much you can scale the infrastructure before residents start choosing transportation options, that make the issue worse (like cars).
The infrastructure also have to support a significant increase in garbage creation and resupplies for stores. If one of the main traffic arteries are blocked, the spillover to alternative routes might exceed the capacity and create delays, which are incredibly expensive.
A lower density neighborhood, might not use the infrastructure as close to its maximum capacity on a day to day basis, but that creates redundancy for when a road is closed for maintenance and significantly lowers the risk of expensive delays.
As with everything, there's several trade-offs between the options, and I think it's hard to give a definitive answer on what has the lowest emission, etc in a cradle to grave analysis. My personal preference is to take all such estimates with a significant "milage may vary" disclaimer
IMHO getting to 50-75 inhabitants per hectare, which gives <15GJ/person/year (where most EU cities are at), is a good place to aim for. Once you're at 100ppl/ha then there's not much improvement going to 125, 200, or more.
A moderate spread of six story buildings might be optimal for energy usage of just the buildings, but total energy usage/environmental impact are also shaped by other human factors for where people want and need to live and work...eg without tall buildings in Manhattan, you would get a lot of extra energy expended in more people commuting back and forth from further distances. And the a high density of people makes public transit even more viable which brings further environmental and health benefits.
That said, I do agree that there are only a few areas in the country where the main barrier to an ideal density is allowing more skyscrapers instead of mid-rises. Manhattan north of the financial district and south of midtown is one such area, parts of SF are another. But many, many more cities would see more benefits of moving from low density single-family homes and detached lots to mid-rises.
Yeah, I agree that there's too much focus on highrises as a fix our housing supply. The units you get by replacing a block of detached homes with mid-rise apartments add up fast.
Side-note: Learning about one-plus-fives was one of those "learning to see the lines of code in the Matrix" moments. They're everywhere. In my experience, for all their shine and gloss, most of them kind of suck. But kinda crappy housing is better than no housing.
Another issue is that a lot of the mid-rise apartments are built in complexes (at least in the US) that segregate the apartment from the rest of the city. You get density but no community. There’s no sense of place.
The most dystopian version of this I've seen if my friend's old apartment outside San Diego. It was just a strip of land between two freeways with an exit, a McDonald's, Starbucks, and Food 4 Less. And the apartment complex. And you had to cross the single light on the strip of street between offramp and onramp to get to the latter two.
30 stories is a fairly hard limit in China because concrete construction techniques with low skilled labor don’t scale much beyond that (otherwise costs increase and they have to use steel/skilled engineers and construction workers). Given that these techniques are exported to many Asian and middle eastern countries (via Indian or Chinese construction firms and migrant workers), you have a whole continent of cities filled with these ~30 story apartment blocks. But then the argument would be for not going above 30 stories because of the costs involved.
I get the feeling that six story limits would only work for the developed west.
> We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers.
¿Por qué no los dos? Skyscrapers for the highly productive business downtown where they can actually bring increased density compared to mid-rise buildings, and mid-rises for the rest of the city. You're right that skyscrapers are not "the best human environment" in any general sense; they're an adaptive response to very special conditions, that are generally not found outside the places where skyscrapers are common.
Skyscrapers are actually counterproductive for things like energy efficiency. I've already said that.
That's why not both in my opinion as someone actively trying to support healthy development of smaller towns that have often been left behind in the US in recent decades. There has been longstanding trend of people moving to big cities because that's where the jobs are, so we emphasize creating better infrastructure in big cities and further densifying big cities, make for a vicious cycle.
If we had more mid-rise density in smaller towns, we could have more thriving small towns and we wouldn't have to choose between overpriced, overly dense big cities or safe, small cheap and boring small towns that lack jobs, lack amenities etc.
We could have decent quality of life for more people generally.
Densification in big cities is a significant source of value. I'm not aware of any evidence that it's occurring at the expense of formerly thriving small towns. It's mostly the "boring" suburbs and exurbs that are losing value, but those developments have always lacked jobs and amenities. It's inherent to the model, you can't fix them without substantially changing their very nature.
Alright, well I don't care about nebulous concepts like "social fabric" and neither do a lot of other people.
Way more people would move to big cities if it was affordable, and these people's wishes should be supported.
Almost by definition, this is true, as if everyone did not want to move to the city, then prices would be lower.
This romanticism for making everyone live in small towns is not something that most people support, given that way more people would leave small towns if they could.
I don't care about nebulous concepts like "social fabric" and neither do a lot of other people.
This is likely true. And yet people bitch plenty about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment of the good life in the downtown areas of big cities.
In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric and have less feces, discarded needles and the like or you can not care and see people moving out of cities like San Francisco because they are going to hell as all the poor people ruin it for the upper classes who still don't care about those people but hate stepping over the mess.
How would having more people live in rural or small towns reduce homelessness, instead of just dispersing it?
To me social fabric in this context of decaying small towns has a negative connotation that in my mind it reads as a reversion to white, sis, straight, nuclear families as the idea of what America is. And it's used that way by political campaigns as well to play on fears, racism, and us/them to win votes.
Most people in the U.S. are one or more of "white, cis, straight". What often passes for 'diversity' in some places is very much the exception, not the rule.
Non-hispanic white is only 57% right now and declining. a ton of cities are white minority - kind of to the point about this picture of past american rural ideals are out of date.
Out LGTBQ is somewhere approaching 5% across all generations. Key word out.
Gen Z are ~15% out. I wouldn't be surprised if the true non-cis/non-straight % is closer to 20%.
So that probably puts cis white in the slight minority and shrinking.
And I'm not sure what 'passes' means I will try to use HN rule of benefit of the doubt
The 'nebulous' bit referenced in parent comment is your claim that hyperdensity is uniformly detrimental to the social fabric. Do you think there is less of a meaningful social fabric in the most dense neighborhoods of NYC or Tokyo, compared to the average American suburb? There will always be people who opt to live in smaller towns, but those simply cannot sustain the sheer level of density that big city cores can.
> about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment
> In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric
Actually there was the other solution. The other solution compared to yours of "make people live in the small towns.", is instead "Make lots of tall skyscapers, so that big cities are affordable".
If we lower the costs of big cities (By making lots and lots of supply, including tall skyscapers), then prices are lower for those who need them, and more people can live here, and take advantage of the big cities, and it can also benefit the poor by actually making it possible for them to live here, instead of on the streets.
We don't have to force out the poor from the big cities. Instead we can make the big cities affordable to live in, with lots and lots of tall skyscrapers.
> see people moving out of cities like San Francisco
Actually, you are the one who is trying to get people to move out of the big cities. I want there to be more supply for everyone, in these big cities, with more skyscapers.
Skyscrapers are inherently expensive to build, so building more skyscrapers isn't likely to make urban cores affordable for the types of folks who wind up homeless.
I know a lot about homelessness. I spent nearly six years homeless and before that had a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy and I still run several blogs on the topic, though I update them less than I used to as my focus has shifted to trying to solve the housing shortage that is a root cause of homelessness in the US.
> so building more skyscrapers isn't likely to make urban cores affordable for the types of folks who wind up homeless.
Yes it will. Think of a skyscaper like a Yuppie containment center. For every high end apartment that exists, a Yuppie is no longer filling up an apartment in the mission, that very well could be afforable if they weren't currently full of yuppies.
There are lots of yuppies who would love to live in those skyscapers, and if we build more of them, then those people will no longer be taking away afforable housing from other people who need it.
Also, historically, this is how housing has worked. Previously high end apartments, become low end, over time, as the rich move out of those places, into other, newer apartments.
> Skyscrapers are inherently expensive to build
Doesn't matter. Because the goal is to get wealthy individuals, out of the existing apartments. The poor aren't forced to live in those skyscapers, but if the skyscapers exist, then there is less competition for the lower end of the market.
Building more housing generally is good and does bring down rents.
It still will not make big cities and skyscrapers in specific affordable for the types of people who end up homeless.
Having been homeless and spoken to many homeless and so forth, I think we need some housing stock below $600/month in rent that will take households of up to three people. Skyscrapers are unlikely to be a means to provide housing at that price point, though they can be found sometimes in older low to mid-rise buildings.
More skyscrapers may make downtowns more affordable for more middle class types who are currently forced out to the suburbs. They are unlikely to serve the types of people at high risk of homelessness, either directly or indirectly.
There comes a point past which you simply can't lower the rent any further if your carrying costs are simply too high.
The point of skyscrapers isn't that they provide the affordable housing. It's that they provide a lot of medium price housing so there is lower demand for housing in smaller buildings.
The biggest problem with housing in big cities is that there isn't enough of it. When that is the case, the most important thing is putting more in. Even if the housing you put in is expensive, as long as it is dense, it will lower housing prices for other places because there is less competition.
At the risk of being accused of self promotion, a quote from one of my projects:
At least one study suggests that four-story buildings are the sweet spot for minimizing energy usage. Though some people speculate that additional research will find that optimal height for minimizing carbon footprint will prove to be in the 6- to 12-story range, there is general agreement that very tall buildings are an energy burden to be avoided if we want to get climate change under control.
One of the things that is part of my mental model is that poor people are frequently people with serious health problems and our built environment is part of what fosters that.
I'm dirt poor and not at my best tonight because of that. This late in the month I'm often broke as is the case currently. It's a very stressful way to live and it compounds problems.
I have lived without a car for more than a decade which is challenging in the US. Our built environment requires a lot of Americans to own a car so they can get to work and get groceries and what not. We make it very difficult to make your life work without a car.
We also have an obesity epidemic which means a lot of people suffering from preventable health problems. That epidemic is rooted in our built environment and the fact that it's so hard to walk anywhere.
It's also hard to walk anywhere because of pollution and extremes of weather rooted in climate change. In my mind, all these things are very clearly tied together.
But it's always challenging to express that effectively, more so when I am in poor health and dirt poor and can't seem to solve that.
The poorest people in the US are people like me. And I have gotten off a bunch of prescription drugs in part by living without a car for a lot of years. But I get openly attacked and dismissed anytime I try to talk about that. I get told I'm making that up and a liar and yadda.
I am not for building more skyscrapers, certainly not for what the article in question advocates of making them even taller.
The myriad problems the US has are rooted in our not human scaled, not human friendly built environment. This includes issues like poor air quality, lack of opportunity to get exercise as a consequence of running errands on foot and many other issues.
I think it's probably time for me to step away from this discussion. I don't know how to keep having it and comply with unstated expectations that my welfare is not important, my experiences are not real and cannot be expressed etc. That's not something I can politely deal with at the moment.
You are not listening to what anyone else is saying.
If there are more skyscrapers, then the yuppies will not live in those 600$ a month housing, and that housing will be available for the people who need it.
Thats the point.
All those low income housing that you want, will no longer be filled with yuppies who would otherwise gentrify an area.
If you read this post, people specifically quote or address the idea, of yuppies no longer living in those cheaping housing, because they are no in the skyscapers, and therefore the lower priced housing is available to others.
Because you have ignored or dodged this idea, like 3 times now.
I'm with you. I think there's enough evidence that skyscrapers aren't a good energy/density optimum; skyscrapers are relatively rare outside of North America. Very high, sustainable densities can be achieved with 4--6 stories buildings. I lived in Madrid in what was considered a poor neighborhood. It's density was three times that of what I have now in Seattle. There were more amenities within reach than I've ever had in my life. I was able to get fresh food on the daily. Not a single skyscraper in sight.
> Having been homeless and spoken to many homeless and so forth, I think we need some housing stock below $600/month in rent that will take households of up to three people. Skyscrapers are unlikely to be a means to provide housing at that price point, though they can be found sometimes in older low to mid-rise buildings.
Not they allow it in the west due to health/fire concerns, but the sub basements of apartment blocks in China have been converted into very cheap rooms for rent. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_tribe
One reason that you don’t have so many homeless in China is that the bottom on housing standards is a lot lower. Again, something that we can’t really replicate in the west.
> It still will not make big cities and skyscrapers in specific affordable for the types of people who end up homeless.
It will make the former places, that those yuppies were gentrifying, more affordable. Because for every skyscraper apartment, that is filled with a yuppy, that is one less house in the mission, being gentrified by a yuppie, which is now available for someone else to live there.
> for more middle class types
Then those middle income types will no longer be living in some other place, that is now available for someone of lower income.
It frees up their former place that they were living before, for a lower income resident.
I think you're missing a golden opportunity here. You can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities, with ultra high-speed rail, blazing-fast internet, free housing, the works. Then we can tear down the cities, towns, and suburbs they moved out of, establish a bunch of small towns with lots of forest and prairie, and produce goods for them to consume, on the condition that they stay in their megacities.
It would be like a Morlock/Eloi situation, except that we'll all be Morlocks. They'll do the missile defense systems and the smartphone OS's, and I'll grow the corn and mine the rare earth minerals. We can all even adopt a bicameral government, one that governs areas of population density above a certain value and one that governs areas below a certain value.
> you can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities
So, funnily enough, this is actually a similar argument that I often make. I believe it benefits everyone, if yuppies like myself, get what we want with Tokyo megacities, so that we don't cause all these problems with the rest of society, with our high income, driving up prices of everything around us.
Someone who described this very well, was noahpinion. He called this strategy, the Yuppie Containment Protocol. Society creates "Gentrification Containment Units", so that we the Yuppies don't cause this horrible harm, of extra income and wealth, hurting everyone else.
Us yuppies, bringing in demand for gentrified coffee shops, fancy skyscapers, and upscale restaurants drives out existing residents. It is better to just give us a couple megacities somewhere, so our horrible terrible income and wealth, and willingness to spend it on the economy doesn't hurt those gentrification vulnerable people.
Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places, then I guess it would only be people who actually want to live in that area or work these jobs.
If nobody wants these jobs, because cost of living is high in those areas, then wages would have to increase to attract people who want to work there.
People would not be forced to live there, because of all those extra empty homes in other cities, that the yuppies moved out of.
>Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places
That's the other weird assumption. My tiny-ass hometown has rents on par with San Francisco right now, because there are apparently enough high-earners who can now work remotely and want to live in a little mountain town.
The vast majority of the world has cheaper rents than SF. Its simply a numbers game.
Yes, I am sure you can find a couple people, who would move from a more expensive location, but that is a silly thing to bring up, as some counter example, when there are a lot more places that are cheaper, which people could move from.
So yes, it is a very reasonable assumption, to say that if someone moves to SF, that most of those people, are moving out of cheaper cost of living areas, because that is how stats work.
And anyway, maybe those mountain towns would be cheaper, if those yuppies were living in SF instead. So both points support me, even in the case of a yuppie coming from an expensive mountain town, moving to SF.
I'm not saying that people are moving from more expensive mountain town to the city, I'm saying that having wealth does not automatically make you want to move to an urban environment.
Especially since the sort of jobs that are starting to move to be location-independent pay better than the sort of low level in-person work that keeps a town or city running.
Developing urban centers to hold more people definitely frees up space in non-urban areas, but it's not a yuppie vs low class thing. There will always be rich people who want country living, and a working class who enjoy (and are necessary to support) city life.
> Developing urban centers to hold more people definitely frees up space in non-urban areas
Great. So you agree completely with my main point here, and your only disagreements seems to be semantic or irrelevant to that main point.
As long as you agree with the statement you that just made, then I can confidently say you have zero, or at least very little disagreement with what I was intending on communicating.
Perhaps high-earning, artisanal baristas who specialize in getting the most out of perfectly-roasted-that-morning civet-excrement-extracted coffee beans? While I also advocate ultra-high-density (Tokyo is a piker compared to #1 density Manila) cities, I freely admit that rentier dynamics in those settings in capitalist contexts remains an unsatisfactorily-addressed problem, and service workers get hit especially hard.
It was a story where the subtext was "And after you rich assholes have become helplessly dependent on your servants, the servants will take over the world and eat the rich because you people are becoming sheeple."
I have difficulty seeing any world where the goal is Morlocks and Eloi as some kind of positive thing to shoot for as a goal. Personally, I would like to see a world where fewer people have reason to bitterly suggest that we should eat the rich.
Perhaps my sentence structure wasn't clear enough; I mean "we'll all be Morlocks", in that the cities shall serve the non-cities, and vice versa. You can't have a functioning nation of all urban or all small-town.
Densification doesn't require skyscrapers. Istanbul and Paris are denser than any American city and they're mostly filled with midrises packed closely together with few vacant lots in between. Dubai should not be our model for a sustainable city.
> Skyscrapers are actually counterproductive for things like energy efficiency. I've already said that.
Sure, but who cares? Air conditioning is counterproductive for energy efficiency too. We have it anyway because the whole point of air conditioning is to spend energy making ourselves better off. If we want to, we can also spend energy making ourselves better off via skyscrapers.
Massive cities are a destined trend under free market and Matthew effect.
Skyscrapers are one of the solutions to massive cities, the others I can think of:
* Lots of cars
* Reduce overall population
* A powerful government that controls a lot and does city planning
* A religion system to make people "do things for the greater good"
you may not what any of them either.
You can propose other solutions as well, feel free.
Skyscrapers are not just inefficient for their own sake. They harm the city.
Businesses that would otherwise be scattered around the city giving their employees a chance to live near them are concentrated in a small region core.
Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint.
Its far better to have mix use six-eight story buildings.
I've lived my whole life in two different metropolitan areas: Chicago and Los Angeles. The former has most of its businesses in or near the Loop, the downtown area.¹ The latter has them more scattered like you argue in favor of.
I find with businesses concentrated, it's much easier to make decisions about housing. In Los Angeles, it was difficult to predict where my next job might be. It could be downtown, it could be Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, the valley, Pasadena, Orange County, etc. I could face a 90 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to get to work. Even if I didn't change jobs, a company might move from one side of L.A. to the other (and this did happen to both my wife and me while we lived in L.A. although her location change was less dramatic than mine). Dispersed job centers often meant passing up on jobs because the location was inconvenient.
In contrast, in Chicago, the key thing is being able to get to downtown reasonably quickly by public transportation (or, when I was single, I had an apartment that allowed me to easily bike or walk to and from the Loop if I so chose and the weather wasn't awful). One thing I noticed was that in the 90s, many tech companies were located in those outer suburbs and living anywhere but near downtown made commuting challenging. In contrast, since I moved back to Chicago 11 years ago, almost all tech jobs are downtown, which seems a likely consequence of the fact that being close to competitors makes it easier to find employees.
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1. There are, of course, bits of exceptions to his with some scattered business areas in some of the suburbs, most notable Oak Brook, Evanston and Schaumburg being the primary examples in my experience.
Understanding and sympathising with this viewpoint, the issue is far more one of urban planning and transit than it is of structure height per se.
San Francisco hasn't been known for its soaring towers (though recently the leaning sort are making headlines), but it is centralised and well-served by transit both within the city and from surrounding communities. To this extent, it resembles Chicago.
At the same time, the Bay Area as a whole strongly resembles Los Angeles, with various tech hubs ranging from San Jose to San Francisco, and including Sunnyvale, Fremont, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park Redwood City, and Oakland. If you find yourself job hopping between these spots, commutes get long fast, and there's no one best place to live.
Chicago was built around rail with both the urban CTA and regional Metra rail service. Suburbs first emerged as points on spokes radiating out from downtown. Those have since filled in considerably, and inter-suburban commutes are both real and every much as horrible a mess as you'd imagine them to be.
Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. Absent the constraints of terrain, what defines Los Angeles is a grid-pattern of both streets and freeways. Whilst Chicago does have a street grid, that grid does not define the city in the same way Los Angeles does.
If LA had instead opted to build distributed clusters of both high-rise (office/commercial) and low-rise (residential) towers, on a hub-and-spoke transit system, it might offer a far more reasonable set of commute and living options. There's no strict need for towers, so much as there is for connections between them.
Arguably, another element that defines much of Chicago is its greystone and bungalow residential styles. These don't reach the density of 5--6 story apartment construction typical of Europe, but are far denser than the predominantly single-story fully-separated housing of the Los Angeles area. As with elsewhere, density makes transit service, whether bus or rail, far more viable.
Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it.
LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere.
LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic.
I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.
Water absolutely shaped Los Angeles's development, and also explains why there are few similarly-scaled cities anywhere near it (San Diego being the principle exception). Los Angeles's watershed extends 1,500 miles eastward, to the front-range of the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River.
That said, Chicago formed as a transportation hub, first based on the Great Lakes and rivers (the Des Plaines connects to the Mississipi), providing a transit point between the middle of the US, from Minneapolis to New Orleans and via the Missouri and Ohio river systems about 2/3 of the continent, to the East Coast via the St. Lawrence Seaway and Erie Canal.
Railroads were built to outlying suburbs by 1850, at which time there were no automobiles at all. Chicago's population as of 1900 exceeded 1 million. Remember that mass adoption of the automobile in the US only began in 1901 with Ford's Model T, and wasn't substantial for another two to three decades.
Los Angeles by contrast had no natural harbour (the San Pedro breakwater was completed in 1910), was largely a ranching and orchard region through the early 20th century, and was by far secondary to San Francisco in importance to California until 1906, the year of the Great Earthquake and Fire.
Following that event, with increased oil exploration in Los Angeles (there remain many operating wells within the city itself), and especially growth during WWII, Los Angeles eventually grew. But it had only 100,000 souls in 1900, surpassing 1 million in 1930, at which point automobile use was strongly established. The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy put an end to what public transit remained from 1938--1950.
Chicago's suburban commuter rail was spared by virtue of the fact that it uses freight rail rights-of-way, which couldn't be dismantled (though some lines did fold, especially after the Interstate Highway System was built). Chicago's El similarly survived though I'm not familiar with the specific history.
Los Angeles practically already is distributed clusters! That's what makes is unusual compared to most cities, that there is a Downtown LA, but it is merely one of many clusters of economic activity, each with their own downtown area.
And they are reasonably well-connected, certainly by freeways (which are not grid-based), but increasingly so by mass transit; LA had a deservingly bad reputation for mass transit in the past, but it has made unimaginably large strides forward. On top of that, the bus system is vast and fills in the gaps where rail does not go.
My last experience with LA transit was finding a very convenient train to go over and hang out in Santa Monica for a day of that trip, and then having to spend way too much on an Uber back because the trains stopped surprisingly early.
Strange, the Expo line usually runs quite late, unless you are drinking until last call. Generally, I think across all LA Metro train lines, they stop running 1am-4am.
I've seen it said (Robert A. Heinline mentions this amongst others, I believe in Expanded Universe) that the LA basin was considered a sufficiently distributed population in the event of a nuclear war.
How much such considerations weighed in to Cold War urban planning in the US I'm not sure.
As the prior reply mentions, much of LA was already established - at least as small towns - prior to 1930. I can’t see how nuclear war could have influenced it.
What is unique about LA is the water rights. To get access, those small towns had to agree to get incorporated within greater LA.
Point being that other developing new cities (particularly in the south/sunbelt, think, say, Phoenix, DFW, and Atlanta, which grew tremendously from the 1960s to the present (air conditioning had a huge effect). Or any attempts to make LA more centralised or rationalised in terms of transporation.
I want to make clear, since everyone appears to have taken issue with what I said.
My ideal model is not suburbia - thats what “LA” is to me. Nor is it NYC a city that has grown way beyond breaking even with return to scale
My ideal model is, for all its problems, Thessaloniki or Bilbao. That is smaller, forgotten European cities.
There your Dr.’s office can be a short walk from home because 6 story buildings are in fact very high density. If need be most inhabitants can walk downtown, but dont need to because public transport can be plentiful and cheap because the city is dimensionally small.
> Nor is it NYC a city that has grown way beyond breaking even with return to scale
There is no way to support this statement on any economic grounds. If New York City wasn't almost as committed to not building as San Francisco it could be have a far greater population. The constant run up in property prices shows that even with the efforts to stop people moving they still want to.
If Tokyo can grow 50% in a decade in a country with declining population NYC could grow much more. People want to live in NYC. Let them.
Bilbao is one of those cities I would love to live in. Pre-Pandemic, I spent a considerable amount of brain power trying to figure out how I can migrate.
> Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint.
These seem like nearly ideal conditions for good mass transit. The reason why businesses like to congregate in the city core is that this creates wealth for the businesses and their employees via agglomeration - I think this dynamic should not be ignored, even though it might not be immediately visible.
Public transportation doesn't work just because all the jobs are in one place. At best this creates a transportation system that craters to business and not to social interaction (since its inherently a spoke model with business the hub)
Also in this business-concentrated city, the synergy you describe (and I agree exists) is set up to benefit business. What about synergies between people?
Better small, concentrated, cities as existed before the automobile that, had jobs scattered throughout them.
(To be clear cities’ downtowns are always more commerce oriented, the agora or the forum come to mind. But go to Rome and see how small the forum of the largest city in antiquity is. Place of business wasn't restricted to one place)
If everybody wants to commute roughly to the same area in the city, it's much easier to build public transport that serves them. Dense cores work very well until the city becomes too big to support reasonable commute times from the periphery to the center by public transport. Of course you need to take care that things like supermarkets, restaurants, schools, libraries and such are well distributed so that people can walk or cycle to them.
If you put everything in the same place ppl end up being on crowded shoulder to shoulder - very difficult to walk 100 m to do what you need. Its like putting too many cores in a CPU without addressing the memory bus.
Better an architecture where a core largely has everything it needs locally and only occasionally needs to go elsewhere; hierarchically seeking larger, harder to reach, memories
This is not the suburban model - in suburbia everything is far from everything. Even your next door neighbor. Instead, in my model, everything you typically immediately need (grocer, baker, pharmacist) is within walking distance (ideally, no public transit needed!).
Europe is mostly very many small, sub million, cities with jobs scattered throughout the city largely created before the automobile.
The jobs are spread throughout the city in the buildings people live in you can choose to live in the neighborhood where you work.
Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) while everyone lives far in a suburb.
> Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space)
This is a creation of modern urban planning; it's not a "natural" consequence of having skyscrapers. Europe has its megacities and hyperdense cores too (which do feature mixed business/residential use, unlike much of the U.S.), and America has its scattered historical towns.
I mostly agree, thats why I used mid sized European cities as an ideal, not London or Paris.
And, it wasn't to pick on the US - Charleston SC or Savanah GA come to mind as an very livable cities (minus the tourists). Instead US cities suffered the advent of the car more since they were newer, less established.
Finally, I agree that (mis century “progressive”) Urban planning is mostly to blame. Where I don't agree is that the skyscraper is a blameless misused tool of the urban planner. In the cities that built them, skyscrapers hurt the city.
And European “megacities” are as unlivable (unless you’re 25-35) as any American megacity. Give me Bologna over Milan any day.
What a ridiculous take. I live in San Francisco without a car, and there are entire classes of business I can't easily shop at because they're concentrated in shopping centers elsewhere in the bay.
Concentrated business districts only help you avoid using a car if you live on top of them.
I live in a European city with only a handful of buildings above 5 stories tall.
Population density is too low for anything but a few restaurants and a grocery store anywhere but in the city center and a few larger shopping centers around the outskirts. The mix with businesses give mostly lunch restaurants that are closed in the evenings and it's just as much a ghost town as anything else after hours.
It’s not because of 5 stories not being enough. I live in Berlin where almost all buildings top out at 5-6 stories and there are restaurants and shops all over the city.
You're right. Skyscrapers don't achieve any meaningful density because of all the space between them, which offsets their height.
The City of Paris (the classical mid-rise downtown without the La Défense skyscraper CBD), has a population density of around 20000pp/km2, climbing up to 50000pp/km2 in 11th arrondissement.
Downtown Tokyo and London are about the same.
In the developing world, some cities achieve much higher densities with only low rise buildings. Cairo is twice higher at around 40000pp/km2, but granted, the lack of urban planning and mass transit makes it inefficient too, and quite frankly, unlivable.
The only skyscraper district than can rival those is midtown Manhattan, which shies at around 20000km2. However it takes tightly packed skyscrapers to achieve it, at a much lower overall energy efficiency.
Skyscraper districts are typically office buildings, which make population density comparisons a bit misleading. From your example, Midtown Manhattan has few residential buildings vs office buildings, but it gets very packed during the day from commuters and population density numbers don't include any of that. (Manhattan as a whole doubles in population during the day; Midtown Manhattan grows at a much higher multiple.)
Depending on what your definition of "skyscraper" is, they do tend to either add density, increase average unit size, or both. Comparing apples to apples, NYC's densest 5-6 story residential neighborhoods (e.g. East Village) are less dense than the high-rise residential neighborhoods like Upper East Side and Upper West Side. And on top of that, I can tell you that apartments are larger on the UES and UWS.
This Wikipedia article conveniently compares city districts by density. You can see here that Yorkville (part of UES) is extremely dense compared to the densest districts in other cities like Paris, and much denser than community board 3 in Manhattan which is a very dense residential mid-rise neighborhood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_po...
Note also that Yorkville isn't even full of high-rises. Most of the side streets are mid-rise like east village. It gets the 50% extra density from consistent high-rises along the avenues, and a smattering of high-rises peppering the side streets.
most places could be dramatically more affordable even if they allowed 3 story buildings… single-family zoning is probably the worst thing to ever happen to urban planning
I think one reason for the "missing middle" is that it's dense enough to make parking a serious challenge, but not dense enough to make a completely car-free lifestyle attractive.
I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
This is where the Netherlands can contribute something: with awesome infrastructure for bicycles, you don't have to be that dense before using the car becomes a once or twice a week thing.
I often have to park my car streets away because all the closer spots are taken. But it doesn't matter as much because we don't use it much.
Car sharing systems are the next step, our car is old so the economics don't quite work yet. But when it breaks down we won't buy a new one, just sign up for one of the services that have cars parked nearby.
there are still a lot of single-family houses near existing public transportation! if parking is really the limiting factor to medium density… we need more remote workers, bike support, and must improve our public transit!
I think more often than not that "existing public transportation" is a bus that goes to a pretty limited subset of the city, 2-3 times an hour. If you happen to be going to somewhere on that line and leaving near a scheduled departure, great, but you'll still want your car for the many times you're not.
You hit the nail right on the head. Right after high school, both my parents lived in the same small town on the outskirts of a larger city. From my father's house, it was a 30min walk to get to the bus stop, which had one passage every 30 minutes. Even from my mother's place, going to school was ~2h to get halfway to downtown. My only decent option was driving to the train stating further from home, and going straight downtown that way. Cut a good 30-40 min off my commute, just mean I hit traffic every day.
Anyway, all this to say, public transportation gets pretty light past a certain distance from city center, and you most definitely needed a car if you want to have some sort of life outside commuting. Admittedly, we're 17 years past that time, but from what I've heard from a friend still living there, it's still the very same situation.
I agree with this sentiment. Too many people believe that “build more and more densely” is saying to build everything 30 stories up like in China but for example if you look at Germany there are only a handful of residential buildings even over 15 floors , and a lot just caps out at 3 or 4.
If you just decided tomorrow that half of residential 3 floors should instead be 6 floors, that would already go some way to helping things! And if you space stuff out nicely you can have a very nice city! Just like… build a bit higher.
> Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency.
um, those crumbling, 40 years old, 15m across, entirely uninsulated, six stories buildings obliterating every surfaces within 25 miles in every direction from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo...those are...not exactly wonderlands always.
But that won’t happen between buildings constructed by different companies so it would have to be mandated in some way. Maybe modular cable cars that can be put up between buildings later?
> The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency.
I will challenge you on this. 80m-120m buildings are the most economic choice almost everywhere: material costs, infrastructure cost, service cost.
As a sibling comment of mine points out, we need skyscrapers. They just aren't the be-all end-all of buildings. We need some skyscrapers. We need a lot of other types of buildings too. Diversity makes for a great district.
I am surprised that this article did not mention the truest economic limit: the fact that the new tallest buildings in the world are often mostly empty. It took until the 1950s for the Empire State building to turn a profit. The Sears Tower's incredible volume was meant for an expanding Sears that never happened. It's a consistent pattern.
Skyscrapers tend to start construction during an economic boom, but because they're so slow to build, by the time they're complete the boom has usually ended.
South-East Asia (Bangkok, Jakarta, KL etc) after the 1998 crisis was full of skyscrapers that were never even finished before the money ran out, the Burj Khalifa opened up just when Dubai's economy went into freefall, and Calgary is a recent example of skyscrapers being completed at exactly the wrong time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28873926
The Empire State Building was built just as the Great Depression was taking root, in 1930--31. That depression lasted until 1941 officially, and it wasn't until the post-war boom that commercial activity really began taking off. It's helpful to keep that in mind when looking at the history of the building.
Keep in mind too that the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for 40 years --- it held the title from 1930 until 1970 when the World Trade Center towers exceeded it. (The Empire State Building topped out in September, 1930, well before construction was comleted.) Conventional wisdom long held that supertowers were lagging economic indicators and foretold recessions. There's some truth to that.
My understanding is that the newer residential super-slender residential towers in New York are largely unoccupied, even though their units have been sold. Buyers are using them as investments.
These particular towers are the architectural equivalent of cryptocurrency: valuable solely for their wastefulness.
I believe that's different. The top 29% of the Burj Khalifa is unusable by design -- its only purpose is to make the building taller.
I believe the OP's point is that when usable space in a building goes unleased, it makes it hard for the investor to turn a profit. Therefore there is no economic incentive to build a taller building.
I find this argument a bit hard to understand for another reason, though. If there is no demand for space, then why does anyone construct new buildings, and why is rent so high in places like NYC? It seems to me like there is actually incredible demand for space in dense cities.
Many skyscrapers are novel- there is a certain prestige, and thus premium- to having an office in the Sears tower or the Burj Khalifa.
That is added on to the fact that skyscrapers are also engineering marvels, and the cost per unit goes up quite a bit once you have to start dealing with those problems, compared to the much more standard 6 story building as an example.
An additional novelty factor is that actually supporting the weight of the tower will require different techniques (and significantly higher costs) depending on the type of land the desired build site happens to be on.
All of these things create something of a price floor for rents.
- The pre-commit issue - In the western world (not always the same in China, Dubai, etc.) most developers work on a debt finance model where they have to sell a certain percentage of apartments or pre-lease a certain amount of office space before the finances come together to develop a tall building. The taller you go the tougher it gets.
- Market reactions to complex ownership structures. Owners for office buildings are still typically single institutions. Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues. When you get a tall building that contains offices, hotels, residential, retail, etc. it all becomes complex to manage and many potential investors/owners/purchasers have a major feat of this that drive them to simpler mostly single-use structures.
- Airspace limitations for aircraft manouvring. Though the enforcement of these varies by country - some are strong on it, others ignore them (Taipei 101 in Taiwan is one that is very close to flightpaths). Helicopters to urban hospitals can also be a big thing.
> Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues.
This is something that always surprised me of the US. About 5 million people live in condos in the US. 65 million people live in condos in Brazil. It is not common at all in Brazil for buildings to be owned by single individuals. What part of the system creates this difference?
> What part of the system creates this difference?
American local zoning laws forbid building anything besides single family homes in the vast majority of land. Some are even stricter banning even renting out rooms in those one-story homes.
(More accurately land nearby commutable jobs, sure one can build apartments in the middle of nowhere, but the housing isn't needed there.)
No, it’s because people want single family homes and America had the space to build them cheap in new cities.
When I lived in Singapore most people live in apartments (government public housing). But damn near (not all) would love to own a landed home (single family home) if they can afford it.
In Canada my grandparents bought a beautiful single family home when the city was around 60,000. They could afford it because it was on the outskirts, out their back window were farms.
Today the city is 1.4M and their neighborhood is “central” and highly desirable.
LA saw a population explosion around WW2 because the armament industries paid well and it wasn’t hard to buy your own home due to the massive empty space.
It's both : people want single family homes, but don't want multi family homes nearby to "ruin" the value of their house. So they zone to prevent multi family homes from existing in single family home neighborhoods.
China has stopped construction of building over 100m and for a good reason. Tall building are incredibly inefficient - you literally have to haul everything high up - water, furniture, more recently cars.
Ta bigger height to width ratio, the more bottlenecked the transit systems (elevators) become.
Likewise for heating, a very tall skinny building has a much larger surface area to a shorter and wider one that houses as many units, plus it has more exposure to high winds and colder temps high above.
I think skyscrapers look cool, but from a practical point of view they're pointless, especially in places like Dubai, where land (plot size) is not yet an issue.
Skyscrapers are disproportionately tall for their width. This leads to the mentioned lateral movement issues discussed. The great pyramid of Giza does not have such issues due to its literal pyramidic shape with its wide base.
It would seem to me, purely based on common sense, that skyscrapers are unnecessarily tippy and flexy due to the bizarre interest in making a thin needle-like building with a small base section.
Why would we not consider simply making tall buildings proportionally wide instead of this obviously flawed tippy needle thingy?
Problems with tippy needles include: foundations and their connections to bedrock, simple physical fulcrum principles, and the obvious inability to spread forces over a larger area. It’s a bit like trying to hold a large Christmas tree up with a small stand with low mass… doomed to problems
You should look at the works of Paolo Soleri, an architect who designed buildings to accommodate the living needs of up to hundreds of thousands of people. Despite their size, they have light and air throughout. Pretty remarkable.
They are making a slight comeback but as more of a leisure thing I think - somewhere nice/novel to go for a stroll on a sunny day, rather than when doing your morning power-walk from the tube/bus station to your office etc (e.g. New York high line type thing)
There was a study awhile back that showed people were a bit more agitated / negative-feeling when walking past a very wide building vs narrow buildings in NYC. (I happened to live near and frequently pass that wide building, and like the study participants didn't like it.)
There are also downsides to deep buildings for residential use: they make reasonable apartment layouts hard because the windows are too far apart. Old deep warehouse buildings often get converted to over-sized loft apartment when converted. While living in a loft is sometimes romanticized for luxury living, the lack of windows and (thus) interior walls makes them a poor fit for families, and the large size makes them expensive for singles and couples.
When I’m in Paris I always try and find time with the Eiffel Tower. I try and put myself in the mind of a person from the 19th century and how this structure must have appeared to them. How it made them feel. It was the beginning of modernism and a new world we are in today. A true line of demarcation from the previous era to a new era. An unbelievably important structure.
I feel like the opposite POV must be presented here, maybe someone thinks like I do.
When I first went to Paris I started with a boat ride along the Seine. I was flabbergasted by the beauty of the city. When at the end of the 90 min ride we turned the last turn and I saw the Eiffel Tower it was the biggest disappointment — it looked like a rusty nail in the Victorian painting. It looks nice when lighted at night though.
I think you need to view it through the lens of a person from when it was made. Consider that it was the first structure to be built by engineers, not architects (that’s revolutionary) and it gave a top-down view of the city, something never possible before.
We take all of this for granted much like we take most of modern life for granted. But the Eiffel Tower marked the beginning of modernism. Look at a lot of visual art from that era - it features the Eiffel Tower for instance. It was a shocking structure for its time.
It was the beginning of the mechanical and Industrial Age. Just fascinating.
> In The Tall Buildings Reference Book, the authors state that under pure gravity loading, a steel-framed building could perhaps reach 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) in height
I'm not a civil engineer, so I have no intuition for these types of things. But I'm certain I wouldn't have guessed that the limit here was 3km! My mind can't even visually picture a thing.
Note that after this quote, the article immediately discusses other constraints, including lateral loading, which dramatically reduce the upper limits. But I'm still boggling over the idea of a 3km tall tower -- it seems like it would just sink right into the earth!
The key words are "under pure gravity loading" which means if there was no wind, earthquakes or occupants. These forces are more significant the higher the building. I wouldn't be surprised if including wind would halve the limit.
I also think they mean something that could be practically recognised as a building. You can build much higher if you are not restricted by a traditional proportions of a building (for example a pyramid or dome).
As to the building sinking -- it is not a difficult problem to solve. The reason some buildings face problem is that this is just a cost issue -- they guessed they need X amount of effort to provide stable base for the building and they guessed wrong. In practice there exists very simple algorithm to provide stable base -- drill to the rock face and use the underlying rock rather than possibly unstable ground. The reason this is not always used is because it can be very costly.
Fundamentally such a thing has to be possible or else natural occurrences like mountains, waterfalls, cliffs etc. would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves. Steel is stronger than dirt after all.
> "else natural occurrences like mountains would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves"
One way of looking at how mountains can get so high is to think of them as if they already have collapsed on themselves. There's no more collapsing possible, so they can pile up higher. A lot like the Pyramids, they're so big and so old and haven't fallen down because they can't, they're basically a collapsed heap already.
Which is something Isaac Arthur mentions in his YouTube series on space elevators, if you can make the base wider, you can make the top higher, and then you don't need Graphene or Scrith or other future super-strong materials to go high enough (in theory, in practise the base would have to get wider than Earth).
You'd run into two problems: The first is that all materials begins to behave like fluids under enough pressure. The second is that your giant heap of material will have its own gravitation pull. By the time you're talking space elevators, you'll run into very unique engineering challenges.
Good point, that's true. But mountains also have massive bases over which to distribute the load. I assume in the context of a skyscraper, the overall shape is still very much "skyscraperish" (that is, much taller than it is wide)
I don’t think that’s quite accurate. You still need to extend the base to support the top, I imagine a pyramid would be better as well at such heights without futuristic materials.
I think it could reach that but would have to be pretty wide if I’m not mistaken. That’s the argument behind arcologies, you build this giant building that is basically a mountain and then fill it with trees, shrubs, grasses etc you can create a building that is also a giant forest.
This was a really neat read, thanks for sharing. The thought of a 2 mile high skyscraper is pretty neat. I'm curious if sway is really so easily solved as the article suggests.
If elevators are the limiting factor, I wonder how much of an engineering challenge it would be to have multiple elevator cars in a shift. I'm picturing a system where each floor has some number of elevator car parking spots off of the main shafts, and elevator cars move backward then horizontally first to get to the main shaft to travel vertically.
The other limiting factor I could see though is limits on parking, public transportation and utilities.
The problem with making elevator shafts longer is the tensile strength of steel cables; a thicker cable weights more and so for a longer and longer cable more and more of the cable is only around to carry the cable itself, much the same way as increasing payload on a rocket. Thicker cables require bigger sheaves to avoid fatigue, but the sheave can't be larger than about half the shaft width. Just gets impractical.
The solution is cable-less elevators. Rack and pinion elevators seem to be used only for construction elevators, guessing NVH is not up to snuff. Thyssen Krupp has maglev elevators though (experimental): https://engineered.thyssenkrupp.com/en/multi-our-sideways-mo...
edit: Also if you go too fast it'd be really uncomfortable due to the air pressure changing too quickly. Vertical acceleration is also really unpleasant, personally I find the quickly accelerating elevators I've used to be very nauseating.
Yes they do! I'm glad you mentioned them cause it isbpretty legit. I know one of their graphic designers (for brochures and stuff), and he was proud of their experimental elevator in Atlanta, Ga
Elevator problems can be worked around with "sky lobbies" where an elevator only covers a portion of the available floors, then you have a lobby at points in the building where you can stack another elevator on top of the last one. So if you are on the bottom section you can get to any floor in one trip, otherwise its a maximum of two trips.
That diagram really highlights one of the points of the article -- the taller you go the more space you have to dedicate to elevators. Looking at that plan, nearly 1/3 of the floor space is taken up with elevators.
Multi-elevator systems have been talked about for a very long time, similar to trains. The problem is still that these layover spots or crossover points take up floor space. And one bad elevator has the potential to jam up the whole system, compared to today where one bad elevator only impacts its shaft.
Manhattan actually has a parking cap; with Manhattan today, the view is that building more parking mostly just encourages people to use it, and to accommodate Manhattan's existing land use would probably require paving over Manhattan, the rivers surrounding it, and a whole lot more.
> With remote work, why are we still all trying to cram ourselves so close together?
For one thing, many jobs can't be done remotely.
But it's not just about work. People want to go to restaurants, community centers, live entertainment. The more sprawl there is, the fewer people can live within reasonable distance of it.
Even if you want to live in a single family home, tall buildings are good. Instead of having to drive an hour through a landscape of other single family homes, you can live in one closer to the city while some of the people who used to live there can live in the city because they prefer being within walking distance to having a half acre of grass. Currently there are more people who want that than most cities have housing units and many of them get priced out, which in turn makes it more expensive to live in the suburbs.
* Digging is expensive. There's several factors for this, but some unavoidable stuff include things like "you need to put the stuff you took out of the ground somewhere."
* The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Although it's probably not that bad if you're only digging a mile or so.
* Natural light is hard to come by underground.
* Groundwater intrusion becomes a much more significant concern.
* Having to pump all of the sump water and sewage up to the sewer lines is not going to be fun.
A simpler system might be to have dedicated upward and downward shafts, with change over points in the roof and basement. The cars all queue up to go up or down depending on which shaft they’re in.
The elevator cars couldn’t have cables of course, but they could be driven by electric motors on the cars themselves (powered by induction), driving a gear wheel that runs on a fixed track on the side of the shaft.
I think a Paternoster wouldn't be viable for a number of reasons (mainly ADA/accessibility). Instead you'd need to have each car independently powered and allow them to communicate back to a central planning server to allow cars to stop without stopping all other cars in the lane (and to prevent other cars from bunching up).
They mention the Monadnock Building, which has no steel skeleton. You can still rent an office in that [1].
It's a beautiful building. I seem to remember seeing window air-conditioners, because it's too old to install central air. Yet people still want to be there.
This is probably the best piece I've read this year, full of relevant historical data.
However, the finish was a bit of a letdown: "These building height restrictions make us all poorer [etc.]". I didn't even think, from the build-up, that they were going that way ...
I realized trying to get 3d terrains printed that we are very impeded in the Z axis. If you don't multiply Z by a factor your map will be almost flat. Everest? 8 miserable km? Come on, I can do that on the horizontal with one leg (ok, maybe not but you get the point).
Super scrapers amaze me when I think of the logistics of food and water going into the building and garbage and sewage coming out, not to mention the electricity demands, etc. Shanghai Tower for example can hold 16,000 people. That's a lot of flushing toilets.
I don't see it mentioned, but in most of Europe the city center height limit has traditionally been the height of their cathedral/church/etc., Where no building can be taller (closer to God) than them.
There's plenty of money in the hands of religious people. Where are the ultra-tall cathedrals? It would be absolutely staggering to see modern construction techniques used with traditional-style facades, to produce church towers competing with skyscrapers.
Big congregation, arena-like seating? Check. Incredible 300-metre-plus gothic tower? No.
I saw a drawing somewhere online that just captured my imagination - a cathedral-like building on a scale absolutely dwarfing regular buildings. I'm 90% sure it was actually Warhammer 40,000 concept art.
I suggest this is the wrong conversation to have. I'd put it this way: I love Paris, with its buildings of 5 or 6 stories, and I love New York City (where I live) with its taller buildings. But both cites suffer the same problem, which is that the roads are used for all purposes. If you are a pedestrian, and you want to go into a store to buy bread and cheese and wine and coffee, the bread and cheese and wine and coffee need to be brought in by a truck that will be using the same streets that people use to get around on/in their cars or Vespas or bicycles or taxis. Only a few cities in the world have ever been serious about building a second level of walkways, for pedestrians, and typically these pedestrian walkways only cover a few blocks in the downtown area. Nor are the walkways truly fundamental to the architecture of the city, and by that I mean one rarely sees retail stores on the 2nd level, but rather, pedestrians are expected to go back down to the ground floor once they need to actually do something, like buy something at the store. Cities of the future will have to commit to that 2nd level, as well as a 3rd and 4th level. And at some point, these walkways need to be built not just for pedestrians but for any 2 wheel vehicles, including bikes and Vespas and mopeds. This issue is more important than whether the buildings should max out at 5 floors or 50.
The amount of traffic needed to service local stores is tiny. One or two vehicles per shop per day at most. My local high street is pedestrianised but permits access for delivery vehicles. On a typical shopping trip I'll see one or none. It works well.
The key is removing the through traffic. Walkways are unnecessary.
Many of the big city centres in Japan are interconnected above and below ground at multiple levels just like that though. Umeda is a fun three dimensional labyrinth, for example.
The idea of connecting two or three close skyskrapers for additional structural integrity and vertical movement possibilites (forgetting cost) seems an interesting tangent.
I've always wondered about elevated walkways or little trains providing horizontal transport between skyscrapers and thus also addressing some of the elevator problem.
EDIT: Fixing "vertical transportation" to "horizontal transportation"
Downtown Saint Paul Minnesota has the “skyway system” but I’m not sure it provides any lateral stiffening, rather more movement between buildings above street level in inclement weather
That looks a lot like what I'm thinking of, only that I imagined this at least at the tenth or twentieth floor. That combined with having businesses in floors others than the ground floor, like you more commonly find in Japan.
FWIW, Tokyo actually has very few skyscrapers for its size, because it lies in an active earthquake zone and much of the city is built on reclaimed land. For a long time the only significant cluster of skyscrapers, including the epic Metropolitan Govt Building (Tocho), was in West Shinjuku because it's known to have solid ground.
I wonder if a multi-block-radius arcology as dreamt of in sci-fi will ever be built. Probably would require technology allowing both building strength improvements and construction cost reductions (automation?) along with reform of the legacy skyscraper regulations described in the article.
Of course massive economic price pressure and/or governmental action would be needed for such a project. It may have to piggyback off of a more critical infrastructure project, such as the support structures/legs of a space elevator (like Zalem in Battle Angel Alita).
This was really well written and researched, and I say that as a structural engineer who predominantly designs tall buildings. I’m not at all libertarian with respect to things like building codes which protect life safety, but I do agree that we over scrutinize aesthetics and architectural aspects of buildings.
When I think of neat places I’ve been to, places that really filled my senses, awed, inspired, they were not the sterile developments approved by zoning and urban design panels. They were more organic. Some examples of the places That come to mind include Rhodes, water towns outside of Shanghai, and random plazas in Florence.
I believe we need to trust that people generally want to make the world beautiful, and let them do it in their own way. I certainly won’t have the same eye to beauty as everyone else, but that’s okay. It makes the world quirky and unique.
Off topic, but I'd like to point out a weird "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon" thing that I'm currently experiencing: "Ghost kitchens". I didn't know they existed a few days ago, saw them referenced a couple times recently and now another one buried deep in this article. Weird!
One interesting aspect I really wanted more of is the evolution of buildings/architecture based on legal restrictions. It is good example of man made natural selection process where you change the environment conditions ( legal ), you see different set of beasts ( skyscrappers ) getting evolved
In a typical skyscraper there that many seats at the windows anymore, most workplaces are closer to the center, where there are no daylight anymore anyway.
I will contribute by adding a couple of references to AdamSomething's views on skyscrapers [1] (we shouldn't build them) and commie blocks [2] (surprisingly pleasant and efficient housing):
As an Eastern European who lately has developed a casual interest in urban planning, I wholeheartedly agree with a low to mid-rise approach to urban development.
Both in my home town (Bucharest) as well as in my current place of residence (Amsterdam) by far the least pleasent areas are the places where high-rises concentrate (Pipera and Zuidas respectively).
Great article but I didn’t like the whole libertarian take at the end that we are worse off because we don’t follow whatever is optimal is some theoretical free market model.
The real world is generally not well captured in unrestrained markets. You got externalities and tragedy of the commons not taken into account.
If people always bought what benefitted them and society then nobody would be a heroin junkie, an alcoholic or obese.
I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings.
Not everything of value can easily be captured in a market based system. They tend to only capture what can easily be measured. However the things which can easily be measured are often the least important things in life.
> I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings.
High rise buildings are quite simply a path to better land use in the most valuable and most productive urban centers - think Manhattan. They will always be rare elsewhere, precisely because they do come with drawbacks that make them uneconomical otherwise.
You and Le Corbusier. It turns out not to work very well, because the way a building interacts with its street-level neighbors is very important, and voids make bad neighbors. Death and Life of Great American Cities addresses this, I believe.
If we didnt suffer from such a dire shortage of housing I would appreciate your point more.
But we do.
I have a feeling if expensive city center land became a tax liability (as it should be) rather than a gold-like asset to be jealously hoarded we wouldnt see the NIMBYism that led to this tangled web of regulations.
I had the opportunity to travel all over this country last year, and I have to say, the only places that don't fill me with deep disgust and existential dread are a) the national parks, and b) the cities with plenty of very tall skyscrapers.
The vast in-between of freeway interchanges, cookie-cutter subdivisions, strip malls, and big box stores, where the tallest thing around is the McDonalds or ExxonMobil sign, is an abomination. I will fill up at those gas stations and eat at those McDonalds on the way between places worth being, but whoo boy, if I had to live in a place like that I'd vote for demagogues too.
I'm not a principled libertarian. Ideally, the law would stipulate that people who build to your preferences are hanged for war crimes. However, I suggest that we implement a free(r) market so that we can both live in the kinds of places we want, instead of one excluding the other.
"I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings."
That's cool. So you can move to a place that's mostly low-or mid-rise buildings and can allow others to move to a place that has skyscrapers. Lucky for you almost every city has very few skyscrapers.
>>The real world is generally not well captured in unrestrained markets. You got externalities and tragedy of the commons not taken into account.
What negative externalities does densification impose? He provides evidence that the laws limiting building height increase housing costs and reduce economic opportunity.
Providing market freedom, where such freedom would provide a clear social and economic benefit, in the absence of evidence it produces negative externalities, is economically sound, and the anti-libertarian insistence that it's not is what is the actual ideologically-motivated position.
>>today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings.
So move to a smaller town, or the suburbs, where land expense doesn't drive densification? Why oppose what people prefer, and artificially limit the density of the economic cores of large metropolises?
These economic cores are a very limited set of geographically restricted zones that are hugely in demand places, for people all over the world to live, hire and work, and generate positive externalities for the entire world, to the extent that they can - through rising density and better transportation networks - build on their agglomeration effects that raise the per capita productivity and innovativeness of their residents.
There are a great many alternatives to these regions if what one prefers low-density living. It's not reasonable to deny the development path that is clearly the aggregate preference of society at large just to maintain low density in these select locales.
As usual the goal is to pack ever more humans in ever smaller spaces for the sake of economy. I prefer to have a smaller community across a larger space, thank you very much. I have the internet to connect to everyone globally, if that's not enough to be innovative, again, thank you very much.
I love to go to work by bike, for instance. Free sky is an important part of the fun of it. I couldn't imagine just hopping in some huge elevator, enter the subway in the basement just to enter the elevator in an office building.
The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency.
Many good cities, like Paris, limit skyscrapers by policy on purpose because it's not actually the best human environment. Good urban environments involve a lot of mid-rise buildings clusters together, not a lot of skyscrapers.
that Roman residential buildings (insulae) maxed out at around 7 or 8 storeys, with 5 or 6 storeys being more common.
One of the reasons for that is that apartment buildings could not include kitchens. Cooking tech was based on using fire to cook and you couldn't build a multi story building with kitchens in every unit because you couldn't put fireplaces in the units.
Poor people in Roman cities bought prepared meals from street vendors. They didn't cook at home.
Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. This article seems to fail to adequately understand the ways in which human habitation and human use drive such things far more than physics, technology and similar.