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.
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.