Yves here. Yours truly loves urban density and so am a big fan of skyscrapers and many-storied apartments. But they are no good if they don’t produce vibrant street life. When I lived in Sydney, near Kings Cross in Potts Point, there were the usual bennies of high density, such as readily available grocers and mini-marts/speciality food shops and pharmacies and newsstands and pubs and coffee shops….and there, hookers. So you don’t need a Manhattan-style profusion of tall buildings….just enough to bring enough people there to produce other living bennies.
Oh, and I lived for over 25 years in the first elevator apartment in Manhattan, completed in 1915.
By Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Professor of Econometrics Humboldt University; London School Of Economics And Political Science; Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Associate Professor of Economics and Urban Studies Brown University; Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy Rotman School of Management University of Toronto; Premier’s Research Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness and Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy University of Toronto; and Remi Jedwab, Professor of Economics and International Affairs George Washington University. Originally published at VoxEU
Land-use regulations, including height limits, affect housing affordability and urban productivity. This column analyses over 11,000 urban agglomerations and 300,000 tall buildings to explore the effect of height restrictions on welfare. Vertical growth enhances land efficiency, reduces commuting, and boosts worker welfare. While higher density can increase housing demand and rents, the associated gains more than offset the costs. The debate about housing supply should not focus only on horizontal expansion. Allowing cities to build upward may be just as important for accommodating urban growth, improving access to opportunity, and preserving valuable land.
A large literature argues that land-use regulations can limit housing construction and contribute to affordability problems in many cities. Beyond higher housing costs, such restrictions may also generate broader economic losses by preventing workers from moving to the most productive locations, thereby creating spatial misallocation (Hsieh and Moretti 2019).
Most of this debate has focused on the horizontal expansion of cities – how zoning rules restrict new housing and push development outward. Yet cities can also accommodate population growth by building upward. A growing literature highlights that limits on building heights can similarly constrain housing supply and contribute to affordability problems (Brueckner et al. 2017). Related work also documents large gaps between actual and economically feasible building heights across cities, suggesting that many urban areas are built far below their potential skylines (Barr et al. 2021, Jedwab et al. 2022, Barr and Jedwab 2023).
However, this literature has largely focused on partial-equilibrium effects in housing markets. Height limits may have broader consequences in general equilibrium. By restricting vertical development in central locations, they can prevent firms and workers from concentrating in the most productive parts of cities. At the same time, height limits may influence urban amenities in opposing ways: they can mitigate density-related disamenities but may also increase sprawl and commuting distances. The overall welfare effects of height limits therefore remain poorly understood.
The Rise of Vertical Cities
To understand the relevance of the topic, it is instructive to observe how cities have grown vertically since the early 20th century. Innovations such as steel-frame construction and the electric elevator enabled the first skyscrapers, and continued advances in engineering and materials have steadily reduced the cost of building tall (Barr and Ahlfeldt 2020, 2022). As a result, tall buildings have spread far beyond a handful of wealthy cities and become a common feature of urban development in emerging economies.
Our data show that since the 1970s, the total stock of tall building heights has increased dramatically (Figure 1), especially in developing economies (Figure 2). Today, tall buildings represent over 20% of the value of the global real estate stock and play a central role in accommodating urban population growth.
Figure 1 The global skyscraper boom, 1895–2020
Notes: The figure shows the evolution of the total stock of tall building heights (km) covering tall buildings above 55 metres (13–14 floors).
Source: Ahlfeldt et al. (2026).
Figure 2 The skyscraper revolution in the developing world, 1975–2015
Notes: Bubble sizes indicate the change in the total stock of tall building heights (km) for all 12,877 world cities of at least 50,000 residents circa 2015. Tiny grey dots indicate cities with no tall buildings. Only buildings above 55 metres (13–14 floors) are included in the calculations.
Source: Ahlfeldt et al. (2026).
Yet, this transformation has occurred despite the fact that many cities impose strict limits on vertical development. Height caps, floor-area ratio restrictions, and other planning rules often constrain how tall buildings can be. These policies are typically motivated by concerns about congestion, shadowing, or the perceived negative externalities of density.
The key question is therefore whether such restrictions prevent cities from realising the benefits of vertical development.
Measuring the Economic Effects of Building Tall
To answer this question, we assembled a global dataset covering more than 11,000 urban agglomerations and roughly 300,000 tall buildings (Ahlfeldt et al. 2026). A central challenge is identifying the causal effect of building tall on urban development, since rapidly growing cities may naturally construct more skyscrapers.
We address this problem by exploiting variation in bedrock depth beneath cities. Geological conditions affect the cost of building tall because foundations must anchor into bedrock or rely on costly engineering solutions when bedrock is too deep or too shallow. Cities with intermediate bedrock depths therefore face lower construction costs. Since these geological conditions were determined long before modern urban development, they provide a source of variation in skyscraper construction that is unrelated to contemporary economic demand.
Using this approach, we find that increases in tall building construction have large effects on urban population and land use. The elasticity of city population with respect to aggregate building heights is about 0.13, while the elasticity of built-up land area is about −0.16. In other words, cities that build taller tend to accommodate more residents while using less land.
The Skyscraper Revolution and Urban Development
These results suggest that vertical development plays a significant role in urbanisation. Cities that expand vertically can accommodate more workers in productive locations. This facilitates structural transformation as workers move from rural areas into urban labour markets, where productivity and wages are typically higher.
At the same time, vertical growth makes cities more compact. Greater density reduces commuting distances and improves access to jobs and amenities. These effects reinforce agglomeration economies, which are widely recognised as a key driver of urban productivity (Combes and Gobillon 2015). By accommodating more people within existing urban footprints, tall buildings also reduce the need for cities to expand into surrounding agricultural land or natural ecosystems.
Do Height Limits Make Sense?
Why, then, do many cities restrict vertical development?
Urban density is associated with both benefits and costs. While dense cities generate productivity gains through agglomeration, they may also produce congestion, pollution, and other disamenities. Height limits can therefore be understood as policies aimed at mitigating these negative externalities.
To evaluate this trade-off, we combine our reduced-form estimates with a quantitative urban model that incorporates agglomeration economies, commuting costs, migration responses, and housing supply decisions. This approach allows us not only to simulate how cities would respond if height limits were relaxed, but also to infer an important but difficult-to-measure parameter governing how urban quality of life changes with density.
The results suggest that the benefits of vertical development outweigh the associated costs. Removing existing height constraints would increase average worker welfare by about 3.7% in developing economies and 7.0% in developed economies, where height restrictions are typically more stringent.
These gains arise through several channels. Greater vertical development allows cities to become more compact, which reduces commuting costs and improves access to jobs and amenities. At the same time, agglomeration economies raise productivity and wages as more workers cluster in dense urban environments. Rents increase as a result of the associated outward shift in housing demand.
Importantly, while higher density can increase housing demand and rents, the associated productivity gains and reductions in commuting costs more than offset these effects in terms of overall welfare.
A Distributional Conflict Over Land
Our analysis also highlights an important distributional dimension of height restrictions. When cities allow more vertical development, the supply of floor space increases, especially near city centres where demand is strongest. This expansion reduces the scarcity value of land.
As a result, relaxing height limits tends to reduce aggregate land values while increasing worker welfare. In our simulations, removing existing height restrictions would lower aggregate land values by about 3.9% in developing economies and 8.1% in developed economies.
This implies that height limits effectively redistribute income from workers to landowners. By restricting the supply of urban space, such regulations raise land prices and benefit incumbent property owners. This political economy mechanism helps explain why restrictive land-use policies may persist even when they reduce overall economic efficiency (Duranton and Puga 2023).
Policy Implications
Height limits may partly mitigate the disamenities associated with density, which helps explain why planners impose them. But when such regulations are too restrictive, they can prevent cities from realising the productivity gains and land savings associated with vertical development. The broader lesson is that the debate about housing supply should not focus only on horizontal expansion. Allowing cities to build upward may be just as important for accommodating urban growth, improving access to opportunity, and preserving valuable land.
As the skyscraper revolution continues, policymakers will face difficult trade-offs between managing the costs of density and enabling the benefits of vertical urban development. The costs and benefits of height regulations will likely grow over time as technological improvements continue to reduce the cost of building tall structures.
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Tenant lawyer here. Large tall buildings require a tremendous amount of capital, so it is fair to ask: who has the capital to build them? Absent strict, universal, fully enforced rent controls that are an accepted part of the culture, privately built tall buildings get built where working class tenants now live. They get populated by rich condo owners and tenants, and displace actually existing working class communities. The only other place where the necessary capital can be found is the government: government-built social housing would provide affordable housing, but no American government, state, city or federal, seems to have any intention to build that.
I don’t know why you assume gentification. Big buildings are cheaper on a per-unit basis. If you want affordable housing, you need density. It also makes it more viable to have at least adequate public transportation.
Gentrification isn’t an assumption, but is the proven result of private construction of large buildings in areas now populated by working class tenants. See, e.g. yesterday’s study here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399896002_Inequality_not_regulation_drives_America's_housing_affordability_crisis. Rent regulation mitigates the displacement, and stricter rent regulation would theoretically eliminate it altogether.
Yes, of course big buildings are cheaper to build on a per unit basis, but the total amount of capital needed is massive, well beyond the means of even wealthy landlords. (The issue of the landlord’s means comes up in litigating demolition cases against stabilized tenants, and so is one I’ve dealt with many times firsthand. I’ve seen the difference between a genuine application by a developer who can afford to keep a large lot vacant for years during construction, and a phony application by a landlord who just wants to evict the tenants).
The discussion you posted comes with its own assumptions: the common assumption is that the land where the very desirable big buildings are to be built is vacant. (YIMBYs tend to believe in “a land without people for a people without land.”) In NYC and, indeed, anywhere that buildable land has become scarce, the discussion needs to center exactly where the new buildings are to be built, and exactly what is there right now.
To be clear, I’m all for big buildings, but the only way to get them built is with enough public money to keep the apartments affordable. Otherwise, experience (and academic studies) show that building tall buildings ends up satisfying the huge amount of unmet demand by rich people for housing that is suitable only for them.
Help me. Residential buildings do not create tenants or buyers out of thin air. They get built in response to demand for more housing, because that urban metro is growing and there is demand for more housing.
Thanks to Trump, the US has no net immigration and birth rates are at less than replacement rates, so housing prices will fall relative to incomes nationwide in the intermediate term. That does not mean that certain areas will not see increases.
Because of the lack of effective public subsidies, in the US new housing is biased toward “luxury” as that’s where the profit is.
The result is that affordable housing (old dilapidated) get displaced by “luxury housing” resulting in gentrification of already urbanized areas that can command the ROI to make the higher capital for high rise construction profitable.
I’ve been participating directly in this process for the last 15 years on the assumption that after the Big Reset, who’s profiles are now becoming clear, the city will have much better, affordable housing stock, and hopefully euthanized REITs.
Deregulating height limits does nothing to increase affordability: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399896002_Inequality_not_regulation_drives_America's_housing_affordability_crisis. Gentrification is not an assumption here, it is the proven and documented result of building new housing for rich people in areas where unregulated working class tenants now live. (Id.)
Your post, on the other hand, contains a glaring assumption: that the land upon which to build new tall buildings is now vacant: a land without people for people without land. That is not the case in any city, like NYC, where buildable land is at a premium.
Yes, per-unit, large buildings are cheaper to build. But only billionaires have the capital to build them. The site needs to be cleared, and generally remains vacant for more than a year during construction.
Big buildings are great, to be clear. But if you don’t want to replicate the Trail of Tears, they need to be built using government financing, and they need to be affordable.
1. This is not “my post”. It is a cross post.
2. The ResearchGate article is US only and is based on a model: “Through empirical simulation…” So this is not proven, even remotely.
3. The article I cross posted gathered data on 11,000 urban agglomerations and 300,000 INCLUDING MANY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
So the study above is vastly more empirical plus has a vastly bigger sample that the one you are touting.
This is apples and oranges fallacy.
One can see how that holds true in Seoul, Tokyo, and apparently Moscow. Practically everyone (slight exaggeration, but not much I think) lives in high rise apartments and everything seems pretty cost effective.
Not true for most of Tokyo.
Vast areas have only 2-3 story structures. It’s the building code. Simple explanation here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/urbandesign/comments/1lcsqoo/the_height_of_residential_buildings_in_japan_is/
Might be ok for big cities, but not great for small towns in Bumphuc, IMO.
We have 6-8 story high million dollar condos going in, encircling our historic height-restricted downtown core like a fort stockade. Cant see the mountains any more, the units they are second home pied a terres, occupied a few weeks of the year. They have not created any affordable units, as the downtown real estate is so expensive.
Supposedly to prevent sprawl, the 15 minute city… all we got was all the affordable cheaper units created in a 60 mile radius, sprawl..and unsustainable resort work-force resort commutes, a la Roaring Fork Valley Aspen to Rifle 2 hr drive, one way.
Our town fathers want growth and tax base, so they round heel approve everything, demanding NO concessions to build a mix of affordable and affluent. The money is in chasing the rich guy, not the worker.
Our cool n groovy community food coop built a multi-story building- on site storage, food prep, offices. I asked the very clever long-time manager, ” Why did you not throw in one more floor for affordable work-force housing units?” He stated that they didn’t want to be landlords to their employees. I retorted, you could rent to any worker, not just be a revulsive ‘company store’. That ended our chat.
I ask this question every time I see a new proposed building ‘in town’. Developer NEVER does it, City never demands it.
They could have a, ” hippies use back entrance” differentiated isolated access, so the aspirational Epstein classers would not have to commune with the unwashed
Going to be some pain as folks navigate $5/gallon gas, increasing property taxes, rents, and food.
Do I buy gas to commute 30 miles one way to work, and eat less?
I am not a fan, YMMV
The private unregulated market just doesn’t produce affordable housing. But throughout the world, government-financed housing, under a whole rainbow of different ownership and management schemes, have historically proven to produce affordable communities. Why can’t we learn from history? Why can’t we learn from other countries?
Bolocks. When I moved to Manhattan, artists and writers lived in Manhattan, most often in elevator buildings, as in >5 floors. I knew many people personally like that through the 1990s.
The US has had an affordability squeeze across the entire US save for depopulating rust belt mill towns and the like.
At the risk of seeming myopic, deregulation of rent stabilized apartments first became legal in 1993, and was greatly expanded in 1997. That tracks with what I take to be your experience. Before what we tenant lawyers call the “fraud years” (1994 through 2019), rent regulation was nearly universal in NYC. With the advent in 1997 of a system that legalized steep, often fraudulent, rent increases without recourse, the whole City became unaffordable. With deregulation came a change in culture: incoming tenants no longer expected to be regulated, and no longer asserted the rights they had. Tenant organizations deteriorated. When I started as a tenant lawyer in 1988 every building had a tenants’ association and every floor had a floor captain. Seems quaint today.
And yes, elevator buildings make up most stabilized apartments. Among other advantages: they are easier to organize. But even the vast garden apartment complexes in Queens (e.g. Hyde Park Gardens, Glen Oaks) provide density well beyond what you see elsewhere in the USA. The difference is that a high rise is part of a walkable ecosystem, and a garden apartment is basically for living life tethered to automobiles.
You are not up on NYC rent regulations. If you live in a rent stabilized apartment and are current on your lease, you MUST be given a rent renewal. The luxury deregulation rules kicked in ONLY if both the rent rose to over a certain level AND you had income 2 years in a row of over $250,000. None of my friends would have been destabilized. I wasn’t and I was in an apt. over the rental ceiling. In my 25+ years in that apt., my landlord only 1x asked me for the form re my income. The income limit was so high that most people would not trigger it.
So please don’t carry on when you are not conversant enough with the relevant facts.
There were two forms of deregulation: “high” income deregulation (originally $175K, which three adults sharing an apartment could easily exceed, later $200K), which is the one you describe, and “high rent” vacancy deregulation, which is the one that my comment addressed. I am quite conversant about both, having won cases involving the specific language at issue in each one. Yes, of course, tenants in place during the fraud years enjoyed renewal leases so long as their incomes did not exceed the threshold. But the system in place from 1994-2019 essentially allowed vacancy deregulation, and legalized massive overcharges even for stabilized apartments, where many tenants did not know they were being overcharged. See, generally, https://socialchangenyu.com/review/the-theft-of-affordable-housing-how-rent-stabilized-apartments-are-disappearing-from-fraudulent-individual-apartment-improvements-and-what-can-be-done-to-save-them/
I’m a little surprised at your reaction to my comment, which sought only to put your experience of an affordable city well into the ’90s, into the larger context. I write only to respond to your assumption that I am not fluent in my central area of expertise, one that I have briefed extensively and trained other lawyers on. Leaving out the attack on my professional expertise would improve your comments.
No, you are incorrect. I lived in a rent stabilized apt and know the rules cold. You were not subject luxury decontrol (that is the term of art, not “high rent”) unless the rent was >$2000. Only then were you subject to possible high income decontrol. My apt was over the luxury decontrol rent level the ENTIRE 25 years I rented it. I knew someone in rent controlled (not stabilized, controlled) and he was not subjected to income queries.
No more Making Shit Up.
Vacancy deregulation (former RSL 26-504.2) cost the city over 150,000 units. It was the main impact of the Rent Reform Act of 1997. It was the only subject of my comment, so I would expect that you would address that subject, instead of indulging in the fallacy that high rent deregulation (former RSL 26-504.3) was a significant factor in the debates over affordability in NYC. Under vacancy deregulation, when a unit became vacant landlords got a free shot at doing renovations that, if 40x the cost plus the last legal rent plus a vacancy bonus equal a rent over the deregulation threshold, the unit was gone from the affordable housing stock. That process is a principal cause of the affordability crisis in NYC and it deserves discussion, even if your lens has been focused only on high rent deregulation.
Vacancy deregulation existed. It was what tenant advocates and attorneys mostly talked about when we were planning the legislation that became the HSTPA of 2019. High income dereguation was always a sideshow, put on by the landlords to create the impression that rent regulation is a subsidy for the wealthy, rather than old fashioned price controls.
And no, you don’t know the rules cold. The threshold for high rent deregulation was originally $175K, and was raised once, to $200K. It was never $250K. See: https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2026/03/fact-sheet-36-03-2026.pdf
This is ground-shifting, which is in bad faith.
You first talked about the 1993 rent deregulation and rent stabilization You suddenly shift position to 1997.
I am well aware of the rules regarding capital expenditures and rent destabilization.
You made a COMMPLETELY different and unsupported claim, that my experience among the writers and artists in my circle of leaving Manhattan had to do with rent regulations Only one was in a regulated apartment. Most moved out due to life changes, jobs, having kids, etc.
You also COMPlLETELY IGNORE why rents were going up, which was the sustained financial services industry boom starting after the 1992 recession. That weight of money , of a massive increase in high salary property renters and buyers, would drive up rents regardless.
Your denials of this basic issue are on the order of trying to deny gravity.
I know many people (and I was one) who had rented units in former single family homes that had been broken up and turned into studio and one BR apartments. These were NEVER rent regulated and often pretty affordable due to being walk-ups. If Manhattan had NOT gone more vertical, as in added more units, it would have been worse.
They were all over the city, bought up by rich Wall Streeters and turned back into single family homes, removing a lot units. I know of cases where the rich took 2, in one case three, former single family homes and turned them into a single massive house.
Even here in the rustbelt where housing seems dirt-cheap, salaries are correspondingly low, and taxes (property, sales, income) are high. Landlords have tax abatements and all kinds of accounting “miracles” to keep their property tax bills non-existent or low, pushing up the share homeowners have to pay. Anyway, my point is, we have an ongoing housing affordability crisis here as well. It seems to me that only long-term way to address it is by permanently removing land from the market via community land trusts, one approach advocated by George McCarthy, President and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, http://www.lincolninst.edu
I know Toledo and Cleveland are much smaller than at their peaks, but Cleveland still has anchors due to the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western and I gather Toledo is attracting professionals who can operate from pretty much anywhere due to low price and good housing stock. That’s a big step up from a mill town. Go to Escanaba, Michigan, which has gone from 15,000 to 12,000 and housing prices have not kept pace with inflation
Now for something completely different. I live in a 2 bedroom, stone cottage, on an acre of land, in Ireland and the nearest village is 6 miles away. I had to extend it to provide a large carpentry work shop, office and an open two story library for my some 10,000 real books.
A real slice of paradise!
My education in architecture and urbanism bounced between campuses in two cites. One (Houston) had no zoning codes at all, and no restrictions on building height outside of legal action by wealthy NIMBYs. The other (Paris) had strict building codes dating back to Napoleon’s and Haussmann, engineered to enable military control over the urban population and including a uniform height restriction. Paris is way better living, go figure. Scooch West to La Défense, where height is allowed, and find the institutional and white collar towers that high rise attracts combine with tall residential to diminish street life.
There are lots of ways to zone for affordable density, and lots of ways for a city to encourage its own pulse. Seattle is famous for the single-story urban cultural density of the Pike-Pine corridor and upper Broadway. The “taller is better” plea often relies on global data when cities would be better served by discussing anecdotal, pointed specifics. It’s usually driven by numbers left out of the public discussion: the way that taller zoning pushes up property values for land bankers. They almost always win. Sometimes it works out for a place, but often as not it paves the way for the generic Neoliberal city.
Your experience seems to be an example of the basic principle that there are good regulations and bad regulations, and the corollary: anyone who is against all regulation is either an idiot or has a vested interest in deregulation.
This is a straw man of a thoughtful comment. You need to stop your axe-grinding.
I used to come out of my skyscraper office at La Défense fairly late at night and there would be only the urban kids from the poor suburbs surrounding it hanging out doing breakdance and parcours, tumbleweeds and crickets otherwise. I wondered why housing hadn’t been figured into the plan, because it wasn’t an unpleasant place to be.
I hate to tell you, but consider the counterfactual: you have wealthy professionals moving into an urban area. You don’t build new tall buildings for them. They bid up the existing lower density housing, tart it up. and drive out the working class to an even longer commute than if you let gentrifiers go vertical. Their weight of money WILL gentrify.
I agree. That’s how gentrification works: the weight of rich peoples’ money driving poor people out of their neighborhoods, unless rent regulation protects them. The question is whether that process can be stopped, slowed down, or channeled into affordable construction.
That is not what the article is about. You keep engaging in penguin fallacy, of demanding the article be about penguins.
The issue is the impact of tall buildings, PERIOD. I posit that the poor get fucked regardless. Is being fucked by longer commutes and lower odds of adequate public transportation better? You keep trying to talk past the actual options here.
If always reducing the issue to the impact of capital on the working class and the poor is a fallacy, I plead guilty as charged. As I said, big buildings are great, but only those with a tremendous amount of capital, such as large developers or the government, can build them.
So you advocate, when cities experience economic booms that lead to an influx of high income workers, that the existing lower income workers be displaced, not by going vertical, which results in less loss of land dedicated to lower rent housing, but that the rich instead go on the London direction, of bidding up low-rise housing and forcing very long commuted on ordinary workers. At least London does have a fast and extensive underground, something missing in the US ex NYC
You keep talking past that working class renters WILL face competition for housing in this scenario regardless. And you have yet to respond to the fact that tall new built housing reduces pressure on existing housing stock.
I saw a thought exercise way back that changed my attitude about this. Can’t find it, I wish I could link. The gist: people used to peg the planet’s carrying capacity at ~10-11b people. Divide them into families of 4, then give each family 5000sf to live and subsistence farm (a tall order but doable if done perfectly). Tack on another 20% for circulation and civic functions, and the whole 10 billlion of us fit into the American Great Plains.
That’s not to suggest a home-agri revolution, but to illustrate that the means of production determines civic forms, and those forms inform the means of production in turn (David Harvey rocks this idea like a Les Paul).
So yeah, neolib cities gonna gentrify and over densify with too tall buildings and too wide streets. Some places that’s a good call and others it’s the only one. But allowing neoliberal market forces to dictate form will make forms that support neo-liberal markets.
Tall doesn’t conserve building materials, construction energy or use-energy. All it conserves is land. So in a city like Metro-Pheonix (mile upon mile of junk space) Neoliberal development is stacking towers in the downtown and transit nodes, both central and in the surrounding suburbs. At the same time it’s recklessly spilling McMansions acrosss a desert that can’t support them. Don’t let anyone fool you that the towers and tract houses aren’t working together. The junk space pockmarking the sprawl is either an empty land bank or a Vanguard holding. Much of it also happens to be the most fertile ground in central AZ built up by thousands of years of desert agriculture along the Salt River basin. It has the potential to look something like a dry Mexico City c. 0001 – lots of cute little reverse-desertified neighborhoods where rich and/or poor can live well on tasty squash, beans and corn their kids grow at the schoolyard. That’s one city. Every other city is just as unique and often just as ill fitted for acquiescence to blanket dispersed densities.
I’m on board with accepting and working within constraints. Cities and burbs are going dense and tall, so be it. I’m not convinced it’s necessarily better for workers and the poor, and it’s something I support less and less the older I get and the more new places I see.
I love urban density but it’s accepted wisdom that beyond a certain height, buildings cease to occupy land efficiently. This is because of the services required to service the building, both the volume they occupy within the building and the area they depend on outside the building, including set backs for light etc.
IiRC, the most efficiently height is around Haussman’s Paris levels (6-8 storeys), which is also the acceptable limit of taking the stairs, with a service lift for packages etc. Large parts of central London are less tall, let alone the vast two storey outer London suburbs.
If one does build densely, it is vital that the ground floors of buildings have shops, restaurants, leisure activities etc with frequent windows and doors.
American cities feel like hostile canyons because the buildings have one entrance and plate glass prison walls, making walking dispiriting. Ideally the buildings would be arranged around a park, like grand London garden squares.
Tokyo is very good at having a quick rhythm of small shops at street level. Tokyo also has multistorey commercial buildings, e.g. walk up stairwells with bars and restaurants on each floor.
China has popularised a standard building form of the “podium tower”. This appears to be a tall apartment building on top of a wider base of a few storeys containing a city block’s services, parking etc. I saw a link to an article from NC but could not then retrieve it :-( but it all sounds very practical.
As a separate point, large buildings are hopeless in a disaster. No water, no electricity, no lift, dubious fire safety etc. I would much prefer to live in a apartment building of a few storeys, where I can walk up and down if the lift is broken or the power out and, depending on urban geography, there may even be enough head in the town water supply to supply the loft tanks.
Anecdotally, the newest tall buildings here in NYC are the worst offenders at failing (or refusing) to rent ground floor commercial space. DeBlazio re-zoned 4th avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, so now there is tower after tower, and almost all of the ground floor commercial space remains vacant. Some of them have been vacant for five years or more. There oughta be a law, but forcing the poor oppressed landlords to rent out vacant space would be something that even a property-rights skeptic like me would concede to be an unconstitutional taking. But we should be taxing the crap out of vacant storefronts, IMHO.
Ricardo Bofill once mentioned that narrow streets were a primary driver for urban life. He said anything over 90 m, window to window, would kill a neighborhood no matter how tall or densely populated.
I say to each his own. If you absolutely love cities, live there. If your heart is in the country live there. If you like a little bit of land and the charms that a nearby city offers, live in a suburb. The problem is that developers want to bring density to the suburbs that border the cities to be able to make way more money.
In my humble Midwest suburb a West Coast developer firm is trying to abolish single family zoning. They have gone behind the backs of the citizens and convinced our village board of their plan.
They are tired of single family people having a say in what can and can not be built next to them. If they can
abolish single family zoning they win.
They also hate Historic Districts.
I say all zoning classes need to be equally protected from encroachment. This firm has caused to be built the
ugliest lot line to lot line buildings with no parking in other towns. It’s all about the cash. Not about the town.
It is a mathematical impossibility to increase your tax base with multi-family. It can only be done with
commercial, commercial office buildings or industrial.
“It is a mathematical impossibility to increase your tax base with multi-family.” Maybe you’re not familiar with local income taxes? They’re a very big thing where I live, and a major source of income for cities. Municipal officials in this region don’t care much about property tax because they only get 10-12 percent of it; 68% goes to schools (increasingly via vouchers to private and parochial schools), and the other 20 percent to support a mix of public libraries, county government and special park districts.
I agree with Seth mostly, as a working class amateur urban studies guy since the 80’s (Family Properties. Detroit Urban Crisis, Crabgrass Frontier, etc) in that extremely dense urban cities require regulation on rents, and protection of all working class housing, social housing being built, and that ‘building tall buildings’ is here in the USA, a developer pay off, for maybe some ‘affordable units’. The vast majority of ‘building up’ in san Francisco is for the upper class, and speculators. To this day at least 1/4 of ‘condos’ are empty. Meanwhile, the mission district with NO extreme skyscrapers, in San Francisco, was one of the most dense neighborhoods in the country since the fires. How so? three story affordable houses with flats with four to five bedrooms each….(since the earthquake at least)….and almost everything you need within ten blocks, and decent transit… houses right against each other, no yards, except in the back. etc. And most of us loved it here. ‘Demand’ for housing doesn’t create affordable housing. The market doesn’t build for the working class. Unless forced to. One million units at less then $1600 a month are gone in California in ten years. And the massive building in the Bay Area, hasn’t touched that.
The study was based on countries all over the world. You keep generalizing from the US. I can tell you that density is much loved in Asia, including new build.
John Kenneth Galbraith’s observation was that the US has “public squalor and private opulence” – The typical resistance to denser development in my experience arises because the public amenities must be pretty good, or denser means squalid. The US is dedicated to making sure poverty means no access to good public amenities. Even the sidewalks are crap, right next to fast flowing traffic whenever they exist, without setbacks or on-street parking.
The “public realm” has been defunded. One could blame racism, or Nixon’s halt to federal affordable housing, or Reagan, who, as he cut the income taxes on the wealthy roughly in half also cut HUD’s affordable housing budget 75%…or Clinton who signed legislation with the Faircloth Amendment, limiting federal housing affordability.
Ah, the developer as Robin Hood! Very believable.
There is a lot of great urban planning advocacy focused on “gentle density” that is being ignored here, to con us into seeing unrestricted skyscraper development as a necessary means to the desirable end of increasing urban density. The aesthetics of the built environment entailed by modernist skyscrapers can be brutal and it simply isn’t true that residential density in particular requires unrestricted skyscrapers. Rowhouses and closed blocks of limited height (5-7 stories) can achieve high densities of housing units or residents while retaining human scale, not to mention attractive decorative detail in the architecture. The premise that more than very selective use of skyscrapers is desirable let alone necessary as a means to achieve density should be questioned at the outset.
… maybe you want to check your knowledge of Robin Hood…
In the quoted passage, the authors were arguing that height restrictions “redistribute” income from workers to land owners. So, by implication their preferred policy — allowing developers to build skyscrapers — does the opposite: “redistributes” from land owners to workers. Like Robin Hood!
Do you think I got it wrong?
I think it is a wildly implausible result on its face, but likely to be appealing to land owners and developers fighting for planning approvals.
I’m more of a mind that the generation born in the last ten years, what’s left of them, will be lucky to have safe drinking water, enough Nature left to feed them and a fire to gather around. By the time that generation grows old, I imagine those skyscrapers, long since vacant from lack of services, to look like leafless trees, towers of Babel brought down by humanity’s incessant internecine war, the collapse of an absurdly complex economic system and Gaia’s revenge.
My guess is that we’re not far from seeing the ground broken on the last skyscraper ever built.
In the mid augths I drove from Detroit to Toronto to acquire a violin. They have roughly the same population but the latter is 1/4 of the overall physical size, hence the relative increase in density. As I got there too late for the shop in question I drove around, then around the perimeter. I was amazed at all of the high rise apartment buildings. Before I settled into a hotel near the shop, I found how congested the central city traffic was, despite there being a subway system and other mass transit. Oh well, I got the instrument (it was a Canadian luthier) and I’m still happy on that account, but could we get rid of cars in an urban environment? My 2¢.
I am going to be ‘it depends’. I live in NYC. I am lucky enough to live in a rent stabilized building and my studio is priced appropriately imo. The people who have moved in recently pay over $2000 more for the same space and limited amenities (we have an elevator). Because I live on a major cross street. It is not dark, you can still get some light in your apartment. The width of the sidewalk and the large street area open things up. Walk down a side street and that is not so much the case. Even in a five or six story brownstone, you might have limited light and air circulation.
I do believe that tall buildings should be allowed but limited to certain heights and require set backs in order to facilitate both light and air movement. Put a bunch of 20 plus story buildings on streets that are already two two person width sidewalks, and three lane road widths and it will be dismal.
I will also point out that despite there being tax abatements for designating a certain percentage of the building low income housing, those apartments are still very expensive for people who are in the income levels that qualify. Many times if you run the numbers it is two or even more weeks pay. It isn’t just about density it is about expectations on the return for building them and for managing them.
On the other side, I actually do recognize that current costs for things like heating, maintenance and repairs are huge. If you don’t have a decent cushion, the sudden need for a major roof repair could cripple you. Basic and minor plumbing, electrical and window repairs rarely get done for less $500 just to show up. (Yes, I am in a position to get to see bills for some of this in a different building.)
You simply don’t need skyscrapers to builde a dense city. You only need them for speculation.
Ancient Rome reached 1 mio inhabitants without skyscraper. Like bdy and Revenant said, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world and it merely has 7-8 storey buildings (and in some places merely 6). Same for Barcelona. You simply never need to go beyond that, it’s pointless, and most of the time ugly to boot.
I mean, really, Manhattan is pretty much, imho, the only decent case of skyscrapers, because entire neighrbourhoods are fully covered with them, a sea of high-rise instead of a peak in the centre and a ridiculous drop a few hundreds yards away, and because the grid actually works reasonably well for that. My main issue with Manhattan would probably be the public transportation grid – metro lines should be denser, more numerous, stations shouldn’t be so spread out and rare, and also you’d need bigger stations and more carriages, to be on the level of the most efficient and most used metro grids.
If you just have a very dense and high business district, and then you move away half a mile and you end up in parking lots and 3-storey buildings, you’ve totally failed at urban planning.
Besides, there’s a great aspect to early 20th century Paris, which is that there may be major social differences depending on which neighbourhood or which floor people live, but buildings will still be of a similar harmonious style all over; you don’t have a big open sprawl with McMansions on one side and poor stuck in high-rises or projects on the other. It’s far more egalitarian in that way – a century ago, bourgeois and other wealthy people still lived in a massively dense area.
But then, none of the authors of the quoted article actually live in a really dense city. London barely counts, because it’s way more spread out than Paris and as soon as you leave the truly dense hyper-centre, you will find very fast 3-4 storey buildings. Sure, it’s not awful like American cities, but it’s a middle-ground between that and continental European major cities; the fact they’re busy building tons of skyscrapers across London is, imho (or should I say in my professional opinion) proof enough the American disease of terrible city planning has taken over that metropolis – but hopefully not the whole country. You don’t need skyscrapers in London, you need on average to add 2 floors to most buildings across most neighborhoods to get to a decent density that would make any skyscraper unncessary if not pointless.
That said, if the core point of the article is that denser more compact cities are better for most people and more productive than what you find on average across America, it’s indeed a no-brainer. Even 20th century American city planners tended to see it, it’s not just Euro-centric vision or WEF delusions. But you just don’t need very high-rise buildings to get that; we have great efficient examples that are centuries-old by now, and that work well, and better.
I think I’ll stay where I’m at.
450,000 acres of Huron National Forest.
“So you don’t need a Manhattan-style profusion of tall buildings….just enough to bring enough people there to produce other living bennies.”
My favorite urbanist Utuber has said that he’ll get many people complaining to him “but I don’t want to live in a concrete jungle!” His response was always “neither do I! That’s why I live in Amsterdam!” Density does not have to mean skyscrapers. We visited Delft in the Netherlands and it was an amazingly compact (and beautiful) city with a population of just under 100,000. No skyscrapers! In comparison, my car dependent suburban city is four times larger (in land use) but only has about an 80% larger population. Delft is WAAAAY quieter than my city too!
This doesn´t pass the political-economic smell test. The authos don´t begin to discuss the kind of planning, of political rearrangement of the existing furniture, that would need to take place to turn around the central feature of cities–the fact that they’re centers of capital accumulation. When Mamdani–or someone–has the clout to start building tall building that would in fact be affordable for large numbers of people, and the affordable amenities that might go with them, let us know. In the meantime, I´d take a look at cities like Vienna and Porto Alegre to see the challenges, and modest successes, that can go with fighting the headwinds of a globalizing capitalism. There is no city in the world that suggests that the thesis suggested by the headline is true, that tests the assertion.
Sounds like the Chung Kuo series of science fiction novels written by David Wingrove. The novels present a future history of an Earth dominated by China.
A great read!
Can learn a lot about future possibilities from Sci-Fi novels: Dune by Frank Herbert, Necromancer by William Gibson, When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger , Mote in Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and many others.