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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Presumably you don't live in NYC. There are dozens of 50+ story buildings under construction or recently completed in nearly every section of Manhattan and the East River waterfront areas. If you get a good vantage point for a view it's like a forest of cranes out there.

Maybe you just mean San Francisco?

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San Francisco actually has several skyscrapers under construction right now too.. The skyline is covered in construction cranes. Not sure where OP is that they're not building.

This random list is a bit dated (2013) but many of these buildings are nearing completion and many more have started planning or construction:

http://sf.curbed.com/maps/26-high-rise-projects-changing-san...

Seattle reporting in, downtown is absolutely full of cranes and large-building construction sites.

https://www.seattleinprogress.com/

Indianapolis reporting in -- we're not building super-large skyscrapers, but we're backfilling the old parking lots that replaced urban blight bulldozed in the 70's and 80's with 10-15 story apartments and office buildings. Salesforce also announced they're taking over Chase Tower, the 48-story tallest building in Indiana, which has historically struggled to push their occupancy rate over 68%.

I think why you don't hear about many cities in America building super-large skyscrapers is threefold: 1) The U.S. is still a very large country with lots of room, especially away from the coasts 2) Construction costs of super-tall buildings scale nonlinearly, so buildings taller than 55 stories tend to not pay off per the square footage value of renting/selling, so mid-scale buildings are generally more profitable 3) Geographic agglomerations mean that creative class folks (like developers) tend to be attracted to existing large cities like SF, Seattle, and NYC

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