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Comment by woodpanel | Hacker News Reader

It's not entirely true. If you walk the inner-city neighbourhoods, you will rarely encounter buildings with more than 10 stories [1].

Clearly there are options, which aren't on the table because of preservationism and zoning.

[1] https://www.google.de/maps/@48.8575448,2.2997841,3a,75y,329....

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There just isn't that much undeveloped land in the inner cities, and no one wants to tear down a 100-year old 5-storey building to make room for a 10 or 20 or 50 storey building. If an empty construction spot is found for some reason, or the odd house is torn down, then I agree with planners: don't make 1 building in 100 tall. That's just an eyesore. Heterogeneous vs homogeneous I can agree is debatable, but almost-homogenenous with a single eyesore is the worse of both.

Also there are height limitation for buildings in Paris, which are in parts of Paris around 8-10 floors.

And yet most arrondissements have densities similar or greater than Manhattan (28k / km2): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris#Arron...

Size of Paris: 104km^2 [1]

Size of Manhattan: 59km^2 [2]

Density Paris: 21,000/km^2 [1]

Density Manhattan: 28,154/km^2 [2]

Comparing arrondissements with a larger area like Manhattan is not good. If you compare Manhattan's wards with Paris's arrondissements you get a clearer picture:

11th arrondissement: 41.500/km^2 [3]

Upper Westsides 25th district: 92.400/km^2 [4]

Looks like the visual comparison of stories works out quite well with regards to density

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris#Arron...

[4] https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1KH824f7Bya0UVv...

If you build taller buildings, you will need to have wider streets, thus resulting in the same density, it won't solve anything.

is it anecdotal or is it provable?

There are dozens of open wide Rues, Avenues and Boulevards in Paris that don't have any dense housing compared to Manhattan or Hong Kong etc.

Yeah you can maybe put only 5 or 10 more skyscrapers by destroying the biggest empty spaces (there's not that many of them), what would be the point of that? It's not a dozen of skyscrapers which will solve the housing crisis.

No you would scrap some buildings instead. But thats of course not doable because preservationism declares every of those 6-8 story buildings in Paris, that are of crumbling conditions a historical landmark if necessary.

Yeah but we tend to think that it's a pretty shitty idea to replace those nifty Carved stone buildings with cheap and shallow stained glass/concrete/steel ones.

What? I've never seen this in practice.

Hong Kong is incredibly dense and full of high rise buildings (Kowloon has 110,000 people/square mile) and streets aren't exactly wide. Seoul packs in 42,000 people per square mile without many significantly wide streets. Tokyo streets are often only suitable for one way traffic.

Paris is already more dense than Hong Kong and Tokyo

Paris is not remotely as dense as Tokyo or Hong Kong. Stats lie because there is some random defintion of density based on some arbitrary area / population where area = unused parts of the city. For example "Tokyo" has unpopulated mountains as part of it's very large "official" area. Same with HK. Choose the actually city parts and the actual "city" of Tokyo and HK and many X more dense than Paris. They are night and day different. Paris is quaint compared to Tokyo and HK.

Tokyo proper (23 wards) is much less dense than Paris, not more. The densest wards are around 20k / km2, while the least dense "arrondissement" in Paris is 17k / km2, with most of them quite above 50k / km2 and more.

A big factor in that is that a huge amount of Tokyo is purely towering office space. People commute in from up to and over 100km away since their transportation fees are covered and high speed trains are a feasible way to travel.

But taller buildings equals wider streets to such a degree that the density you win by building high mostly gets eaten up by the lost real estate used for wider streets.

Why do you need wider streets? Moving people is what the metro is for.

Except if you plan to build an underground city, people still have to walk from/to the metro station to/from wherever they live or work. And people also still strangely favor having a bit of sunlight.

As a French living now in Canada, Paris streets are narrow in general, and especially the sidewalks are ridiculous, most of the space is for cars. One of the first thing to do would be to reclaim that street space for pedestrians and cyclists, which is an ongoing, slow and painful battle.

Sunlight. People go crazy if they live in darkness everyday. I'm pretty sure this was discovered & studied in the history of American east coast cities.

Then why not raze Paris' buildings down to one story?

(The difference in sunlight exposure for pedestrians between an 8-story building and a 16-story building is not remotely as large than between an 8- and a 2-story building)

Because sunlight non-exposure is one of the pinnacles of unfounded, futile arguments against density.

> Why do you need wider streets?

For public health reasons, enable emergency and disaster response, contain potential propagation of collapses, enable large volumes of people to evacuate in a timely manner, etc.

Europe has lived with narrow streets for some centuries and learned to avoid that mistake. It's a shame that somr people have forgot or never learned those lessons.

The narrow streets were never the problem. Sanitation was.

Actually at this time, when Haussmann started its transformation of Paris, people though that the circulation of air was very important for health, and that was one of the reasons of widening the streets and limiting the height of buildings, but the main reason was for allowing traffic of goods and people, and to improve security and control of the population (revolts in Paris had made 3 different political regimes collapse in less than 70 years before that).

Today people still value seeing the sky and freedom of movement. I have not been everywhere in North America but usually I saw that big buildings mean wide streets around them.

> Why do you need wider streets?

Moving goods.

> Moving people is what the metro is for.

People aren't the only thing that needs moved to support a city.

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