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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

Is building upward prohibitively expensive due to needing to make earthquake-resistant buildings?

I know that in Sydney, Australia, there's a perceived "space shortage" but the true issues are regulatory, nimbyism, and behind most of that is a desire to protect the investments of existing property owners. We could just build upwards and have an abundance of centrally located dwellings. Most buildings in Sydney are just a few storeys high.

Tokyo reminds me of Sydney, except for the earthquake factor. If the earthquake factor isn't an issue, then the situation is truly extraordinary; millions of people living in the tiniest of spaces just to protect existing investors.

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> Is building upward prohibitively expensive due to needing to make earthquake-resistant buildings?

There is no shortage of high apartment towers in Tokyo and major city centers in Japan. So no, that's not a restriction as much as you would think.

The thing mentioned in the article sounds like it has more to do with the high ceiling height of one floor, not a whole building.

As far as I know most height restrictions are to do with casting shadows over other people's property.

For example, I own an apartment in a complex where some buildings exceed the area's height restrictions through an agreement with the government because the tall building is placed in the middle of the southern side of the block and hence only shades buildings in the same complex. If you're just building one building, that would be a problem.

Of course there are earthquake considerations, but everywhere I have seen them they're to do with choice of construction materials for a given size.

Source: me, I own an apartment in Tokyo and my wife is a licensed real estate broker.

I generally agree that the lack of taller buildings is mostly regulatory, at least in areas not prone to earthquakes. Look at the bizarre weirdness of air right laws, and especially the buying and selling of air rights, which has caused a rise in odd needle-thing super-tall luxury apartment buildings in cities like NYC.

So while I agree that we need to build upwards and increase density, we have to be mindful of air and light, especially air quality and sunlight at street level.

Interesting case: Seoul. No earthquakes. 20-story buildings everywhere [1]. Construction cranes everywhere.

Still real estate is very expensive ( 13K$ per square meter for something downtown [2] )

The main effect of building so much is that now almost half of the South Korean population lives around Seoul.

[1] https://www.mensjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Seoul... [2] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Seoul

   real estate is 
   very expensive

Can it even be the case that real estate is "very expensive" when almost half of the South Korean population can afford to live around Seoul? Dwelling expenses should be evaluated relative to available household income. I conjecture that Seoul's population on average spends roughly the same fraction of household income as they did 10, 20 and 100 years ago.

Are Seoul prices depressed due to the inevibility of instant destruction if a new Korean War starts up?

20 storeys I would consider relatively low still. I've spent some time in Bangkok, where plenty of buildings are 30+ floors. One of the great things about a building like that is the facilities that can also be offered with it. They usually have driveways well suited for drop-offs & pickups, as well as very nice swimming pools and gyms, possibly along with other common areas. (couches, pool tables, study areas, etc.)

Things may be changing. There are a huge number of cranes working in Sydney now.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-21/real-estate-warnin...

They already built up. Greater Sydney is 8/10 of the size of Greater Tokyo with 1/8 of the people

Sydney feels like a small city with endless suburbs.

> We could just build upwards

You can't just build up and up and ignore the issues at ground-level. As you add more vertical housing you still need more space and resources at ground level, for public transport, for parks, for schools which need sports ground, for everything. Everything else continues to get more congested and building vertically solves none of these inherent problems.

An interesting question is: do all factors scale at the same speed?

The experience of e.g. Hong Kong and Manhattan seems to suggest that it's easier to provide for public transport, schools etc, in ultra-dense environments. One of the core advantages of ultra-density is that less space is needed for streets and motor traffic. Ultra-density also makes logistics for basic goods and services (e.g. food and health care) more efficient. Even greenery can be more efficiently provided in ultra-dense environments, because multiplexing is possible as parks are rarely used by the majority of the population at the same time. E.g. London parks are pretty empty almost all the time.

(See also the scalability limits that high-rise buildings have w.r.t. economics of floor space, that I mention in another post.)

Yet on a lovely day like we’ve had this weekend, London parks will be a horrendous sea of flesh, like beaches in Benidorm (or Brighton)

Out of the circa 8760 hours of the year, what fraction is like today? (Moreover, even today, parts of e.g. Hyde Park that are away from the main walkways will not be like Benidorm central beach in the high season.)

Why overfit on rare edge cases?

The point is that people want to use the parks when it’s sunny. So they do. And it’s hideous.

I don’t care if it’s empty when it’s raining, there’s a reason why that’s the case.

Having access to Hyde Park is pointless for the purposes I like green areas (to enjoy when the weather is nice)

Geoffrey West and people at the Santa Fe Institute have long argued that cities enjoy good scaling properties which make them more efficient on net and drivers of economic growth. Economists also study these efficiencies under 'agglomeration'.

Public transit doesn't need to be surface-level. It can be handled extremely well by subways, with stations located in the sub-basements of selected buildings.

On a more utopian level, people of yesteryear envisioned skyways between tall buildings as viable public transit. Once the density of high buildings becomes high enough, it could become feasible.

But the point is people won't want to do the work to build the extra subways. They just think the buildings should get taller. People want to allow San Francisco to build tall buildings but the city has an almost non-existent public transport system and they aren't proposing to change that. They just want to cram more people into the same infrastructure.

It isn't tall buildings that need public transit. It is tall office buildings in office only downtown areas. If the tall buildings are mixed use much of that goes away. Put the office on floors 45-50, apartments on 15-44, school on 12 and 14, (13 is traditionally reserved for mechanical for superstition), more apartments on 6-11, gym on 5, and retail on 1-4. People would rarely have reason to use more than the elevator to get around as everything they need is in their building.

Note, the floor assignments above are something I made up on the spot. It gives the idea, but it is surely wrong in the details. Anyone wishing to build such a building should do their own calculations.

building out subways takes longer then the typical election cycle. politicians have no interest in spending billions on a project that wont get finished in 10-20 years.

Hong Kong did this (public transport stations located in the sub-basements of selected buildings) really well.

Note however that skyscrapers also have scalability limits: as height increases, the amount of interior that gets eaten up by non-usable infrastructure and support (e.g. beams, load-bearing wall, elevators). I have read on the internet (please correct me if my data is wrong -- I've not fact checked it) that the Burj Khalifa in Dubai occupies about 68796.6 m2, while offering about 334000 m2 of interior floor space. Thats about 4.85X increase. This means that if they simply occupied all the land and went up for 5 floors they'd have more floor space. As an example of a low-rise building, the Pentagon in the U.S., with 5 floors and 600000 m2 has more usable square footage than the Burj, the tallest building in the world. (Alas I don't know how much land the Pentagon uses, maybe somebody can tell me?) I also don't know if the Burj Dubai is representative w.r.t skyscraper economics. It's unlikely that Burj Dubai's main raison d'être has been rental income, it's more a landmark, drawing attention to Dubai, to the ruler's power, promote Dubai as a business location etc. (Those will indirectly affect achievable rental income in other, more functional Dubai buildings.) See [1] for a well-written introduction to the economics of skyscrapers.

[1] http://buildingtheskyline.org/skyscraper-height-i/

northern Virginia has some of the worst sprawl in the country.

The public transport congestion is reduced by higher density. Pretty much everyone (in Sydney) is trying to get to the center. If you have more dwellings in the center, you reduce the number of people relying on PT. In cities that are less of a star structure, this may work even better. People end up trying to live close to their workplace and relying less on the transportation.

The need for transportation is a side-effect of not having sufficient dwellings close to where people are commuting to.

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