¿Por qué no los dos? Skyscrapers for the highly productive business downtown where they can actually bring increased density compared to mid-rise buildings, and mid-rises for the rest of the city. You're right that skyscrapers are not "the best human environment" in any general sense; they're an adaptive response to very special conditions, that are generally not found outside the places where skyscrapers are common.
That's why not both in my opinion as someone actively trying to support healthy development of smaller towns that have often been left behind in the US in recent decades. There has been longstanding trend of people moving to big cities because that's where the jobs are, so we emphasize creating better infrastructure in big cities and further densifying big cities, make for a vicious cycle.
If we had more mid-rise density in smaller towns, we could have more thriving small towns and we wouldn't have to choose between overpriced, overly dense big cities or safe, small cheap and boring small towns that lack jobs, lack amenities etc.
We could have decent quality of life for more people generally.
Well I am. And I think such trends do a great deal of harm to the American social fabric.
Way more people would move to big cities if it was affordable, and these people's wishes should be supported.
Almost by definition, this is true, as if everyone did not want to move to the city, then prices would be lower.
This romanticism for making everyone live in small towns is not something that most people support, given that way more people would leave small towns if they could.
This is likely true. And yet people bitch plenty about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment of the good life in the downtown areas of big cities.
In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric and have less feces, discarded needles and the like or you can not care and see people moving out of cities like San Francisco because they are going to hell as all the poor people ruin it for the upper classes who still don't care about those people but hate stepping over the mess.
> In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric
Actually there was the other solution. The other solution compared to yours of "make people live in the small towns.", is instead "Make lots of tall skyscapers, so that big cities are affordable".
If we lower the costs of big cities (By making lots and lots of supply, including tall skyscapers), then prices are lower for those who need them, and more people can live here, and take advantage of the big cities, and it can also benefit the poor by actually making it possible for them to live here, instead of on the streets.
We don't have to force out the poor from the big cities. Instead we can make the big cities affordable to live in, with lots and lots of tall skyscrapers.
> see people moving out of cities like San Francisco
Actually, you are the one who is trying to get people to move out of the big cities. I want there to be more supply for everyone, in these big cities, with more skyscapers.
I know a lot about homelessness. I spent nearly six years homeless and before that had a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy and I still run several blogs on the topic, though I update them less than I used to as my focus has shifted to trying to solve the housing shortage that is a root cause of homelessness in the US.
Yes it will. Think of a skyscaper like a Yuppie containment center. For every high end apartment that exists, a Yuppie is no longer filling up an apartment in the mission, that very well could be afforable if they weren't currently full of yuppies.
There are lots of yuppies who would love to live in those skyscapers, and if we build more of them, then those people will no longer be taking away afforable housing from other people who need it.
Also, historically, this is how housing has worked. Previously high end apartments, become low end, over time, as the rich move out of those places, into other, newer apartments.
> Skyscrapers are inherently expensive to build
Doesn't matter. Because the goal is to get wealthy individuals, out of the existing apartments. The poor aren't forced to live in those skyscapers, but if the skyscapers exist, then there is less competition for the lower end of the market.
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 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 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.
http://projectsro.blogspot.com/2021/02/copenhagens-first-sky...
The study in question:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/getting-buildin...
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.
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.
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 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 would be like a Morlock/Eloi situation, except that we'll all be Morlocks. They'll do the missile defense systems and the smartphone OS's, and I'll grow the corn and mine the rare earth minerals. We can all even adopt a bicameral government, one that governs areas of population density above a certain value and one that governs areas below a certain value.
It was a story where the subtext was "And after you rich assholes have become helplessly dependent on your servants, the servants will take over the world and eat the rich because you people are becoming sheeple."
I have difficulty seeing any world where the goal is Morlocks and Eloi as some kind of positive thing to shoot for as a goal. Personally, I would like to see a world where fewer people have reason to bitterly suggest that we should eat the rich.
So, funnily enough, this is actually a similar argument that I often make. I believe it benefits everyone, if yuppies like myself, get what we want with Tokyo megacities, so that we don't cause all these problems with the rest of society, with our high income, driving up prices of everything around us.
Someone who described this very well, was noahpinion. He called this strategy, the Yuppie Containment Protocol. Society creates "Gentrification Containment Units", so that we the Yuppies don't cause this horrible harm, of extra income and wealth, hurting everyone else.
Us yuppies, bringing in demand for gentrified coffee shops, fancy skyscapers, and upscale restaurants drives out existing residents. It is better to just give us a couple megacities somewhere, so our horrible terrible income and wealth, and willingness to spend it on the economy doesn't hurt those gentrification vulnerable people.
Perhaps high-earning, artisanal baristas who specialize in getting the most out of perfectly-roasted-that-morning civet-excrement-extracted coffee beans? While I also advocate ultra-high-density (Tokyo is a piker compared to #1 density Manila) cities, I freely admit that rentier dynamics in those settings in capitalist contexts remains an unsatisfactorily-addressed problem, and service workers get hit especially hard.
Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places, then I guess it would only be people who actually want to live in that area or work these jobs.
If nobody wants these jobs, because cost of living is high in those areas, then wages would have to increase to attract people who want to work there.
People would not be forced to live there, because of all those extra empty homes in other cities, that the yuppies moved out of.
That's the other weird assumption. My tiny-ass hometown has rents on par with San Francisco right now, because there are apparently enough high-earners who can now work remotely and want to live in a little mountain town.
Yes, I am sure you can find a couple people, who would move from a more expensive location, but that is a silly thing to bring up, as some counter example, when there are a lot more places that are cheaper, which people could move from.
So yes, it is a very reasonable assumption, to say that if someone moves to SF, that most of those people, are moving out of cheaper cost of living areas, because that is how stats work.
And anyway, maybe those mountain towns would be cheaper, if those yuppies were living in SF instead. So both points support me, even in the case of a yuppie coming from an expensive mountain town, moving to SF.
Especially since the sort of jobs that are starting to move to be location-independent pay better than the sort of low level in-person work that keeps a town or city running.
Developing urban centers to hold more people definitely frees up space in non-urban areas, but it's not a yuppie vs low class thing. There will always be rich people who want country living, and a working class who enjoy (and are necessary to support) city life.
Great. So you agree completely with my main point here, and your only disagreements seems to be semantic or irrelevant to that main point.
As long as you agree with the statement you that just made, then I can confidently say you have zero, or at least very little disagreement with what I was intending on communicating.
stale2002 perfectly makes the point you've been advocating for throughout the thread.
To me social fabric in this context of decaying small towns has a negative connotation that in my mind it reads as a reversion to white, sis, straight, nuclear families as the idea of what America is. And it's used that way by political campaigns as well to play on fears, racism, and us/them to win votes.
Non-hispanic white is only 57% right now and declining. a ton of cities are white minority - kind of to the point about this picture of past american rural ideals are out of date.
Out LGTBQ is somewhere approaching 5% across all generations. Key word out.
Gen Z are ~15% out. I wouldn't be surprised if the true non-cis/non-straight % is closer to 20%.
So that probably puts cis white in the slight minority and shrinking.
And I'm not sure what 'passes' means I will try to use HN rule of benefit of the doubt
* Lots of cars
* Reduce overall population
* A powerful government that controls a lot and does city planning
* A religion system to make people "do things for the greater good"
you may not what any of them either.
You can propose other solutions as well, feel free.
Sure, but who cares? Air conditioning is counterproductive for energy efficiency too. We have it anyway because the whole point of air conditioning is to spend energy making ourselves better off. If we want to, we can also spend energy making ourselves better off via skyscrapers.
Businesses that would otherwise be scattered around the city giving their employees a chance to live near them are concentrated in a small region core.
Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint.
Its far better to have mix use six-eight story buildings.
These seem like nearly ideal conditions for good mass transit. The reason why businesses like to congregate in the city core is that this creates wealth for the businesses and their employees via agglomeration - I think this dynamic should not be ignored, even though it might not be immediately visible.
Also in this business-concentrated city, the synergy you describe (and I agree exists) is set up to benefit business. What about synergies between people?
Better small, concentrated, cities as existed before the automobile that, had jobs scattered throughout them.
(To be clear cities’ downtowns are always more commerce oriented, the agora or the forum come to mind. But go to Rome and see how small the forum of the largest city in antiquity is. Place of business wasn't restricted to one place)
I find with businesses concentrated, it's much easier to make decisions about housing. In Los Angeles, it was difficult to predict where my next job might be. It could be downtown, it could be Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, the valley, Pasadena, Orange County, etc. I could face a 90 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to get to work. Even if I didn't change jobs, a company might move from one side of L.A. to the other (and this did happen to both my wife and me while we lived in L.A. although her location change was less dramatic than mine). Dispersed job centers often meant passing up on jobs because the location was inconvenient.
In contrast, in Chicago, the key thing is being able to get to downtown reasonably quickly by public transportation (or, when I was single, I had an apartment that allowed me to easily bike or walk to and from the Loop if I so chose and the weather wasn't awful). One thing I noticed was that in the 90s, many tech companies were located in those outer suburbs and living anywhere but near downtown made commuting challenging. In contrast, since I moved back to Chicago 11 years ago, almost all tech jobs are downtown, which seems a likely consequence of the fact that being close to competitors makes it easier to find employees.
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1. There are, of course, bits of exceptions to his with some scattered business areas in some of the suburbs, most notable Oak Brook, Evanston and Schaumburg being the primary examples in my experience.
San Francisco hasn't been known for its soaring towers (though recently the leaning sort are making headlines), but it is centralised and well-served by transit both within the city and from surrounding communities. To this extent, it resembles Chicago.
At the same time, the Bay Area as a whole strongly resembles Los Angeles, with various tech hubs ranging from San Jose to San Francisco, and including Sunnyvale, Fremont, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park Redwood City, and Oakland. If you find yourself job hopping between these spots, commutes get long fast, and there's no one best place to live.
Chicago was built around rail with both the urban CTA and regional Metra rail service. Suburbs first emerged as points on spokes radiating out from downtown. Those have since filled in considerably, and inter-suburban commutes are both real and every much as horrible a mess as you'd imagine them to be.
Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. Absent the constraints of terrain, what defines Los Angeles is a grid-pattern of both streets and freeways. Whilst Chicago does have a street grid, that grid does not define the city in the same way Los Angeles does.
If LA had instead opted to build distributed clusters of both high-rise (office/commercial) and low-rise (residential) towers, on a hub-and-spoke transit system, it might offer a far more reasonable set of commute and living options. There's no strict need for towers, so much as there is for connections between them.
Arguably, another element that defines much of Chicago is its greystone and bungalow residential styles. These don't reach the density of 5--6 story apartment construction typical of Europe, but are far denser than the predominantly single-story fully-separated housing of the Los Angeles area. As with elsewhere, density makes transit service, whether bus or rail, far more viable.
LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere.
LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic.
I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.
That said, Chicago formed as a transportation hub, first based on the Great Lakes and rivers (the Des Plaines connects to the Mississipi), providing a transit point between the middle of the US, from Minneapolis to New Orleans and via the Missouri and Ohio river systems about 2/3 of the continent, to the East Coast via the St. Lawrence Seaway and Erie Canal.
Railroads were built to outlying suburbs by 1850, at which time there were no automobiles at all. Chicago's population as of 1900 exceeded 1 million. Remember that mass adoption of the automobile in the US only began in 1901 with Ford's Model T, and wasn't substantial for another two to three decades.
Los Angeles by contrast had no natural harbour (the San Pedro breakwater was completed in 1910), was largely a ranching and orchard region through the early 20th century, and was by far secondary to San Francisco in importance to California until 1906, the year of the Great Earthquake and Fire.
Following that event, with increased oil exploration in Los Angeles (there remain many operating wells within the city itself), and especially growth during WWII, Los Angeles eventually grew. But it had only 100,000 souls in 1900, surpassing 1 million in 1930, at which point automobile use was strongly established. The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy put an end to what public transit remained from 1938--1950.
Chicago's suburban commuter rail was spared by virtue of the fact that it uses freight rail rights-of-way, which couldn't be dismantled (though some lines did fold, especially after the Interstate Highway System was built). Chicago's El similarly survived though I'm not familiar with the specific history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chicago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Los_Angeles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Chicago 1906 map showing well-developed rail trasnportation network.
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/workspace/handleMed...
By contrast, Los Angeles at about the same time, dominated by streets:
https://slippyjenkins.com/four-ridiculously-hi-res-maps-of-l...
And they are reasonably well-connected, certainly by freeways (which are not grid-based), but increasingly so by mass transit; LA had a deservingly bad reputation for mass transit in the past, but it has made unimaginably large strides forward. On top of that, the bus system is vast and fills in the gaps where rail does not go.
How much such considerations weighed in to Cold War urban planning in the US I'm not sure.
What is unique about LA is the water rights. To get access, those small towns had to agree to get incorporated within greater LA.
Point being that other developing new cities (particularly in the south/sunbelt, think, say, Phoenix, DFW, and Atlanta, which grew tremendously from the 1960s to the present (air conditioning had a huge effect). Or any attempts to make LA more centralised or rationalised in terms of transporation.
My ideal model is not suburbia - thats what “LA” is to me. Nor is it NYC a city that has grown way beyond breaking even with return to scale
My ideal model is, for all its problems, Thessaloniki or Bilbao. That is smaller, forgotten European cities.
There your Dr.’s office can be a short walk from home because 6 story buildings are in fact very high density. If need be most inhabitants can walk downtown, but dont need to because public transport can be plentiful and cheap because the city is dimensionally small.
There is no way to support this statement on any economic grounds. If New York City wasn't almost as committed to not building as San Francisco it could be have a far greater population. The constant run up in property prices shows that even with the efforts to stop people moving they still want to.
If Tokyo can grow 50% in a decade in a country with declining population NYC could grow much more. People want to live in NYC. Let them.
Let me guess, you never go anywhere without your car??
Europe is mostly very many small, sub million, cities with jobs scattered throughout the city largely created before the automobile.
The jobs are spread throughout the city in the buildings people live in you can choose to live in the neighborhood where you work.
Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) while everyone lives far in a suburb.
This is a creation of modern urban planning; it's not a "natural" consequence of having skyscrapers. Europe has its megacities and hyperdense cores too (which do feature mixed business/residential use, unlike much of the U.S.), and America has its scattered historical towns.
And, it wasn't to pick on the US - Charleston SC or Savanah GA come to mind as an very livable cities (minus the tourists). Instead US cities suffered the advent of the car more since they were newer, less established.
Finally, I agree that (mis century “progressive”) Urban planning is mostly to blame. Where I don't agree is that the skyscraper is a blameless misused tool of the urban planner. In the cities that built them, skyscrapers hurt the city.
And European “megacities” are as unlivable (unless you’re 25-35) as any American megacity. Give me Bologna over Milan any day.
Concentrated business districts only help you avoid using a car if you live on top of them.
Population density is too low for anything but a few restaurants and a grocery store anywhere but in the city center and a few larger shopping centers around the outskirts. The mix with businesses give mostly lunch restaurants that are closed in the evenings and it's just as much a ghost town as anything else after hours.
I could easily walk two towns over, and a major European town was a short train ride away.
We certainly didnt have night clubs we certainly had fancy restaurants everywhere catering to families who wanted a night out.
Europe is not very monolithic!
Better an architecture where a core largely has everything it needs locally and only occasionally needs to go elsewhere; hierarchically seeking larger, harder to reach, memories
This is not the suburban model - in suburbia everything is far from everything. Even your next door neighbor. Instead, in my model, everything you typically immediately need (grocer, baker, pharmacist) is within walking distance (ideally, no public transit needed!).