> They cast these huge shadows and block views
Talk about first world problems. Expecting a city skyline to never change is ridiculous. The only problem is that so few people use these buildings. The best kind of density regulation requires _more_ density.
"In Athens, buildings are not allowed to surpass 12 floors so as not to block the view toward the Parthenon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_A...
I'd say this isn't typical of most of the world, but it's not unprecedented.
I live 40 stories up, surrounded by a lot of green spaces because the city doesn't need to mow down natural habitats for population growth. 6 floors seems quaint and archaic, all it's going to cause is endless depressing urban sprawl.
> There will never be enough supply in some place
We can always build higher, construction techniques are only getting better. I don't see why 60 floor buildings can't be a norm in most supply constrained cities.
The sweet spot for residential in Hong Kong is about 30-40 stories.
I could see whole cities of mostly >50 stories, but then unblockable views start to get immensely valuable right?
So as the city fills up and you discover which locations have more durable views, you need to start tearing down those skyscrapers to replace them with more luxurious ones.
Not sure if that’s dystopian, but I do quite like the view from up here.
Because there is no way we can make infrastructure follow in the short term. Public transports are already saturated here, we could remove cars, but there is still a limit in how many people can be on the ground in streets, parcs, shops...
Different strokes I guess.
(I'm in a 1400 sq ft / 130 m^2 2/2 apt in ATX.)
The average NYC studio is 50 m^2. The larger end for a Parisian studio is given to be 35 m^2.
I live in Nanterre, 5min away from the RER station, and my rent is 1200€/month for a 2-bedrooms apartment (50 m²). I have a <1h commute for about anywhere in Paris, and <20min for La Défense.
Point is, you can have affordable-ish rents in a business center without building humongous high-rises everywhere, as long as your public transport network can support it.
There's nothing forcing you maybe, but plenty of people will be stuck there because of circumstances.
In the Parisian example, it is legal to have an apartment without an in-unit bathroom, and this is straight up illegal in virtually every American city. A list of requirements for NYC (not exhaustive): https://www.renthop.com/qa/nyc/what-makes-an-apartment-illeg...
It's called tenement housing, in any case. Split the living room in half and rent the large walk-in closet, now a 2 bedroom is magically a 5 bedroom like an airline employee crashpad. :)
Some friends of mine were thinking about renting out an entire warehouse and constructing illegal residential tenement "apartments" in them.
There's only ~75 buildings in Paris >6 floors because of the 37m height limit.
Cities either have to have faster transportation, build underground, build higher, or build out farther. Increasing costs by keeping transportation horrible or limiting supply for the rich squeezes money from the lowers and the middle classes.
Very fast transport from nearby satellite communities would be the most ideal solution because then locality doesn't matter as much to most people.
Regarding Paris, at the current density, maybe it would be better to have higher building but with a smaller ground footprint (not sure if it's the right term), to leave space free for more parks?
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3115225/...
250m is the limit for strict regulation. Newer buildings tend to be around 100m.
I would imagine that has more to do with curbing local officials’ habits of encouraging land speculation to plump up their budgets. The central government is trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to property that needs to rise in value to boost wealth but also not become totally unaffordable for first time buyers, and overheating the market doesn’t help with the latter.
In the US alone, there are over 17 million vacant residential properties. Average un-occupancy rates for urban areas run 10%. That is more than plenty to house every homeless and very poor person.
There ought to be massive taxes on urban vacation, vacant housing, and entirely airbnb properties to encourage utilization by those who require housing rather than being hoarded/exploited by those who use them for recreational/investment purposes.
It’s a notoriously silly take.
Most vacant homes covered by that statistic are either 1) uninhabitable shells in low-demand rust-belt metros; or 2) houses that are for sale or between tenants. A small percentage of them are second homes. And while you could of course raise taxes on those homes (a policy I’d probably support in some form), it’s unlikely that it’d have much of an impact on the overall problem.
Also, see the Wikipedia page on Greenwich Hospital, London [3]:
An early controversy arose when it emerged that the original plans for the hospital would have blocked the riverside view from the Queen's House. Queen Mary II therefore ordered that the buildings be split, providing an avenue leading from the river through the hospital grounds up to the Queen's House and Greenwich Hill beyond.
The resulting effect is displayed well in this contemporary pic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naval_College.JPG
[1] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/planning/planning-p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Hospital,_London
It's nuts that huge buildings are built, and then stand empty almost year round. That obviously doesn't help with density.
I like how you casually take a dump on being environmentally friendly. Yes, city dwellers do have less of an impact on the environment. Like all animals we like as much space as possible. But unlike other animals we don’t need it to survive.
If more of us fit in cities, there would be more space that could be left for wild animals. Maybe that equilibrium will help the planet flourish for longer. That’s actually a good thing, even if your condescending comment won’t acknowledge it.
- rewilding
- fast and expansive rail network
- right to roam
Get these things right and we can lower our environmental footprint whilst maintaining - or even improving - quality of life for the average individual.
Heck, trains don't even have to be fast for much of it: Simply making passenger trains a priority would be a huge improvement - right now, passenger trains have to wait for freight trains.
If the settlements are very small then the number of people driving to the nearest station will be low anyway.
I’m optimistic for services that are halfway between bus and taxi.
My county is rural but not that rural and has a density of 12 per km². It's a 2 hour drive to a small city.
As an example, the Midwest has roughly the same population as France, and the TGV network overlaid kind of lines up with major population centers. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/04/04/european-urban...
Some people who constantly advocate for dense urban often would also rather small towns just didn't exist. Dense urban for everybody! They imagine utopia to be a hand full of dense cities, surrounded by wilderness untouched by human habitation, with high speed train tracks crisscrossing that wilderness to get people from one dense city to another. No roads, no cars, no suburbs, no towns or rural villages. Just pack everyone into these urban islands. Things like bus service, and "last mile" are not needed in this utopia.
Three narrowish three-story houses replacing one McMansion is still a tripling of density on a single lot. Take this Dutch village for instance: https://www.melbtravel.com/edam-netherlands-village-preserve...
(I have planted potatoes though)
Consequently, it's not something we consciously think about. We just assume everyone has seen the night sky. I certainly never thought seeing the stars and the milky way would mean so much for an 11 year old. She wanted to stay outside so she could stare at them all night. But the mosquitoes, bless them, put a stop to those plans.
Only one side in this debate wants to make laws that encode their particular housing preferences in law. It’s the side that wants to prevent new construction, not the side that wants to allow people to make free choices in an open market.
So we optimize to put people close to their jobs so they get lots of leisure time with their family.
If they don't want that they can always live farther out. That way everyone is happy.
The political situation and the relative expectations of the local communities are sufficiently different so as to cause European style urban planning to fail here. You have to engineer to the human and political constraints as well.
US towns and cities are drunk on debt and bailouts and that is a competitive constraint on growth.
As someone who grew up in such an environment, 90+% of my peers spent the entirety of our adolescence doing as much as possible to get away from suburban hells like that. And you know what's ironic? I have way more access to actual nature now that I live in a city close to some national parks than I did when I was younger and was trapped in endless suburbia.
You're right, yet there are many cities that still restrict building development in the name of protecting certain views.
One example is the City of Vancouver that has a page dedicated to explaining the views they are trying to protect for real estate zoning.[1]
[1] https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va...
That will just expand the market for such investments and make even larger areas unlivable.
It's like they think mountains do not move. Rivers always run the same course. It's comical and tragic.
NYC created the world's first zoning laws in response to a building casting shadows: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/background.page
The zoning described was actually quite generous by modern standards; you could technically build as much as you wanted as long as it fit the prescribed cake tier shape, and you could build theoretically unlimited height on a certain portion, I believe the center quarter of the lot. There is no city in the US today where you could build something as tall as the Empire State Building as of right; and yet the older regulations allowed that.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. 6 buildings taller than the ESB have been completed in NYC since 2014, mostly residential towers of the sort described in the OP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N...
Nearly all tall buildings in New York these days are legally built through assembling "air rights." Zoning has predetermined height/FAR limits for all lots, but in certain areas it is possible to sell currently unused rights and transfer them to the owner of another lot. This allows some developers to build taller but keeps overall neighborhood square footage around a prescribed limit. This way, you can build a spiky tower or two here and there on Billionaire's Row (the general name for the area) but the street cannot become a wall of them.
More info on air rights: https://streeteasy.com/blog/what-are-nyc-air-rights-all-abou...
But these days in most American cities there is surprisingly little you can actually do with your property without subjecting yourself to additional review or exceptions.
Some amount of community review is good at a base level, but the gone wrong example YIMBY activists likes to trot out is the ridiculous example of San Francisco's "historic laundromat" saga. https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...
Even once a building is built, zoning legally constricts what you can do inside it. Most residential developments do not allow operating small businesses from the home (you can't be a hairdresser in your own house). I'm not sure how exactly this will play out once the pandemic is over and nosy neighbors start poking around at who's WFH. In fact this already happened to a Seattle cidery: https://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/food/article/yonder-cide...
For the past 30 years this has not happened even once in a major city. Developer will not build so many building as to drip the price. Maybe its time to accept that you are perpetuating a myth.
Not withstanding unoccupied real estate investments are a problem in every major city. It's usually wealthy foreign investors living far away in particular...e.g. Russia -> London, China -> Singapore/Vancouver, etc. really seems like non-occupied real estate purchases by foreign capital ought to be restricted a bit legally
Cities and counties can also implement vacancy taxes and such to somewhat lessen this problem.
It has also the benefit that owning a home doesn't get preferential tax treatment than renting.
Income from wealth should be treated as normal income, it shouldn't matter if you consume the income yourself or receive cash for it.
Meanwhile city coffers fill up with cash that can be used to build social housing.
The only downside to LVT on non primary residences is the epic political fight it would require against the super rich.
If you wanted to design a building to pay as little land tax as possible, this is what it would look like.
They also purchased "air rights" from neighboring buildings.
Their LVT bill (assuming air rights were also taken into account) would not be small.
It seems that people also don't actually like living in them. It's particularly noteworthy that they're speaking out about it because they're risking doing real damage to their investment by doing so. That's a sign that they really don't like it.
If it were built primarily as a place to live rather than as an investment I don't think it would look the same at all. There would be far greater emphasis on livability, less on views and probably a much lower height.
A LVT increases the cost per square foot more for shorter buildings. A 10 story building pays about twice as much on a square foot basis as a 20 story building. The whole point is to encourage taller buildings.
(It’s not quite that simple since taller buildings probably have less usable square footage per floor, but that’s basically how it works.)
Yes these owners 'can afford' more but it will definitely discourage what OP was talking about that it's just land banking for future asset appreciation. The land value on this kind of property is extremely high so tax is not low even if it's a tall building
Whatever the tax on these buildings is under LVT, it will be more unaffordable by their neighbors that are shorter and use more land. There is a higher incentive for neighboring buildings to get torn down and get replaced by taller skyscrapers like these.
It’s just odd to point to the buildings least affected by the tax as the sort of development that would be discouraged.
The comment you're replying to didn't say they were.
Maybe at the absolute top end, there isn't enough rental demand, eg the $90m apartment mentioned may not fetch $400k/month in rent. But I hear the same argument for middle-class apartments in moderately expensive cities: rich people buy $600k apartments in Dublin, Vancouver, Sydney, but turn down $2500/month in rental income even in red hot rental markets.
I don't buy it, though I don't have a clear alternative explanation.
Buying real assets is seen as a way to protect their wealth when it is at risk of being confiscated or devalued by their home governments.
Another way to think about these apartments is similar to art. Billionaires spend obscene money on art, and they aren't renting out those paintings or really even looking at them very much.
Therefore, renting it out is a secondary concern. You could rent it out, but that comes with all sorts of liabilities - what if tenants damage your property, stop paying, claim squatter's rights, infest the property with bedbugs, etc. There's a number of things that could go wrong with renting, and many landlords rarely make much profit on rental units.
So for these millionaires and billionaires it's easier to simply not rent them out at all.
A tenant in a single unit/house will easily drop the price by 10% or more from my experience trying to buy a single family home in SoCal in 2016.
As well, who can afford to rent these units? The mortgage/break-even point for for a $8mil value would be $37,825 a month.
... is how imagine their thought process.
Like inheriting it, which is the shadiest of shady ways to make money
In this country there was a time yes where inheriting it is shady and it’s something I fear our conservative brothers have forgotten. The problems of multi-generational wealth were clearly visible to our founders looking at Europe. It should be patently offensive to all Americans
What matters is the turnover of inheritance.
If you have the same 200 families holding all the wealth for 500 years, you have a problem (like several countries in europe).
There is nothing wrong with a hardworking person to reach wealth, and for heirs to keep it, if its properly managed. The issue is they should be able to lose it thru squander. Bail outs, lobbying, regulatory capture, prevent that natural ineptitude from taking place (securing thru connections what heirs couldn't do like their predecessors....that is, satisfying customers or creating shrewd innovation).
So if you gain something, does that means somebody else needs to lose? Is that how people justify stealing or scamming? Or is that how they cope with their envy that rich people must be stealing or scamming.
I once knew a person that had this theory about happiness. If someone is happy, someone else needs to be sad.
I feel sad for anyone who has this mindset. It's way nicer on our side, where we do win-win deals, and know to be happy, the people around us need to be happy.
If you would like this world-view to undergo some critical analysis, I strongly recommend Anand Giridharadas' take in "Winners take All" (condensed in this google-talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM).
He specifically addresses the negative points of the "win-win"-mentality, and in my opinion, makes a strong point that a society built on a "win-win" culture is bound to be doomed.
"To those at Google watching this who don't know the story: Google initially decided, for the first time in its history, to not publish this video to its Talks at Google site here on YouTube after it was recorded. This presentation was given on the second week of September, note the publishing time lag. Giridharadas contacted Google to ask why, and his contact said "I'm not on that team anymore" and was blown off. He then leaked the story to a leading tech journalist, who started calling Google for comment because she was working on a story about why, for the first time ever, a Talks at Google video was not published. They published it the same week -- obviously reluctantly and under pressure. The only reason you're seeing this guys is because power is doing damage control. . Wake the f** up."
If the parents earned that wealth through voluntary exchange, and they didn't do so by exploiting negative externalities, then it's theirs to do with as they wish. If they want to pay 1000 people to fan them, start a charity, or give it all to their kids, that's their prerogative.
It follows from the concept of private property. The parents earned that wealth at one point, in that someone voluntarily gave it to them in exchange for subjective utility of equal or greater value.
What right is it of yours to take it away from them just because you don't approve of the way they're spending it? They can buy 500 Ferraris but can't give it to their kids?
In my view it's plain theft dressed up in layers of abstraction and indirection just to hide that fact. (No, not all taxation is theft, as some level is necessary, but swiping half or all of someone's property is).
The accumulation of wealth across multiple generations has an extremely long history spanning back centuries of corruption, self dealing, preferentially treatment, and the hoarding of the more desirable assets (land for example) that the heirs did not earn or work for and cannot be enjoyed by a new entrant in the market. Being entitled to something because of your blood is fundamentally unamerican. We fought for our independence from such a system.
This country.. at least as how I was raised was one of grit, hard work, and innovation which determined who you’d be in life. A country where anyone with a novel idea or ruthless cunning can carve out a slice for themselves. The idea of inheritance undermines that, heirs did not earn anything by being born to the right parent, own things they did not work for.
This country is too young to have the problems of some European nations past but I think it’s starting to go that way. I think the founders saw the problems caused by bloodline rule and heirs and didn’t want that here.
There should be no inheritance. The heirs didn’t work for it, they’re no more entitled to it then I am. If a parent is wealthy then the kids will enjoy a life of potential high society, connections, and Ivy League educations, but they have to make it for themselves. I stand firmly behind that American ideal
> the heirs did not earn or work for.
> heirs have an advantage they themselves did not earn, own things they did not work for.
In this case, the parent (X) gave their wealth to their child (Y), and in return they get to satisfy their "empire"- and family- building ambition, which in subjective utility terms to them is superior to alternative uses of that wealth. Perhaps they've been working all their life for this motivation, it drives many people. A perceived level of accomplishment that extends post-death.
That's the nature of a decentralized, high-freedom world. X and Y will often transact and it's not clear what the subjective value exchange is.
As long as that transaction isn't hurting you through negative externalities, it's my opinion that you have no business interfering in that transaction.
> I don’t care what they spend it on, I never claimed to care.
If at age 60, they buy 500 Ferraris, that's okay. If at age 60, they instead send that wealth to their kids, that's not okay.
The former transaction (wealth <--> Ferraris) is okay.
The latter transaction (wealth <--> subjective value from family/empire-building) is not okay.
Personally, if I was rich, I would derive much higher subjective value from giving that wealth to my kids than buying 500 Ferraris.
> The heirs didn’t work for it, they’re no more entitled to it then I am.
I would say yes, because it was a voluntary exchange from the charity to that individual. We've no business in interfering in that.
We may think that the purpose of the charity is stupid, but that's the private, decentralized decision that they've come to with their own wealth.
> It is in the best interest of the nation and the individuals living at that time that the assets and wealth of that nation be accessible to anyone living in it.
In practice, it so often ends with an undesirable outcome. If we did a 100% inheritance tax, do we know the impact on frivolous consumption or people's motivations?
In theory, nobody is really a utilitarian anyway, people's determinations come from biological/a priori frameworks and a subjective sense of fairness and justice with a tinge of impact from jealousy and self-interest (I'm not accusing you of that).
Reasoning from a set of basic axioms which generally, but not always, point in the right direction has a better track record, in my opinion.
> (like plots of lands)
And honestly I’d rather them buy 1000 Ferarris and crash every single one. I don’t even care if it doesn’t go to the government, on a more serious note it could all go to the American Cancer Society or a charity of their choosing, or local municipality…
I’ve personally committed to dying poor. I’ve met trust fund kids (not that I’m anywhere near that level) but money breeds entitlement, especially at a young age where they may not be emotionally ready. That’s not something I want for my kids. We’re all in tech here, we do well enough to corrupt at least a little
And it’s still unamerican.
I guess the impersonal, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps "rugged individualism" aspect of Americanness clashes with family I'll-help-in-every-way-I-can collectivism - how do you square that circle?
Then the transaction will be taxed as income for those 1000 people. Gifts to children, particularly adult children, should be similarly taxed as income whether they are passed while the parents are alive or when they die.
They haven’t ruined anything.
Moreover, even if you disagree about their beauty, so what? People should be free to build things — even things you don’t personally like!
Now from end to end across Manhattan, most of 57th Street is becoming vacant in preparation for construction. The process is likely to take 20 or 30 years to complete, similar to what happened on 10th Avenue. There is more money to be made by letting buildings sit empty for years. 250 West 55th, at the cross street of 55th & 8th avenue, was an empty corner lot for 28 years while they waited for the rest of the buildings on the block to become vacant for teardown.
Some areas are especially derelict -- between 5th and 6th Avenue in particular. It's an absolute eyesore and source of daily construction noise and will likely be so for the rest of my natural life.
This has ruined my neighborhood.
As for "people should be free to build things", we decided over 100 years ago that wasn't the case. Not unrestrained by zoning laws and concern for the community.
That was an enormous mistake. It's the source of our housing shortage in high-demand areas and it's probably costing us literally trillions of dollars. [0]
> If you think that the buildings are ugly and damage the city, you'd be opposed to them. You like them so are not.
This is what you believe, not what I believe. In fact, I think people should be free to build buildings I think are ugly.
[0] https://ggwash.org/view/42946/zoning-the-hidden-trillion-dol...
Anyway, I disagree with your article's point of view. I don't think letting more people live in San Jose or NYC would unlock huge 10% improvements to GDP, and, even if it were, there's a value to being able to live in single family homes. If WFH is here to stay, then my suspicion is that NYC is going to continue suffering from its 2020 housing glut.
Of course that's true. Again, my view is that people should be free to build whatever they want. Single-family zoning makes the alternatives illegal, not the other way around! Proponents of single-family zoning get a lot of mileage out of the implication that urbanists want to impose their way of living on everybody else, but the opposite is quite plainly the case. Only one side in this debate wants to encode their preferences in law.
With any luck, NFTs and crypto in general might reduce this kind of investment in property. They might turn out to be a better place to park excess cash.
There are 15 million items offered for sale on OpenSea, for example, and each one of those will have cost the artist $50-100 in fees to list. Almost all of those will either fail to sell, or will sell at a loss to the artist. So, although the crypto-rich want you to believe you're democratising finance or sticking up for the little people against "the elite" or however they phrase it, the reality is the exact opposite of what you describe, i.e. NFTs are moving money from the hands of the artists to the crypto-rich.
"These numbers do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated." [0]
[0]: https://thatkimparker.medium.com/most-artists-are-not-making...
Most artists aren't going to sell, in no small part because there are a LOT of artists out there in the world and because selling art is Hard. I've met plenty of folks that spend more time selling art and being social enough to sell art than they spend actually making that art. And this is just the average seller: Few can actually make it a career.
Money, connections, luck, and a lot of social labor are pretty well required to get your art selling at higher prices, and might get rich folks to buy your stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em7nqDqQ8oM
It has a great explanation of the difference between complex and complicated, and the fragility of our systems compared to nature's ones.
Skyscrapers fuck up a city how???? Do you expect Manhattan to consist entirely of 2 story suburban homes? It's attitudes like yours that are the reason the streets are full of so many homeless.
That is definitely one of the saddest parts for me. These billionaires (many of whom got their wealth in shady circumstances) are just using these condos to park their money. I may think NFTs are insane but at least when people with too much money park their wealth there they don't fuck up an entire city.