Perhaps because a tall residential building in a tourist spot is an eyesore.
People go there to see something scenic, not more of what they have at home, or worse.
In my corner of the world people move out of large cities not because they enjoy driving so much, but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits
Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
That's because there's not enough housing in the city limits.
>Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
That's not true, adding a few more sky scrapers increases the amount of space for people and does not impact the amount of sunlight people can enjoy.
Cities can also do things like add more rail lines, so people can commute from further away -- which also increases the amount of space for people.
If you build it like an eyesore, it will be an eyesore, yes. Here is a multi-story building that I lived as a student in and it housed another 10k: https://www.ruseducation.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LOMON...
But I agree that building glass+concrete rectangles is a not a great idea for tourist spots (or anywhere, really).
When they were young, my grandparents moved into a whole district built from scratch for the purpose of housing workers from a nearby steelmill.
Communism notwithstanding, the district is amazingly well planned and - what's dearly missing in modern, hyper-optimized construction - sufficiently spread apart.
Exactly! If you rise up enough, it becomes possible to have green zones around these big buildings and make living actually enjoyable.
On the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong and most of Manhattan - I don't look forward to living there, even if some condos are really nice inside.
Even high-end condos cost less than a low-end house to build, since the land costs are amortized among many units.