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Comment by sbov | Hacker News Reader

I'm not claiming there isn't a problem, but these numbers seem odd to me. 75% of the square footage was built between 1900 and 1930. But only 40% of the buildings could not have been built today.

Is it that new buildings are roughly half the size? Or did they somehow manage to build buildings between 1900 and 1930 that could have been built today? If they could do it then, what is so hard about doing it now?

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Most buildings in Manhattan are old. Many of them are larger than current zoning would allow. It is very hard to change zoning law, or the political status quo in general, in wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan— we have accreted a process that makes change very difficult, though not as ridiculous as San Francisco.

Many new buildings in Manhattan are built in central Manhattan neighborhoods where tall buildings are legal. But new buildings built in wealthy areas of lower Manhattan can be smaller than older ones. See this rendering of 300 Lafayette Street, to be built in place of a gas station, and about half as tall as the 1920s building down the street: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-OA513_NYWTD0_P...

Even midtown Manhattan has zoning restrictions, which is crazy to me. People like to talk about preserving neighborhood characters -- well the neighborhood character of midtown (say 30th-50th excluding east of 3rd) is tall buildings and streets as canyons. That should be a free for all except for preserving a few key buildings and their environs (e.g. grand central).

Similarly, the telos of the LES and EV are cheap houses built as densely as possible at the time they were built to house poor immigrants. You honor that history most by allowing dense housing not by preserving ugly block after ugly block in situ.

By all means preserve Striver's Row and some of the nice block of Greenwich Village but there's no good reason to keep large parts of Manhattan static. Let Manhattan be Manhattan, if you want static move to some quaint village in Westchester.

My understanding is that in Midtown there's been a stronger appetite for building tall on the avenues vs. mid block between the avenues.

That's, as I recall, why there was the infamous chopping of 200 feet from the under-construction Nouvel Tower on West 53rd St - right smack dab in the middle of the land of skyscrapers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/53W53

which in my view was a minor travesty and loss of a great skyline opportunity.

1. I'm assuming the 60% were small enough, short enough, set back enough from the property line, etc., that they would meet zoning regulations.

2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930.

>2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930.

I don't think the population of NYC has increased that much from 1930. By 1930 NYC was a massive city and many boroughs have shrank since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...

Shows were population shrinkage and growth have occurred.

True, but Manhattan, where people think it the most packed, hasn't. The population has gone down.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, for most visitors, Manhattan is basically midtown--and they've certainly seen pictures of the financial district even if they've never gone down there. Even for a lot of residents, Manhattan effectively ends at around 100th Street or so. (I've been going to Manhattan all my life and even lived there for a summer and I've never been north of Central Park except to drive into the city and to visit The Cloisters once.)

Manhattan used to be far more dense than it is today

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-de...

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