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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

A 1000 sq ft home costs nowhere near $200,000 to build. The land, on the other hand, costs more than that alone in major cities.

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> The land, on the other hand, costs more than that alone in major cities.

You can build apartment buildings 5, 10, 20 or even 80 floors high. The cost of land per apartment can be made quite small by building higher.

But a 30-story apartment building will block my view of the river!

You can mock, but if someone bought a house, and paid a lot for it so they can view the river, then this is a reasonable concern.

In that case and if you truly own something like a view. I'd suggest something like that should be taxed too. And since the person owning it puts a premium value to it. Something in the ballpark of 40% of the net price of the home extra apart from the property taxes is perfectly justifiable.

They're more than welcome to buy the air rights to the lots between them and the river.

Well the shadow of a tall building covers sunshine in a large area. This limits its applicability.

I'd rather have an apartment building than be homeless in the sunshine.

As you build up, the construction costs (and ongoing maintenance costs) per square foot of livable space can increase significantly, though. You need more engineering, more expensive materials, fancy cranes, extra safety procedures, etc. Plus more of the potentially livable floor space is instead taken up by elevator shafts and machinery.

Here's one almost 30 stories high apartment building in a place where the location and land don't have too much value as such (Atlantic City). 1,000 sq.ft. 2br condos seem to be priced from $160,000 to $250,000.

https://www.zillow.com/b/bella-atlantic-city-nj-5Xjxz9/

That's a 30-year old building in Atlantic City, though. The building itself will have depreciated since then, and Atlantic City isn't a very desirable area any more. The current prices won't necessarily reflect the original construction costs.

There are some actual numbers in this Fannie Mae commentary:

http://www.fanniemae.com/resources/file/research/emma/pdf/MF...

The average costs to build 1-3 and 4-7 story apartment buildings was $192.0/ft^2 in 2017, compared to $233/ft^2 for 8-24 story buildings. I assume the square footage includes common spaces. I don't know if they attempted to control for sample biases (e.g. if taller buildings tend to be build in areas with higher labor costs).

Getting apples to apples numbers to compare can be difficult. People tend to built more stories in more desireable (read expensive) places.

Simply builing to 5 floors with dense infill would be higher density than any US city west of New Jersey.

And is approximately the scale of central Paris.

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