The Economics of Skyscraper Height
buildingtheskyline.org
buildingtheskyline.org
The reason why we won't have NYC or SF looking like Star Trek¹ is that the people are already wealthy and they chose to live here in the way it is so the people who would want Star Trek SF won't come to present-day SF to make it into Star Trek SF. Star Trek SF may be some unassuming town in America or (more likely) one of the emerging economies: maybe East Asia, but maybe if African nations capture their demographic dividend (unlikely IMHO) maybe them.
¹ I will have someone LongBets this on my behalf if someone wants to take the other side. San Francisco will never be like Star Trek's hyper-developed San Francisco. Willing to nail down specifics too.
EDIT: Maybe I should make an exception for high-wealth places with dictators/monarchs. There they can bypass any normal human process.
EDIT 2: No bets. Bets are off. Looks like I'd just lose money on this one because of NYC.
I'm not so sure about this -- the people who've moved to SF in the last 10 years have absolutely changed SF, and did not move to SF because they liked the way it is; they moved here because of work.
1) A lot of what makes up Manhattan or SF today won't last forever. Cramming new stuff in is hitting points of diminishing returns. But as those buildings get more and more aged and/or obsolete, there's gonna be a higher need that doesn't exist today.
2) The Star Trek time frame is really long! NIMBY's a hundred or two hundred years from now will probably have very different tolerances for what they'd be willing to see created.
How would we reconcile that prediction with Billionaires Row in Manhattan that was a high-wealth place but not a high-growth place that has built a number of residential skyscrapers recently. What's changed from the example that disproves your hypothesis to the near future?
Isn't the more accurate way of saying this 'My argument is wrong'?
But if it's not clear for any reason, here we go: I was wrong.
It may not have 'ultra high' buildings, but those exist for different reasons and the economics are different.
SF has earthquakes and a shifty foundation which is material.
Maybe I am misunderstanding your post? Skyscrapers are possible in SF. The Salesforce tower is 1,070 feet tall. They did have to go down 300 feet to anchor to bedrock, though.
The theory makes some sense if you have a wealthy city that's remained stubbornly low-rise (Paris?). But if you love NYC you probably like the skyscrapers, rather than viewing them as a necessary evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N...
In Europe, if you exclude Russia from the top 20 tallest buildings, the UK (2), Germany (2) and Spain (2) have the tallest buildings, with the UK and Spain buildings built in the 2000s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_E...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_N...
See Pinterest paying $100mm to break their lease in a new development in SF.
See AOC limiting new AMZN business, major banks distributing their work force in NYC.
Anecdotally, my company did a survey (10k+ employees) and the vast majority didn't want full-time work from home in perpetuity.
I think it works well for some industries and functions, but it's an absolute cluster for others. Add in the inevitable "COL adjustment" for people who live in LCOL areas, it will be a few percentage of employees who make a permanent change.
Once Covid is a thing of the past, we'll see the vast majority of people return to work in an office - likely with a lot more "work from home" flexibility, but still an expectation that they are in the office for some percentage of their work week.
Just my 2 cents. I could be entirely wrong.
This is because they have found WFH to be so successful.
I am honestly somewhat wary of this. It seems like execs saw the dollar signs flashing and are starting this, yet we barely have any data on this affects levels of productivity. It hasn't been that long for them to get that data.
I've had remote-only jobs and jobs where I went into an office every day, and I have many more pleasant memories and longer-lasting relationships from the jobs which had an onsite component.
I doubt there is a popular belief that says "tall skyscrapers do not have an economic rational". Really weird starting point to make this article
>How are you going to get elevators up beyond 5 floors and social distance?
Btw, there are reasonable arguments that density was not the primary driving factor for Covid in NYC.
Something like 60% of the time I'm by myself and 20% of the time I can maintain reasonable distance. Furthermore, <1 minute of exposure is unlikely to spread covid.
It could perhaps start with a few chapters on how "When I was 18, I'd planned to take the summer off to go to the Pyrenees" followed by how the author rarely ever fell sick.
Halfway through, there'll be some text about how "But the culture of mask wearing in Asia led to far lower viral loads for those exposed, scientists say, allowing them to fight off the disease. Few, if any, actually fell ill. But in my hometown..." and then some folksy take on what their hometown is like. A small town in Ohio is a good one.
"By the time scientists had realized the value of face masks, that hometown had been ravaged by both disease and closures". Now you can insert some tale about a local diner that was open for 50 years and now had to close.
Approximately 1400 words later you can quote a few papers that revealed that with universal masking risk of infection is remarkably low. It will be an unprecedented discovery. Then a few Taboola ads at the bottom about how "This new garment will take the world by storm" with someone wearing a mask.
And then we can discuss it on HN. If you remember me then, make sure to link to this comment.
The shrillest thinking but/thus the most influential is this moronic idea of phallus symbols. According to which, they are a power tool for the patriachy, which albeit being so powerful the patriachy is simoultaniously so immature that it can't refrain from playing with its genitalia in public.
The fact that this phallus idiocy is virtually non-rebuked in academia and still considered established, tells you about the influence on popular belief the reactionaries have had.
On the contrary, skyscrapers are a sign of a culture's virtousness. Which is why dictators (and also immature policy makers [1]) throughout modern history try to emulate the skylines of these cities [2], but never achieve it [3]. Their artificial skylines either look like an experiment gone bad [4, 5], consist of only a few (one) tall buildings [6] or are confined to some "new business district" on the outskirts of their capital [7, 8].
There are other moronic reactionary, influential, ideas like the one of "clouding" ("Verschattung"), according to which because of skyscrapers we're either dying from Vitamin D deficiency or because of sadness because we can't see our monuments anymore. This is ignoring the fact that a 2 story building is already enough to cast a shadow upon you, thus in most old towns you were already unable to see any landmarks and already were "clouded" (in warmer areas even intentionally).
On the contrary, while most skyscrapers will look functional, many achieve a democratization of identity, in that they enable more people see their city's icons.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikingturm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Pearl_Tower
[5] http://www.globalpostmark.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/201...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabemba_Tower
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_City_(businnes_center)
Not sure if parametricist cat pics
=.=
are any improvement on Sphynx picsMaking high density living bearable and even desirable that's the art we need (and millenia of urbanization has been about) to master.
[0] I'm aware that dense cities are not automatically more sustainable. But I suspect is easier to achieve sustainability due to proximity.
South American sprawl was the worst in terms of easy access to 'nature'.
So I guess it depends what you consider human scale.
I think a lot of this could be solved with a couple of improvements to building codes:
1) require far stronger noise dampening, equivalent to that of detached homes. That is, regular day-to-day life should not register at all - including e.g. watching a movie with the sound system turned up (including bass). There should also be almost no tolerance for vertically travelling noise, you should be able to stomp around or drag furniture without disturbing your downstairs neighbour.
2) Force arrangement of shared interior walls such that your bedroom will never be adjacent to the neighbours living room, so that if noise does leak through it should not be able to disturb anyone's sleep. This should also affect the routing of water pipes and such, so that water flow and pipe knocking does not intrude.
3) The above points should be enforced by random sample testing of some proportion (somewhere in the range of 15-30%) of the buildings apartments before it is certified for occupancy. As in, testers would randomly select two adjacent apartments, set up loud music in one and measure the noise bleed-through in the other to see if it's within tolerances.
Basically, there will always be a subset of the population of a high density building who are selfish jackasses. Construction should be changed to reflect the fact that people are unreasonable and compensate for it, instead of turning it into an externality e.g. making everyone install carpets in their apartments to reduce floor noise. I don't want to be aware of my neighbours existence outside of seeing them in shared hallways.
I have to confess, based on similar situations I've been in, that I wasn't sure until I got to the end of that sentence whether it would be "sleep" or "TV watching".
Seems like you're under-selling density here.
A dense city may not be automatically sustainable but it seems logical that denseness would be necessary to create a much more sustainable city than today.
Oppositely, there is degree of sprawl is almost automatically unsustainable, in ecological and economic terms.
Paris, or Siena, or many other examples achieve very high density, with buildings that are 3-4 floors high.
Paris may be the former, but it is no Manhattan or Chicago DT.
I'm not sure we'd ever reach that point in the developed world. Populations have already peaked (it's only going up because of immigration) and sprawl is self-limiting because who wants to do a 4 hour daily commute?
Not in the larger scheme of things. People move to suburb X before grid lock and have a one hour commute. Enough people move there that the commute is suddenly two and a half hours or more. But people keep moving to the area because the houses exist, the land is still relatively cheap and so-forth. The bottom may even fall out of the market but the place exists, someone will buy the houses. Exurbs can easily become suburban ghettos like Antioch or Modesto.
But naturally, it's not just the commute part the closes in on exurbs. Cost of services is higher and once the places become less-than-upper-middle-class, they don't have a tax base to pay for expensive services, they become less desirable than urban ghettos.
You could build a super dense city, but a limited population is going to want to live there - people with kids, etc.
Unless you’re willing to force them to live in a city, some people are going to seek out low cost areas and be a source of employees for the companies doing the same.
Ironically, an increase in remote work would probably exacerbate sprawl.
Is it? Or only if we want to keep living the way we do? I assume if we all became vegan polycultural subsistence farmers it would be more sustainable but we would be more spread out.
I understand the benefits of single family units and a private outdoor space but I feel like there are diminishing returns. It's probably possible to retain more than 75% the value of a single family unit while doubling density.
If you live on the 50th floor, you have to travel a total of 100 floors every day. You're taking the lift, and taking 10x the energy to do so. Also, IIRC skyscrapers need machine-powered air ventilation which also takes power.
Of course, the real killer might be the embodied energy - a 1-story flat can have a lot less embodied energy than an equivalent-sized 100-story skyscraper, simply because you can build the flat out of low-embodied-energy mud brick, whereas the skyscraper is necessarily high-strength steel with reinforced concrete anchoring underground.
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But I think we're getting tunnel-vision. This is a social problem, perhaps it has a social solution.
The important question here is: why are some plots of land so much more valuable to live on, than others?
Perhaps if instead of spending money on building more skyscrapers, we instead spent it on decentralising, more people would be able to live in bumfuck-nowhere and that would reduce demand for existing skyscrapers without a ton of energy-expensive construction. There are plenty of rapidly emptying small towns around, after all.
IMO silicon valley is public enemy #1 here - surely the IT industry is more suited to remote working and doesn't need some of the (AFAICT) most expensive housing in the entire US. That really suggests to me that there's a ripe juicy social problem that would dribble out a ton of benefits when bitten into.
To do the maths:
* It takes 10 joules to lift 1kg 1m
* If we assume each floor is 4m, then 200m needs to be lifted daily
* If we assume a 100Kg human then our daily commute requirements are 200,000 Joules -- (200 * 100 * 10).
To put this number into other terms that's about 56 Watt Hours - the energy required to run a decent laptop for an hour.
Gasoline has ~ 31,500,000 Joules per litre in it it. If we were 10% efficient at using that energy we would need 0.06l of it (0.02 US Gallons).