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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a suburban office park before the pandemic. My commute to the office park wasn't substantially shorter than when I commuted to a downtown office and the office park was a lot more depressing. When I worked downtown, my coworkers would regularly explore new restaurants during lunch, have 1-on-1s over ice cream etc. The other benefit was that downtown had better public transit. Getting from one random place in the suburbs to another via public transit is a much harder problem to solve than getting people to a central area.

I wish we could solve zoning and permitting and just build our cities up.

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> I wish we could solve zoning and permitting and just build our cities up.

Lest people think that building up necessarily means skyscrapers, it doesn't. You can build a six-story building without any of the extreme engineering or exotic materials that skyscrapers require. Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam all manage high levels of density where the average resident will be living in a building of approximately six stories or less.

I don't get why people don't like skyscrapers. They're cool. I am from NYC, so maybe I'm used to it. My understanding is the major reason they aren't build as much outside of Manhattan is because the bedrock in Manhattan supports heavy structures.

As cool as skyscrapers are as achievements of engineering, they're only a good solution when land is so expensive that the cost of the land dominates the cost of the building. Skyscrapers just aren't materially cost-efficient and don't scale well; as they get taller, a larger and larger percentage of the floorspace must be sacrified in order to accommodate structural elements and elevators. And then you have other problems, like how they have to pump their own water rather than relying on ordinary water towers, or how wind and earthquake risk has to be accounted for as the height increases.

That is definitely true. On the other hand, we also aren't fully accounting for the cost of sprawl. All infrastructure gets much more expensive with sprawl and that cost is usually equalized over an entire metro area with the urban core incurring very little infrastructure cost per person while the suburbs frequently come out negative on contributing tax$ - infrastructure cost. Carbon emissions which are higher with low-density are another cost that's not priced in. It makes it really hard to find the equilibrium point if we aren't pricing everything in.

Yes, I'm not advocating for unchecked sprawl, all I'm saying is that there's a middle ground between suburban hell and Blade Runner dystopia, which brings me back around to my recommendation for six-ish-story buildings. European cities are the natural experiment that show how well even relatively "short" buildings can leverage the benefits of density.

I think we are pretty much in agreement.

For what it's worth, I thought blade runner was cool in that respect. Parts of Blade Runner were dystopian, but not the idea of having a big city (the advertising was dystopian iirc). My feeling is that if we have a strong urban core, we can rescue the countryside and nature from over-development. It's also nice to walk around cities. I have to drive everywhere outside of urban areas which sucks.

It also was surprising to me to learn that the Blade Runner city is considered dystopian. I had some of my greatest times in Asian mega cities like Shanghai and Tokyo. I think the key is to get away from subjective preferences in either direction, price in externalities, remove red tape, but also direct or indirect subsidies in either direction which right now benefits the suburbs by paying for their huge infrastructure needs. Maybe the result will still be that everyone wants to live in a SFH, but I think reality is gonna be a more diverse mix of options and in general more density because it's not economical. We also have a lot of people who right now cannot afford any home and I'm sure they'd prefer a shoebox between hundreds of other shoeboxes over a whole in the ground under a freeway bridge

That might have been true in the early 1900s when skyscrapers were new, but they can build skyscrapers on any kind of soil these days.

A good chunk of the tallest buildings in Boston are built on late 19th century landfill (Back Bay). Admittedly not an earthquake-prone area but still.

Another thing that seems to be missing from many people's mental model is that building up doesn't mean you need to destroy green spaces. In fact building up gives you more ability to create green spaces between the buildings.

Yes and these buildings are awful to live in. Paper mache boxes with no sound isolation. If you are going to live in an apartment in the US, it's very important to live in a tower, even on a low floor, and not a mid-rise, because extreme engineering and exotic materials (relative to US construction norms) are necessary to make multifamily living tolerable.

The exotic materials and construction required for a skyscraper are due to a need for massive strength:weight ratios, and are a separate consideration from sound insulation. A desire to use less material overall (and therefore need to support less weight) will naturally drive a skyscraper to have as little of this material as it can get away with, which means poor sound insulation is the default. Naturally, low buildings will also skimp on sound insulation because nothing's cheaper than nothing, but this is why you need regulation and building codes that take sound insulation into account.

Steel and concrete buildings are way quieter than wood in practice.

Yeah, but they make shorter buildings out of steel and masonry, too. Next time you're apartment hunting, you can call ahead and ask whether the building is lumber construction, if you're not sure.

I’m pretty familiar with the “luxury apartment” offerings in the Bay Area and they’re pretty much all steel towers or wood 5-over-1s. I’m told 5 stories is the standard because that’s what you can make out of wood; an extra story or three isn’t worth it with the shift to more expensive materials.

Some of the steel towers have their cheaper apartments in wood podiums; have to be careful.

I live in a 10-story condo. 9 or 10 stories seems about the lowest not to be made out of wood. Even these are very rare compared to <=5 or >=15.

Ok, so it seems like they're hard (or impossible) to find in your area, but that's not true everywhere.

That seems like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

It seems intuitive to me that just because mid-rises are likely to be built using the cheapest materials that satisfy building codes doesn't mean it's impossible to build them with better sound isolation and other amenities that improve living there.

So can you provide some reason why mid-rises must be that way, as opposed to the Almighty Market just failing, as it usually does, to provide anything other than the cheapest least-common-denominator solution?

As I understand it, buildings don’t pencil out with more expensive materials until they are also much taller.

Insofar as people want to correct the Almighty Market on housing, they ban mid rises entirely. I don’t think there’s a political constituency for “apartments, but good” and supply is way too constrained for developers to care. Maybe we could at least get some kind of testing/disclosure of acoustic properties since it’s so hard to tell on a tour.

> I wish we could solve zoning and permitting ...

Perhaps we should learn from other places that have better solutions already? E.g: Japan? Singapore? etc.

Somehow many western countries have gotten stuck in red tape and the inability to learn from other cultures.

I think the problem isn't that we don't know what effective policies would look like, but a political one.

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