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Comment by southernplaces7 | Hacker News Reader

The amount of sniffy negativism on this site is absurd. The building certainly does look out of place in OKC but so what? If the local council and zoning procedures approve it, then maybe, just maybe the people of the city don't mind too much. We'll see. A tiny bit of a sense of wonder at a new supertall, even if it's in an unlikely location is more of what I'd have expected from a site filled by supposed tech enthusiasts. Bear in mind also, the NIMBY bullshit of places like SFO has nothing to do with any housing problems or lack of them in Oklahoma City.

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You're allowed to have bad taste or do things like pain your house with leopard print or leave rusted cars in your front yard as decorations. Doesn't make it good.

In my tech-enthusiast mind I'm really interested in making peoples lives better so something that would instill some wonder in me would be something more like building Parisian boulevards, walkable, tree-line streets, and parks and such. Maybe even a train or bike lane. Something that would actually improve the livability of the city. An out of place skyscraper is just out of place. There's nothing particularly wonderful or interesting about it aside from how ridiculous it is. It reminds me of Dubai. Sadly, I thought we were trying to move past the Walmart-ization of the world.

> something more like building Parisian boulevards, walkable, tree-line streets, and parks and such. Maybe even a train or bike lane.

I've often wondered why a billionaire doesn't found a new city along those lines. There's a lot of very cheap land all around this vast country, and economic value creation isn't tied to geography as much as it used to be.

Heck, you don't even have to start one from scratch. I live in a midsize city away from the expensive coastal areas with a downtown that's full of potential. It wouldn't take a whole lot of money to truly revitalize it.

I find it very confusing as well. Then again it's also typically the same people who say if only you'd tax me more that would fix society's problems and then when you send them the link [1] so they can voluntarily do what they say they want to do they say no! not like that!.

A number of people complain about "billionaires" for being rich and whatnot. My biggest gripe with them is they're often unimaginative and have no taste.

[1] https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

Most land is already zoned by local authorities, and their rezoning would also be controlled by said local authorities. This type of development is not legal in most of America’s zoned land.

Yep, and thankfully most downtown areas like the ones described by the person you are replying to are zoned for density and new development, and locally elected officials are very incentivized to increase their tax base and do good things for their local economy and so they're willing to work with developers on zoning updates, variances, and approvals.

There are no significant barriers for anyone who is motivated to build.

Problem in most housing constrained cities is 'downtown' is very small. As an example, only about 7% of residential Seattle land is zoned for multifamily, and that is an even smaller portion of the metropolitan area. That's not sufficient for a city that has grown by a third since 2000; and Seattle is considered a friendly city for such multifamily developments.

I agree that what is zoned for a city like Seattle isn't going to be representative of most American cities, and in particular the ones that the person I was replying to was talking about (mid-sized American cities away from the coasts).

Personally I'm less interested in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, etc. because the constraints there don't apply to Columbus, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, etc.

If you'd like to see for yourself, take a look at a satellite map of a city like Columbus and look at the downtown area. You'll find lots of vacant buildings (well you'd have to just know that so that doesn't really count), and surface parking lots that aren't used that often. If you compare that to Seattle you'll see a big difference.

Sounds like the California Forever project? https://californiaforever.com/

Planned cities always seem to get obsessed with far more "green space" than is needed, huge, useless plazas, and very-wide streets, which create miserable, too-spread-out spaces that never stop feeling sterile and wrong. There may be some exceptions, but that's the usual outcome.

There is Poundbury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury

> If the local council and zoning procedures approve it, then maybe, just maybe the people of the city don't mind too much

How are these related? If people in OKC were polled and 90% of them said they didn't want the building in their community, do you think that would stop the building from being approved? That is not the typical relationship between developers, councils and zoning boards, and community members.

These laws are what dictates whether some construction project and its uses are allowed or not under the decisions made by the city's elected government. Thus, while these types of laws and municipal administrative details often have their many flaws and sources of corruption, they're at least the most plausible metric of local democracy at work. They're in any case much more valid than the dislike of some distant group of critics with no place in local politicas and demographics.

The price tag is easily $2-3B, it doesn’t make financial sense. I’d bet a significant amount of money it never gets built because nobody will finance it. It’s likely a portfolio design piece for the architect and developer, paid for with someone else’s money (OKC most likely).

It's not just out of place, it's extremely uneconomical for this area. Being against something massively inefficient is what I would expect from supposed tech enthusiasts.

You flatly don't know whether it's economical or not, you're just assuming it is, about a building that doesn't ven exist yet. The number of variables that can lead to a construction project ending up efficient or not, or economical or not, is too large for anyone to easily predict before a foundation is even laid down. Given the amount the developers presumably plan on investing in somethig this large, I'd assue they took a close look at economic viability.

> The amount of sniffy negativism on this site is absurd

I don't want to be monocausal, but a lot of this is simply Europeans spending time on this site and voicing opinions about American architecture.

It's well-understood that Europe doesn't build significant buildings anymore, and there's confusion about why a US city would want to build something large and noteworthy.

>> It's well-understood that Europe doesn't build significant buildings anymore, and there's confusion about why a US city would want to build something large and noteworthy.

That seems a little unfair. For example, Philharmonie de Paris, France; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; The Shard, London; MAAT Museum, Lisbon.

The Shard is the 47th largest building in the world. It's only notable in the absence of any other significant buildings in a nominally world-class city.

While I love supertall buildings, I don’t think height or size necessarily equates with notoriety, especially in a place like London.

Paris seems to do pretty OK on all of density, vibrancy, and aesthetics, while segregating all their somewhat-tall buildings to La Defense. I'm skeptical that moving all those into the city proper, let alone aiming for top-X-buildings slots, would improve the city in any way.

If the comment meant "tall" vs "significant," then granted. I think that, as a term of architectural art, "significant" means more than tall...

As a european, when I see this negativity, I see it as americans hating on each other, in this case blue state americans hating on a red state. Since HN doesn't have /pol/ style flags, I guess we'll never know.

I view it as less blue versus red and more class and culture clashes between states. I have blue friends in Texas that will get upset when a blue person from a coastal state says disparaging stuff about the whole state and its people.

>The amount of sniffy negativism on this site is absurd

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

public resources will inevitably be spent to support something which has no place in a city like OKC. OKR doesn't really have geologic boundaries which in turn means building out is cheaper than building up, and thus follows rent.

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