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Comment by jqpabc123 | Hacker News Reader

Skyscrapers are expensive to build and maintain.

They are built as a solution to high population density (the only place to go is up) combined with high demand and standard of living that can and will absorb the added cost.

Oklahoma City fails to meet these criteria.

To see this, compare OKC to a nearby major city like Chicago.

   - Population density of OKC is 1100 per sq. mile.  Chicago is 12000.

   - Per capita income in OKC is $36K.  Chicago is $46K.

Based on demographics, this sort of tower in OKC looks out of place --- more like maybe a marketing/financing gimmick rather than a serious proposal. I doubt it will ever be completed as proposed because most bankers/financers are likely to reach the same, rather obvious conclusion.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chicagocityilli...

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Look at any skyscraper and you see that it's not merely an attempt to use space efficiently but rather to inspire awe.

In economic terms, a skyscraper tries to create, not merely to supply, the demand to live and work in it.

Many buildings are purely about inspiring awe (and creating demand), such as the Eiffel Tower, the St. Louis Arch and the Las Vegas Sphere.

There are tens of thousands of skyscrapers out there. Only fraction of them are awe-inspiring prestige projects, majority are most likely just pragmatic.

Eiffel Tower, the St. Louis Arch and the Las Vegas Sphere.

Yes, these are awe inspiring works of art --- not intended or designed to provide housing for people. In other words, not really comparable to the proposed OKC tower.

A building is not a unix command line tool. Any building has several functions, and inspiring awe is often one of them.

Skyscrapers also enable moderate density in car-dependent cities. If most people drive, you need more space for traffic and parking. That leaves less space for the city itself than in cities where most people use public transit. To achieve the same density, you have to build up.

Supertall skyscrapers are obviously prestige projects. But ordinary skyscrapers make sense in cities with a relatively small business district surrounded by low-density suburbs.

All day on HN I hear the same song and dance, we need more housing density to combat high real estate prices. And then you see a city being proactive and doing something about it and you criticize it. Good on OKC to get ahead of the issue and make more housing stock available.

Have you been to Oklahoma City, or to Oklahoma in general? This makes as much sense as proposing that an expansive stockyard be constructed in the middle of San Francisco.

Among countless reasons not to build something like this in Oklahoma City, the place is basically nuked by tornados every so often.

Are tornados a threat to skyscrapers?

They won't take the building itself down, but let's just say that whoever owns the local glass shop is going to be a happy camper.

Have you ever been to Oklahoma City yourself. It is not "nuked" by tornadoes all the time like you imply. We've had a couple large ones, and all of you outside idiots think they happen daily. Most tornadoes are small, most Oklahomans have never seen one in their lives. Every city has its own natural disasters. For the record, Oklahoma has the largest casino in the world (https://www.gambling.com/us/online-casinos/strategy/the-7-la...) and that is in freaking Thackerville.

A tower like this is insanely expensive to build.

Housing density can largely be solved with multi-family units that are only 3 stories high. The majority of land-use in Oklahoma City is dedicated to single family houses on traditional plots.

You don't need a super skyscraper that's more than twice the height of the next tallest building in OK to address affordable housing.

This is what people need to understand. We don't need big flashy projects and skyscrapers. We need more missing middle multiplexes and townhouses. A lot of which could sprout up naturally if government wasn't restrictive in zoning and what folks can do with their own property (front yard businesses too)

This sort of work is not done by 'a city'

Matteson Capital and Thinkbox[0] are cited as the clients by the architect AO as listed in the article

Developers take a big swing sometimes, sometimes to get interest in their proposals ( the internet likes it, so my local counsel will have to approve it ), sometimes to get attention from other partners to do big projects together. This may be a portfolio piece, even if never completed as proposed here.

I don't know much about OKC but a certain musical theatre work has me very interested in the wind loading studies for this building.

[0] : https://www.aoarchitects.com/project/the-boardwalk-at-brickt...

Housing density is only one option in the toolkit to reduce real estate prices, and it's really only applicable to places HNers wanna live.

Hardly anybody on HN wants to live in "the sticks" and you can build houses there pretty cheaply.

Housing prices can almost always be solved by moving, but people don't want to do that.

(To be fair, they're usually talking about moving from single family homes to allowing small apartment buildings of 4-20 units, not moving from single family homes to towering skyscrapers.)

You are 100% spot on, I mentioned this in another comment I made and our housing crunch recently (past 8 years or so) is all due to human nature(and also a huge inflow of money). You can buy cheap houses in a majority of America but most people(on HN especially) want to live in superstar locations like SF bay area, coastal areas, mtn towns etc. Its a classic human nature problem and not a infrastructure problem. In addition you have trillions of dollars of money from venture and disrupted legacy industries(see tech giants bringing in hundreds of billions) flowing into these few places and people are surprised when an average house price in San Mateo county hits $1.8M!

I think the "song and dance" has an implicit "where needed", and Oklahoma is not suffering from the crowds, density, lack of house, and overpriced property values that have elicited that sentiment for other places, such as SF and other highly desirable places that have artificial barriers to housing development despite a need for it.

Except you need to build 'boring' 35-50 floor towers that are pre-designed and already have built versions of themselves. That way you can just buy the design and have a few people with prior experience building them to help out.

Not a unique tower that has never been built before, and will have an absurdly high price per square foot.

No one here is complaining about real estate prices in OKC

we need more housing density to combat high real estate prices.

Building 1800 units of luxury high rise homes costing millions per unit isn't how you combat high real estate prices.

It is odd, because OKC is a large city, but it's not dense. However, the Bricktown area of downtown is a cultural hub, which hosts the NBA team as well as lots of dining and activities.

Atlanta, GA has 3 times the population density of OKC and it hosts NBA, NFL and MLB teams. All without any apparent need/justification for the tallest building in the country.

There are lots of other similar examples. The justification for this in OKC just isn't there IMO --- and is unlikely to ever be there for one major reason --- limited water supply.

https://www.koco.com/article/oklahoma-city-utilities-departm...

Major high density cities demand a large water supply.

OKC is a bit weird, in that it's the center of a particular sort of religious movement. "Prosperity doctrine" types. The headquarters of Hobby Lobby and several other major "christian-owned" brands are there.

This is more about them proving themselves ascendant, than anything else, if I don't miss my guess. A better model might be Dubai, also home to some famously tall skyscrapers... its density is probably lower than can justify those, but they were built anyway to prove how ascendant their form of Islam is.

Record setting skyscrapers are usually a leading indicator of a bust, since they get financed when credit is at its easiest to get and there aren’t more pressing priorities to invest in.

Burj Khalifa is named so because Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi had to bail out both the Burj Dubai and the government of Dubai during the 2007 financial crisis.

This is more about them proving themselves ascendant

In other words, it's all about marketing --- not logic, reason, economics or good urban planning.

Even in cities that rationally justify tall buildings, the "tallest building" competition is always about showing off. They set the records with tall spires on top that don't have any usable floorspace.

Yes, the spires on top of rationally justified buildings is showing off.

In OKC, it's not just the spire but the entire building that is about showing off. The rationale is missing --- which is why I doubt it will ever be built as proposed.

> I doubt it will ever be completed as proposed because most bankers/financers are likely to reach the same, rather obvious conclusion.

I agree, if I was a lender I wouldn’t extend $2-3B to build ~1800 housing units in Oklahoma City. At a $2.5B price tag, that’s $1.4M per unit. The financials don’t make sense.

Maybe if we were still in ZIRP, but the federal funds rate is currently 525-550 bps.

This would be the sixth tallest building in the world. How many of the five above it meet your criteria?

This building would become a major tourist attraction. Will the leases and other income generated by the building be enough to pay off the bankers? If so, then it will likely be built.

How many of the five above it meet your criteria?

All of them have higher population density and per capita income in the area than OKC.

For example, Kuala Lumpur has 17X the population density of OKC.

Yes… a major tourist attraction in… Oklahoma. I’m sorry, but nobody is looking to go to Oklahoma on their vacation, especially not to see a tall building.

Nor was anyone looking to go to the Arabian Peninsula on their vacation 30 years ago, and yet here we are.

I did not know that was a hot vacation spot. But, even if it is, it has the advantage of being foreign and exotic. That can’t describe Oklahoma except in a negative sense.

It's like a 90min flight and $120 ticket for me. I would absolutely make a trip out there to see the tallest building in the US, especially with how out of place it would look next to the rest of the skyline.

Oklahoma has a pretty healthy tourism industry.

https://www.travelok.com/

Of the people who go to Oklahoma for vacation, I would expect some of them would definitely make a stop at this building.

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