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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

A tower like this is insanely expensive to build.

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.

No one here is complaining about real estate prices in OKC

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