
Luxury Developers Use a Loophole to Build Soaring Towers for Ultrarich in NY - koolba
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/tallest-buildings-manhattan-loophole.html
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electricslpnsld
What's the major complaint(s) of people who oppose large towers? Shade?
Skyline (which you aren't going to be seeing anyway unless you live out in
Brooklyn or Queens)? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the big deal is here. If a
billionaire wants to live up in the clouds, great, more vacant spaces in the
rest of Manhattan for everyone else.

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spaceheretostay
Building large buildings to fill with empty space and spending huge amounts of
money catering to the ultrarich, while there are still massive housing
problems in NYC, is definitely going to offend some people.

A society which enables the rich to produce extraneous waste - literally
making multimillion dollar luxury home spaces just to fill with nothing, so
that you can skirt the law for building codes, and not even allow a person to
live there - yeah that's offensive.

The rich should be able to buy things they like, yes. But of course it's
offensive when the country has a housing crises and the rich are building
houses that nobody is allowed to live in, just so they can get a better view?

I mean yeah that's pretty obviously offensive and a strong, real reason that
people are opposing these towers - it's described in the article.

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chrisco255
The country doesn't have a housing crisis. Certain cities do. Certain states
do. And the ones with the worst housing problems have the most restrictive
real estate laws.

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spaceheretostay
I really don't understand this position. The country has a housing crisis
_because many of the cities in this country do_. Removing the connection to
the rest of America is an incorrect way of looking at it because of cause and
effect: this is such a big problem in America today that it is affecting
people who weren't directly in the housing-short markets themselves.

A weakness in part of America is a weakness for all of America. It works this
way with the outside world too - our housing shortages are part of a _global
problem_. _We are all in this together_. Framing the issues that the world
cities have internally as something that _isn 't a problem_ for people living
elsewhere is just denying that we live in a connected society.

One groups problems affect the other groups.

> And the ones with the worst housing problems have the most restrictive real
> estate laws.

Do you have a citation for that? I don't believe it's true.

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MR4D
Ignore the citation. Come to Houston and see for your own eyes. We don’t have
zoning, and laws are pretty lax. HOAs are another story, but that’s a
different issue entirely.

New York has a problem - we don’t. And I’m not going to solve their problem
because they created the set of choices that led to it.

What makes America great is all of these cities get to make their own unique
set of mistakes. Over time, we figure out as a whole what works and what
doesn’t. Some cities can choose to follow that path or ignore it, but either
way, it’s _that_ city’s problem, not _everyone’s_ problem.

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ng12
> “It offends me,” Mr. Macklowe said, “because we created a very nice building
> that fits into the skyline perfectly.”

Oh, please. 432 Park is one of the biggest eyesores in the city. I wonder if
that's one of their selling points: "Come live at 432 Park, the one building
without any views of 432 Park".

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merrywhether
This article is weird journalism. It presents decent counter arguments to the
problem, which is nice but also leaves the average skeptical reader confused
about how much waste is actually occurring on these floors. Surely _some_
mechanical space is needed, and the wind-flow anti-sway idea doesn’t seem
crazy, but it’s really hard to draw a real conclusion. The fire ladder height
problem in another comment seems valid, but surely most skyscrapers just
aren’t ladder accessible.

But my biggest gripe (at least on mobile, maybe it’s different on desktop?) is
why aren’t there pictures off the so-called wasteful spaces? Putting aside the
argument that more space is needed for future batteries, let us see an example
of what this actually looks like. That would certainly go a long way toward
clarifying the wastefulness. I know what the outside of buildings look like,
but those are the only pictures I see. At least get the outside of the
problematic barbell building, or diagrams, or something!

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dev_dull
> _The building and nearby towers are able to push high into the sky because
> of a loophole in the city’s labyrinthine zoning laws. Floors reserved for
> structural and mechanical equipment, no matter how much, do not count
> against a building’s maximum size under the laws, so developers explicitly
> use them to make buildings far higher than would otherwise be permitted._

Like most things in today’s society the reaction to this seems to be one of
two: double-down on the zoning enforcement or eliminate it.

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lr4444lr
The headline is simply inflammatory and irresponsible journalism. There are
legitimate arguments given by sources in the article as to why the buildings
are constructed this way, arguments which may or may not be sound in the final
analysis on the topic, but the reader is unfairly primed to side against them.

~~~
malvosenior
It’s also worth noting that the New York Times headquarters is the 8th tallest
building in Manhattan:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Building](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Building)

Why is filling a building with journalists and advertising industry people
morally superior to filling it with equipment?

I actually quite like the way the nyt building looks but it’s definitely in
the vein of excessive luxury. It didn’t need to be that nice, but hey it’s
their money to spend! Too bad they don’t grant others the same courtesy.

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jazzyjackson
Because thousands of people moving in and out of a building overflows into a
robust neighborhood - food being sold on the streets, restraunts and theaters
hosting new experiences every day...

The neighborhoods being built up into luxury towers no one lives provides no
business to the would-be shops and galleries nearby, leaving them as empty as
the streets around the High Line...

"Last March, beloved leather bar Rawhide at 212 Eighth Ave. closed after rent
rose from $15,000 to $27,000 a month. Close to a year later, it remains
vacant.", from 2014,

[https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140204/chelsea/vacant-
sto...](https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140204/chelsea/vacant-storefronts-
line-eighth-ave-as-high-rents-force-out-businesses/)

There's other articles along the same lines if you google 'empty storefronts
high line nyc'

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malvosenior
Both the buildings we're talking about are in midtown. It's already at peak
density of humans. Less would actually be better.

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raws
That building stands out so much in the sky line it's like a middle finger to
the people watching it. You the type you can afford with "fuck you" money ;)

~~~
llamathrowaway
Upvoted. For some reason more recent skyscrapers (not just the ones mentioned
in the article) lack the modesty of older constructions. They feel completely
out of place when viewed from afar. Totally not like some of the pre-ww2
skyscrapers which are monumental or even flamboyant (think of Chrysler
Building) yet work together to create a consistent and harmonious feeling.

~~~
raws
And this one is just a boring monolithic block at least the Chrysler Building
has something happening at the top architecture wise.

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sys_64738
It took me a few moments to realize the headline wasn't referring to software
developers. I don't know what a luxury SW developer is!

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raverbashing
I don't see why it is a loophole, it actually sounds like the law is not so
bad.

If technical space was counted then the building would be 1/4 shorter? Could
be.

In the grand scheme of things you can certainly debate housing that sits
empty, but that doesn't seem to be the main problem in lack of stock. Your
neighborhood NIMBY that doesn't want affordable construction in affordable
neighbourhoods seems to have a bigger impact than just tall towers for
millionaires.

