
Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today - strivedi
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-percent-of-manhattans-buildings-could-not-be-built-today.html
======
humanrebar
> New York’s zoning rules were intended to create less cramped quarters, but
> they also have consequences for the number of aggregate apartments in the
> city. Such limitations can quickly decrease the supply of housing, and most
> likely drive up rents. If every tenement in the city were reconfigured in
> these ways, they would be less crowded, but there would also be fewer
> apartments to go around.

Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan
was built between 1900 and 1930. I'm not sure how these regulations are
supposed to have anything but a profound effect on rents. I can understand
that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?

There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into
Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws.

~~~
dilemma
These regulations are the results of social evolution, and explain why it's so
hard to be a young adult today, across all industrialized societies.

I believe that the saying "The first generation makes it, the second
generation spends it, and the third generation blows it" applies to societies
as well as families. Current policy makers have no idea about the cost at
which today's societies were built, and take for granted what they've been
given and squander it. NIMBY laws are absolutely an example as the cherished
old buildings were built in a different type of political climate and could
not be built today, ironically.

~~~
s_q_b
_" The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the
third generation blows it."_

Digression:

Interestingly, this adage about hereditary rule is one of the loan phrases
brought back after the First and Second Anglo-Afghan wars. Primarily these
were from the language of the ruling Pathans (as we would call them Pashtuns.)

The original Pashto, more literally translated:

 _" The grandfather was born in a tent. He remembers living in a tent. He will
lead the people well.

The father was born in a tent. He remembers both living in a tent, and living
in a palace. He will lead the people well.

The son was born in a palace. He has never lived in a tent. He will not lead
the people at all."_

There are several of these Afghan sayings, from both the Pashtunwali and folk-
wisdom, that the British officers brought back home. The most well-known of
these most don't realize is an Pashto loan phrase at all:

 _" Revenge is a dish best served cold."_

~~~
nickonline
It's really not some crazy idea. I'm sure you've heard

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my
son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will
ride a camel,"

~~~
gohrt
that quote is just about oil running out.

~~~
gozur88
The source of the quote, Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, died in 1990. By my
reckoning the last Land Rover generation will have been born by now.

------
brudgers
To me, there's a potential implication in the headline that doesn't quite
paint the right picture. Today's zoning code express a plan for dealing with
the good and the bad of aspects of previously constructed buildings.

Today's zoning code deals with the height and bulk and uses of existing
buildings as facts when determining the hygienic requirements of future
buildings. Existing non-conformities are part of the logistical plan for
handling change. The tightening of rules over time is the result of the strain
prior laxity places on resources today.

------
dankohn1
This is great analysis. Zoning laws still leave plenty of opportunity for new
construction, and Mayor De Blasio has made major changes to encourage new
construction, which is the only potential solution for the high housing costs
on the East and West US coasts.

For an example of what zoning laws were trying to avoid, look at images of
Gotham City from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, where the buildings grow outwards
as they go up like trees trying to absorb all sunlight.
[http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/tim-...](http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/tim-burton-visual-analysis-17.jpg)

Manhattan is less dense today then it was a hundred years ago, but it's
density can and should increase as taller, healthier buildings are added.
[http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-
de...](http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-density)
(Written from the 22nd floor of the first LEED Platinum certified apartment
building in Manhattan.)

~~~
fraserharris
Reminds me of Barcelona prior to expanding beyond the Roman walls:

"As there was no more land left inside the city walls, all kinds of inventions
were used to build more lodgings – houses were literally being created on
empty space. Arches were erected in the middle of streets to be built upon,
and a technique called retreating façades saw house fronts extended out into
the street as they rose up – until they almost touched the building opposite
(this practice was banned in 1770, as it prevented air circulation)."

Source: [http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/01/story-
cities-1...](http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/01/story-
cities-13-eixample-barcelona-ildefons-cerda-planner-urbanisation)

------
gregwtmtno
No one wants to go back to the days of tenements, but we need to relax these
zoning rules. We need more housing stock at every income level except ultra-
luxury.

~~~
arethuza
What's wrong with tenements? [NB Scot here and tenement pretty much means
"block of flats"]

~~~
notahacker
Scotland is the exception to the rule that "tenement" is used to refer to the
most substandard and overcrowded multi occupancy housing
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement)

~~~
arethuza
Apologies, was blissfully unaware of that usage.

I live in the "large rooms, high ceilings and ornamental details" kind of
Scottish tenement here in Edinburgh - only major downside being the
impossibility of charging a electric car/hybrid.

NB And yes, we do have a garden although we're on the 2nd/3rd floors... ;-)

------
Spooky23
The headline is a bullshit statement, and the reporter should know that. I
don't expect click bait from the NYT.

Urban zoning isn't the same as the burbs. Most of those buildings could be
built today, but would require a variance. The buildings that would "never get
built" today wouldn't be a result of zoning, but the ADA -- the need to have
ramps eliminates new construction of walk-ups and the requirements for
wheelchair accessible elevators increases the cost of construction, reduces
square footage and makes it too expensive to build buildings similar to many
common Manhattan buildings.

In the case of NYC in the last decade, they also require paying off
politicians. If you follow NY news, you'll notice that the US Attorney has
been very busy investigating that practice.

~~~
akgerber
Many buildings in NYC are built as-of-right— within current zoning code. As-
of-right building is much quicker and cheaper than getting a variance, which
is partially why New York.

New walk-up buildings are perfectly common in the outer boroughs, where land
values justify them. There's one going up around the corner from me. They meet
the ADA by having an accessible first floor unit.

~~~
jhbadger
Seriously? Just having one accessible unit counts as meeting the ADA? That's
terrible. That would be like having one apartment that's rentable to
minorities and saying that satisfies the Fair Housing laws.

~~~
akgerber
Elevators are very expensive to build and operate— requiring every new
multifamily building contain one would significantly increase the cost of
urban housing by outlawing many common forms of building, and effectively
preclude homeownership in many poor urban communities where a 2- or 3- family
house is the most affordable route— buildings must be large to amortize the
cost of an elevator, and large buildings are usually owned by large corporate
landlords. That does not appear to be a tradeoff Congress desired.

"The Fair Housing Act requires all "covered multifamily dwellings" designed
and constructed for first occupancy after March 13, 1991 to be accessible to
and usable by people with disabilities. Covered multifamily dwellings are all
dwelling units in buildings containing four or more units with one or more
elevators, and all ground floor units in buildings containing four or more
units, without an elevator. Federal regulations adopted by the Department of
Housing and Urban Development at 24 CFR 100.201 define covered multi-family
dwellings."
[http://www.fairhousingfirst.org/faq/mfhousing.html](http://www.fairhousingfirst.org/faq/mfhousing.html)

------
Xcelerate
A little bit unrelated to the article, but why has the US quit building
skyscrapers for the most part? I know there's a few in the works (Salesforce
tower) but generally speaking, it seems like the skyscrapers that exist in
most major cities were built long ago and they don't plan on adding any more.

~~~
CPLX
Presumably you don't live in NYC. There are dozens of 50+ story buildings
under construction or recently completed in nearly every section of Manhattan
and the East River waterfront areas. If you get a good vantage point for a
view it's like a forest of cranes out there.

Maybe you just mean San Francisco?

~~~
mikeyouse
San Francisco actually has several skyscrapers under construction right now
too.. The skyline is covered in construction cranes. Not sure where OP is that
they're not building.

This random list is a bit dated (2013) but many of these buildings are nearing
completion and many more have started planning or construction:

[http://sf.curbed.com/maps/26-high-rise-projects-changing-
san...](http://sf.curbed.com/maps/26-high-rise-projects-changing-san-
franciscos-skyline)

~~~
mpwoz
Seattle reporting in, downtown is absolutely full of cranes and large-building
construction sites.

[https://www.seattleinprogress.com/](https://www.seattleinprogress.com/)

~~~
boxy310
Indianapolis reporting in -- we're not building super-large skyscrapers, but
we're backfilling the old parking lots that replaced urban blight bulldozed in
the 70's and 80's with 10-15 story apartments and office buildings. Salesforce
also announced they're taking over Chase Tower, the 48-story tallest building
in Indiana, which has historically struggled to push their occupancy rate over
68%.

I think why you don't hear about many cities in America building super-large
skyscrapers is threefold: 1) The U.S. is still a very large country with lots
of room, especially away from the coasts 2) Construction costs of super-tall
buildings scale nonlinearly, so buildings taller than 55 stories tend to not
pay off per the square footage value of renting/selling, so mid-scale
buildings are generally more profitable 3) Geographic agglomerations mean that
creative class folks (like developers) tend to be attracted to existing large
cities like SF, Seattle, and NYC

------
nxzero
Having done a residential housing startup, violated zoning, and talked in
person to current or form heads of zoning in a number of cities, there's got
to be a better solution.

Taking step back, might be worth understanding how this all got started:
[http://ny.curbed.com/2013/3/15/10263912/the-equitable-
buildi...](http://ny.curbed.com/2013/3/15/10263912/the-equitable-building-and-
the-birth-of-nyc-zoning-law)

If you understand the history and common zoning laws, you'll quickly start to
see a pattern, that being it's a reactionary system that's often designed by
politics, not science.

I personally have given up on the topic, but hope someone is able to make some
progress.

~~~
foota
Can I ask what a residential housing startup is?

~~~
nxzero
It's dead; for privacy reasons, I rarely give out identifiers.

Core issue wasn't zoning, but managing the dynamics of residents, which I was
able to do in person, but not at scale.

Zoning wasn't an issue; meaning the police, head of zoning, landlord,
residents, etc. -- all knew we were violating the law, but we were able to
manage the issue without issue for the duration of the lease.

If you're trying to understand what residential housing startup would look
like, you might look into a now dead former competitor in the space:

[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/06...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/06/campus-
san-francisco-group-housing-millennials.html)

Our approach was different than Campus, but generally speaking, we were after
the same market.

If you have any more questions, let me know.

~~~
Shivetya
Sounds like a variation of AirBNB where the company offering the service
either owns or manages the property. I can see where this would get smacked by
all sorts of zoning laws. How is it different from extended stay
accommodations?

~~~
nxzero
AirBNB, though it tries to do so, doesn't provide a community, culture, etc. -
nor does it plan to my know plan to build villages, cities, etc.

If you look into Campus, you'll see that this was the path they planned to
take.

------
patmcguire
The bit about developers demolishing all but the 1/4 of a building and
rebuilding to upgrade while keeping the zoning is nuts.

[http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/four-leading-
ar...](http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/four-leading-architects-
compete-for-a-rare-park-avenue-site/?version=meter+at+10&module=meter-
Links&pgtype=Multimedia&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-
links-click)

------
edwingustafson
Same is true of cars on the road -- some or all vehicles from past model years
would fail to meet this year's automotive regulations.

~~~
mseebach
Except new cars are universally better than old cars on virtually all fronts.
The appropriate analogy would be if we could build 200 mpg cars, right now,
today, except they could only be red, and red cars are illegal due to a
regulation introduced in 1983 (while everybody agrees that it's great to be
rid of gaudy red cars, some people -- mostly unpleasant and tasteless fans of
obnoxiously coloured cars -- grumble that the regulation was pushed by the
green-paint-industry).

~~~
humanrebar
I don't know about universally better... the prices are higher as well.

~~~
djaychela
Ha, guess what? I just read that comment and thought "Totally wrong, what a
fool!"....

And then I did some research, turns out you're right! Just checking average
salary in the UK vs a comparable car (Cortina > Sierra > Mondeo) shows that a
1962 Cortina was about 50% of average UK salary, whereas a Sierra went up to
about 70%, and a Mondeo today is around 85%!

~~~
ptaipale
That doesn't sound right. What sources did you use?

(Edit: mseebach apparently googled the same sources I did, but faster.)

From what I could find, in 1962 the Cortina was selling at £573 [0] and the
average salary was £799 [1]. That's 71 %.

In 2014, the average salary of all employees was £27271 [2] and the Ford
Mondeo started at £20795. That's 76 %.

So the ratio is not that much different. And the Ford Mondeo of 2014 is an
incredibly much better car.

A lowly 2014 Fiesta at about £10000 would have been a completely unbelievable
car in 1962. And not a smaller car. In fact, latest Fiesta has exactly the
same wheelbase (2489 mm) as the 1962 large family car Cortina, the Fiesta is
140 mm wider, 300 kg heavier (and so much safer), and the start-of-list engine
model in Fiesta has 59 kW which is slightly more than the 58 kW of the tuned-
up top model Cortina GT.

[0] [http://www.rac.co.uk/drive/car-
reviews/ford/cortina/207784](http://www.rac.co.uk/drive/car-
reviews/ford/cortina/207784)

[1]
[http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/13/past.comment](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jan/13/past.comment)

[2]
[http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2868911/Best...](http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2868911/Best-
paid-UK-jobs-2014-Compare-pay-national-average.html)

[3] [http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/news/91004/new-ford-
mondeo-2015-pr...](http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/news/91004/new-ford-
mondeo-2015-prices-and-specs)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Cortina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Cortina)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Fiesta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Fiesta)

~~~
djaychela
I got the earnings data from the FT.com site - had it a few years ago, and
then copied into a text file that I refer to often (typically when referring
to music technology cost vs average earnings, as I teach music technology, and
it puts it in context). It gave 1960 average wage as £1042.

I know that cars have got a lot better (I've been a hobby mechanic for 30
years, and I've built a WRC class winning car, so I know my way around an
engine bay, and spend a lot less time fixing mundane things that would
regularly go wrong on cars of the 70s and 80s) - that wasn't the point that I
was making, it was solely on cost for an equivalent car, and something that I
was surprised by - I had expected the cost to be much less in relative terms
today, not being the same or going the other way (whichever figure you
believe, the point largely stands, I think). The reason I was surprised in
part is because I had assumed a similar effect as in music technology, which
has decreased in price immensely since the 1960s; you can own technology today
for a few pounds which would have been "multi house" price in the 1960s, and
of course there are lots of technologies and processes which simply didn't
exist - in much the same way as today's cars are incomparably better than
those of the years gone by.

Yes, a Fiesta is an equivalent in some dimensions of a Cortina, but it's not
an equivalent in terms of intended market; the Cortina was the mass market
family car of its era, hence the comparison with the Sierra and Mondeo.

------
Mz
It's a shame that so much about urban planning just proves the saying "That
government is best which governs least."

------
jdnier
When I first saw the article title, I thought it might be about all the
building materials and specialist skills required for construction that are no
longer available or practical, not to mention the cost of building with those
materials and techniques now. Zoning issues aside, I bet many of those
building really couldn't be built today.

------
coldtea
> _New York’s zoning rules were intended to create less cramped quarters, but
> they also have consequences for the number of aggregate apartments in the
> city. Such limitations can quickly decrease the supply of housing, and most
> likely drive up rents._

Sure, so?

Obviously, if you allow to squash 10-20 people per 1000 sq ft you could lower
the rents -- but unless you aspire to be an urban slum, you should have some
limits in place, even if they raise rents.

------
snlacks
Why does it have to be simple enough for everyone to understand? We're talking
building in one of the most expensive parts of the world where only the
richest organizations can afford to build and it affects millions of people
directly, and the state and national image. Making it easy isn't necessarily
going to protect the interests of the city as a whole.

------
sandworm101
Junk headline. The day after any building code change, all that came before
could not be built again.

A better story would have been now past building codes shaped many NY icons.
The Empire State Building's shape isn't some architectural masterpiece, it is
a diagram of the building code at the time. It fills exactly as much space as
was allowed.

------
tomohawk
Big ball of mud. The code that is the most impenetrable and hardest to
refactor lasts the longest.

------
Shivetya
Okay I cannot find it, but is there a square footage requirement per occupant
for new living spaces?

~~~
epc
In New York City the minimum has been 400 sq feet (approximately 37 metres
squared) since 1987, however a Bloomberg era experiment allowed creation of
so–called microapartments in the 250-350 square foot range.

------
anizan
Is there any zoning for safe space? Does anyone know? Or do i need to build my
own bunker like Switzerland did for each and every one of their citizens....
during cold war. Btw is cold war over yet? Or is it just a going through a
thaw right now

------
gbourne1
The zoning laws actually help the diversity, aesthetics aside. As the laws
change, the buildings change with it. Some bulky and tall, now skinny and
short. The buildings of the era are influenced from the changing laws.

------
kazinator
That helps give NY its grit. If you want some pink little buildings, to to
Miami Beach.

------
hackaflocka
Times change. Situations change. It's understandable.

------
hiou
I'm curious what all of these increase housing supply fanatics think about
cities in the rust belt(Cleveland, St Louis etc) with an oversupply of housing
which makes them a hotbed of crime and gang activity?

~~~
vonmoltke
Housing is oversupplied because those areas are experiencing negative growth
due to shitty economies. I would think the shitty economies are the cause of
both the housing oversupply and the crime.

You sound just like the people in my neighborhood who oppose any new apartment
or mixed-use construction because apartments bring transients and transients
bring criminals.

~~~
dionidium
Just to be clear, this isn't exactly right. Population loss in the rust belt
is widely misunderstood. Most of those cities didn't lose people; they just
moved them out of their urban core. St. Louis, as a region, for example, has
_grown slightly_ over the last 40 years. But a whole bunch of people have been
doing a whole lot of moving around the area over that time.

You don't have to lose people to get blight. You just have to build new houses
and abandon the old ones.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> Most of those cities didn't lose people; they just moved them out of their
> urban core. St. Louis, as a region, for example, has grown slightly over the
> last 40 years.

You seem to be confused. St. Louis is a city, and has lost people, just like
major cities across the country did. This is part of what led to urban blight.
It's the St. Louis metro area that has remained stable/growing.

~~~
dionidium
As a St. Louisan, I'm not impressed by descriptions of the region that
emphasize myopically-drawn political borders from 1876. My point, clearly, was
that St. Louis didn't lose people to other cities. It lost people to other
parts of its own region.

Further, I assure you that people from outside the region make no such
distinction when they talk about "St. Louis."

