The valid point is that skyscrapers are often architectural grandstanding, and make so many other compromises at the ground level, that they rarely deliver much higher density.
What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. Basically how we did the best architecture from before the 1920s. Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building.
Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings like exist all over older parts of the US and Europe (and presumably many other parts of the world).
It doesn't help that architecture (and most other artistic fields) is currently dominated by the belief that beauty is almost completely subjective. Under that philosophy, why not just design the thing that's going to at least win some awards for being "innovative" or "striking?" (These are almost always euphemisms for "offensive" but for people who think offense is a purely subjective experience)
There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings
There is a real reason: lack of skilled trades. Those old, beautiful buildings are the work of skilled tradespeople such as masons (skilled in stonework), master carpenters (skilled in joinery), glaziers, plasterers, painters, sculptors, blacksmiths, ironworkers...
Modern buildings use so much metal and glass because these materials don't require skilled trades to mould and shape them on site, they are delivered whole and assembled according to plan. To build an old-style building today would cost a fortune because the few surviving practitioners of those traditional trades are considered highly specialized experts and historians of construction techniques.
Even simple brick masonry work seems like it's dying. My father was informally trained by old school Chicago bricklayers. I'll see brickwork done by him 20 years later still looking new, and lined up well, while a lot of newer stuff just looks terrible. Same thing here in Chicago, so much nicer old brickwork compared to newer construction.
Yeah. Construction is in a race to the bottom, cost-wise. In my city (university town) there are a bunch of off-campus high rise residence buildings. They put these things up so cheaply that a lot of them are falling apart not even 5 years on!
Their whole m.o. is to put up a new building, sign as many incoming students as they can to leases, then mysteriously fall behind schedule for the opening of the building. This leaves hundreds of students stranded without a place to stay at the start of school term. They then offer these students a “free” lease transfer to the old building, thereby renting out a bunch of crappy rooms no one wanted in the first place.
Back about 20 years ago, a development where I lived got new sidewalks poured. On looking the work over, I decided that in the modern market today's foreman is the apprentice of two years ago, at most.
The other portion of this is a lot of buildings are build by contracting firms, not architects. It's taking a lot of trends and squishing them together in a way that works, but is not designed. The end product is facades with windows not lining up properly, weird perspectives, and extra rooms that don't fill a purpose.
This is a component for sure, but you can absolutely get CNC’d millwork to add ornamentation if you cared to. We can develop technologies to make buildings both beautiful and easy-to-construct if we cared to.
Also we need to be training up skilled tradespeople in general, even for the basic basic stuff.
NIMBYs are always going to NIMBY. You can concede all kinds of things, but it seems to be 'change' that bothers many of them. It's never beautiful enough and if it is then, well, it's not "affordable", or it doesn't have enough parking, or or or...
Source: I show up at things like city council meetings to support housing as a YIMBY.
People have a lot of reasons for resisting development. One of them is that it will increase traffic in the area and there's a good chance traffic is already bad enough. Secondly no one wants to have a 3+ year large scale construction project going on in their neighborhood and all the headaches that come with that. People want peace and quiet and the only one benefiting from it is the developer so why not resist that. Additionally, people bought into a certain place because of its characteristics and often those are not respected by developers who just want to maximize their profit by building the most profitable thing they can get away with. Lastly, often "new development" means rentals in an area that is dominated by single family homes. Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners.
Saying that I agree that some people will just find any excuse possible to resist. But their opinions are just as valid as the next guys and this is why we need to find compromise. I support thoughtful development and in making the dense part of town more dense.
There is no right to buy a piece of property and expect the surrounding area to stay static. If you want the town to stay small and quaint, buy the entire town.
Towns that do not grow wilt away and die. There are absolutely towns that didn't grow across America. You can recognize them by their landmarks like the closed factory, the "fod lease" signs along Main Street, and so on.
>Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners.
This and your reference to "the dense part of town" tend to point to a different meaning of "don't have the same skin" than the initial read suggests. Even if that was not your intention, it's absolutely the practical effect of reinforcing old injustices by claiming the rich white areas should remain that way while the denser, inevitably more diverse areas have to absorb all change.
And YIMBYs are gonna YIMBY. I just wish they would change their acronym to the more accurate YIYBY -- for your backyard. Which is where they want all this glitzy new stuff (with dubious benefits most of the time; and aesthetic qualities of even less merit in almost every case) to be built.
Source: I show up at the same meetings. And for the record, am agnostic on the [NY]-imby scale. I just wish the Y contingent wouldn't be so self-satisfied in their pretension that anytime someone questions the wisdom of latest pork barrel / snake oil proposal put forth by the development industry -- why, it's because they're a selfist, narcissistic you-know-what who just hates progress and loves to whine.
That new housing is "snake development projects", but my house was probably built by pure of heart Disney-esque woodland creatures singing as they worked, right?
People need a place to live. It is driving so many problems in our society that they don't. Sprawl causes massive CO2 emissions. Homelessness. People forced to move away from where they grew up. Businesses that struggle to hire.
And "my" backyard is accurate: people being told by others what to do with their own property is a big part of the problem. If it is your backyard, no one is going to force you to build anything in it.
Clearly, not all new development is perfect and awesome all the time, but one thing we used to do is to allow it: and then, crucially, allow it to change and adapt over time into something better.
It's not snake oil because it's new. But because of the blatant lies (and occasionally more subtle distortions) in the developer's project proposal, staring everyone right in the face.
Nor is all new development bad, nor old development ipso facto good, by any stretch. We get the issues, and understand the tradeoffs.
And I, at least, don't demonize YIMBYists. I just wish they'd stop being so smug, and find a better way of supporting their position than simply responding to any expression of opposing viewpoint with facile generalizations and tired caricatures.
And you see the unsatisfiable concerns over and over and over again. It's pretty rare to see a "yes, this project looks ok, but could we add this thing to it or do this other thing a bit differently?", where the asks are within reach and not impossible.
Funny. When our neighbours sold their house they stopped by all the houses around to deliberately leave kids toys out front everywhere. They wanted the area to look extra kid friendly. It was a very family heavy, child friendly area, no one minded. People do look for communities that actually talk to each other.
Anything less than a confirmed Yes vote (perhaps with caveats, but ultimately: a Yes vote) to whatever the developer proposes is, in the YIMBYist book, equivalent to the objections of that lady in Oregon.
Not really. Here, our YIMBY group works, from time to time, with the local bicycle advocacy group to improve new projects. We've found developers to be quite receptive to polite dialogue about potentially problematic bits and pieces of their projects.
Most public comments are simply unrealistic or "no!", though.
No project is going to be perfect, ever, and we're desperately in need of more homes, so yeah, let's build more!
The tricycle lady wasn't just some random person, either, she used to be on the planning commission, and helped kill a number of badly needed apartments in the 'nice' bit of town.
Based entirely conversations with a few architects and interior designers, the incentives are almost always far more aligned with “cost-effective”/“inoffensive” than “innovative”/“striking”.
Architecture has always been strongly bifurcated with the (much larger) low end being dominated by cost/market considerations. But these architects do take design cues from the top of their field.
Low-end Italianate and Gothic Revival yielded the gorgeous Brooklyn brownstones. Low-end Corbusier yields the hideous, cultureless 5-over-1s perfectly prepared for a Chipotle logo.
Chicago has many pleasant old courtyard buildings (mostly 3-4 stories) and our NIMBYs would protest them for not providing parking if they were being built today.
> Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses.
This. Being upset that your entire neighborhood has been boxed in by ticky-tack five overs is a pretty natural response IMO.
People like to hate on NIMBY's here but for many cases (not all) I think it's reasonable to care about your neighborhood and to want to prevent outside interests from fucking it up.
It's funny, brownstones originally had similar resistance for being bland and uninteresting yet we find them beautiful now. I think cost effective new housing just isn't going to be that visually interesting, but we need it anyway unless it's going to be expensive.
Yeah, no. This is simply not true. It is simply not true that NIMBYs would opposed only especially ugly building. The complain and actual reality is that they oppose pretty much everything.
If you oppose building in general you are not a NIMBY though.
I guess the slide has been big but isn't the term mostly about, like, prisons, pubs, waste collection centres etc. that they want, but just not near them?
"Sure, the Seattle area needs more housing, but not in our quaint little suburb, that's already gone downhill since whenever I moved in" is a standard NIMBY line.
Skyscrapers are the natural result of extremely high permitting costs, which don't scale well with building size. Your average real estate developer is just trying to get a return of investment, and a 7 story building is set up to be less profitable than the skyscraper or a subdivision.
A non-trivial part of the problem is the requirement of having access to two stairwells for each apartment. This is theoretically helping with fire safety, back in a world without sprinklers, but it also leads to far more space dedicated to hallways. Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US, and adding that second staircase, in a different fire-proof structure, would have cut the number of units by 25%. The two stairwells only start becoming cost effective when your building has a very large floor plan, at which point, you might as well have skyscraper.
Way too many things that people consider just the natural way of doing things just come down to regulatory regimes that don't quite ban alternatives, but make them uneconomical. Even when we assume every bit of regulation was added for good reasons, ultimately we shouldn't judge said regulation by what it intended to do, but by what it causes.
Make building the 8 story block less difficult and more profitable than the alternatives, and it'll get built without having to actually force anyone into building them.
> Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US
I'm curious if this bears out in how much property and casualty damage is there from multifamily dwelling fires between Spain and the US? In any case, it's a good example of why we should keep in mind that every safety regulation is necessarily a tradeoff against cost and efficiency.
>What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards.
I used to believe that but I don't think it's actually true.
I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings.
The above claim will be hard for readers to accept if they are well-versed in the constant negative news articles in New York Times, etc and Youtube channels like NotJustBikes, StrongtownsOrg, CityBeautiful, ClimateTown ... all disparaging the "soulless" suburbs.
What happens is the proponents of "walkable cities" have inadvertently created a "filter bubble" and now mistakenly think most families don't want to live in suburbs.
But what about all those surveys where people preferred "walkable" cities to go to businesses like grocery stores, theaters, and museums without a car?!? That's true but the surveys' methodology and framing are flawed because they don't structure the questions as a set of tradeoffs so the respondents can see if they prioritize other things above walkability such as bigger house sq footage, yard and pool to play in, garage for hobbies, not sharing apartment/townhouse walls with noisy neighbors playing music too loud, etc.
So the _silent_ majority in America do like walkability... but they also prioritize other aspects of residential living that ends up sacrificing the walkability. It's the unstated tradeoffs that explains the paradox of people supposedly wanting "walkability" but yet we still all end up with car-centric suburban sprawl.
> I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings.
Where in the US is made of "5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards" that the op referenced? I don't know anywhere that that's an option on the table. People live in suburbs because it's what is available, full stop. If there were dense 5-10 storey areas sitting empty while the surrounding suburbs were full, then you'd have a point
I live in a city, not a suburb, but they seem to be grouped with suburb-talk as there is a larger city nearby, and I find it strange that ‘walk ability’ isn’t mentioned since that is best part of living in a neighborhood of single family homes. People are out walking all the time. There are parks to walk to as well, but those are getting removed as they are being replaced with 3 story apartment buildings. Not sure how it came to pass that high density housing and less parks are the ideal.
Not really directed at you, but more at the general topic which causes all the stereotypes to appear and I don’t see them in the real world. Everyone I’ve met in an apartment living space wishes for a home. I know I did.
Are you claiming that suburbs are more "walkable"? What destinations are you walking to? Or are you describing a kind of pastoral pleasantness that is present in suburbs but not in denser areas?
I think what confuses some people about this topic is that their mental image of "suburbs" is a quiet street surrounded by lawns & trees, with minimal traffic, while their mental image of cities is of noisy, stinky, dangerous streets with lots of traffic.
I would argue that the "pleasant" qualities that we associate with taking a walk are orthogonal to the density of the neighborhood itself, and that the negative qualities people see in cities are really a problem of their car-centric design in the US. For example, see a neighborhood like Sunnyside, NY, just a few subway stops from Manhattan:
Highly dense row-housing, but with ample green spaces and many pedestrian-only pathways. Has enough density to sustain many local businesses within walking distance, features a number of subway stops easily reachable on foot--it's very possible to live in this neighborhood without driving.
It would be impossible to build a low-density neighborhood that works as well without a car, because there won't be enough people to sustain the businesses required to serve them within a walkable distance. And once you start assuming that everyone will own a car and will use it for every errand, then you inevitably get sprawl + congestion + traffic.
Generally people use "walkable" to mean that errands can be done without a car. I presume the people in these suburbs are using a car to get their groceries.
> Not everything has to be centered around consumption/consumerism
If you're arguing for a completely non-consumptive lifestyle in which you grow/forage all of your own necessities, then I concede that my argument doesn't apply to you, but I think most suburb-dwellers are not at your level. Suburbs are typically much more resource-intensive to maintain than denser neighborhoods.
Suburban neighborhoods are clearly less resource intensive since they don’t have a high density population to maintain with equally high levels of consumption
This is more about the city than the house. To build a walkable city requires a certain density. Great public transportation requires density. Density is not possible with US style sprawl.
As evidence, look at what people are willing to pay for a tiny apartment in London.
But the canyon effect of cities built entirely of skyscrapers is also not nice.
Great cities also have trees and grass everywhere.
And mixed use is needed. Being able to walk a block to get eggs from the corner store or grab a pint at the pub is amazing. That also is not possible with US style single use zoning.
We have also tried “towers in the park” style developments. Those are too spread out to walk or bike.
There is probably a way to get density for public transport and walkability, a few taller buildings but not too many to cause canyons, and street level businesses, but the easy answer is to stay with what has worked all over the world and simply build mid-rise buildings.
Also, US style sprawl is expensive. The upkeep to pave the roads every 5-10 years, maintain sidewalks, and the longer utilities, is usually far more than what the homeowners pay in taxes. Cities either raise taxes, let older neighborhoods crumble (common), or subsidize suburban areas with tax revenue from the dense areas (common). US urban sprawl is not sustainable.
What suburbs do people prefer? The pre-war suburbs in the US are walkable. The people who prefer walkable neighborhoods but like suburbs want to live here. The prices are high in cities that have them. Affordable, walkable suburbs will never happen again.
Also, we don’t give people the choice between suburbs and dense neighborhoods. People need to be allowed to make tradeoffs. This is especially true for the lower middle who can’t afford expensive areas, We don’t know if they would choose long commute and backyard, or short commute and apartment.
The Skyscraper Museum has [1] an exhibit on the history of density in NYC: https://skyscraper.org/housing-density/history/. Density was maximized in the slum tenement era at ~1000 people/acre, achieved with merely 5 story buildings (and somehow packing 10 people per apartment which just... how). The closest you've come since that era in NYC is London Terraces, which is essentially a block of residental rowhome high-rises. If you look immediately around it, you can see that most high-rises instead opt for the towers-in-the-park model.
Density tends to come not so much from height but lot coverage, and for various reasons, people insist on really low lot coverage from tall and supertall buildings, which puts extra constraints on density you don't get in mid-rise buildings.
[1] Or rather had, as they apparently swapped the exhibit out a few years ago, though much of the material remains online.
There are a TON of midrise apartment buildings under construction in the US, look at the stats on multifamily construction or just drive around. They don’t look like Paris but they exist. The problem is more that people don’t want neighbors because people are assholes.
It's a monstrosity, a tribute to blandness. All cities look exactly the same.
It's possible it will look better when the trees grow (if they plant any), though who knows whether the buildings will still be around.
Atlanta is great about trees. Any that are removed have to have a replacement planted.
Not sure where you're referring to, but at least around here in the actual city the architecture and landscaping is varied enough to not be bland. And we're seeing genuine increases in density and walkability/bikability and "urbanism" in general. I put 10x more miles on my electric scooter than I do my car now.
> who knows whether the buildings will still be around.
I think it's starting to come back. A lot of the new more affordable houses in the Bay and in larger cities are blocks of town homes. I think we are going to see a lot more development there, as developers realize they can build them more efficiently and people realize that they are the right ratio of space (e.g. garage, space for a family, small backyard) and density.
What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. Basically how we did the best architecture from before the 1920s. Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building.