21 ms·

Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today

321 points by strivedi 10y ago

humanrebar 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    "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 10y ago
      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,"
      - s_q_b 10y ago
        Yeah, it's so common as to have become a television trope. It's not difficult to see how a life of luxury can cause one to divorce the notion of wealth (or power) from the hard work necessary to obtain it.
      - nxzero 10y ago
        Formal name for the pattern is regression toward the mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
      - antisthenes 10y ago
        That reads more like a joke about Land Rover maintenance costs.
      - gohrt 10y ago
        that quote is just about oil running out.
        gozur88 10y ago
        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.
    - ef4 10y ago
      It's much more universal than that. Variations on this proverb occur in many, many cultures and languages: there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance 富不过三代 (wealth does not pass three generations)
  - akgerber 10y ago
    Many urban building typologies are effectively illegal in nearly all of the country (but not Manhattan below 110th Street) due to parking minima, even in supposedly-unzoned Houston. One of my great hopes for autonomous vehicles is that they will finally break the political logjam where existing neighborhood residents demand new housing/businesses in mostly parking-free neighborhoods require offstreet parking to preserve their own access to street parking. (And that bike lanes/pedestrian space/etc that require taking back some of the land that car owners usurped at midcentury become possible.)
    - mjevans 10y ago
      For dense city cores I'd prefer parking at the edges (part of the city) and forms of people movers (think caves of steel / tomorrow land belts). For other places I agree that eliminating street parking is ideal, but believe that more underground/in-building parking is necessary, with enough space for useful vehicles to park safely.
      - anamoulous 10y ago
        Honestly, in Manhattan they should eliminate automobile access to a great deal of the streets and avenues.
        AJ007 10y ago
        They are in the process of doing it, at least slowly. There still needs to be some sort of delivery truck access, irregardless. Parts of downtown Chicago provide an interesting example with multi-leveled streets, the big deliveries and trash collection can be all be done out of sight. I suspect very soon we will see a city, or multiple cities, start blocking off certain streets and then neighborhoods to non-autonomous vehicles. Maybe it will be Manhattan, maybe it will be another city. This lowers the bar for how advanced the self driving tech needs to be by a lot. You can have 100% traffic enforcement. Pedestrian deaths should almost be completely eliminated short of some very unusual edge cases.
        10y ago
  - home_boi 10y ago
    NYC is still very cheap. With roommates and an hour long commute, you will be looking at $700-800/month rent.
    - nxzero 10y ago
      For how many square feet of non-shared personal space?
    - JDiculous 10y ago
      Why is an hour long commute considered acceptable? If you value your time at $50/hr, a daily 1-hr commute equates to an additional $2,000/month
      - jonknee 10y ago
        People who live with roommates an hour away to save money almost certainly don't value their time at $50/hr.
        ghaff 10y ago
        In addition, it may be useful to have some sort of mental model of how you value your time. "Seriously, you make six figures and spend an hour a week doing some task you despise to save $5?" However, most people aren't in a position where they can directly trade in, say, an hour of commuting time for a check.
        hx87 10y ago
        I value my time much more than my space. Hence living with roommates close to work.
      - grillvogel 10y ago
        what's so bad about sitting on a train for an hour? its some nice personal time to do whatever you want or just space out and relax.
        JDiculous 10y ago
  - rcthompson 10y ago
    I've recently been musing on a similar theory, but for safety regulations, redundancy, and preventable disasters, for example at nuclear power plants, or the recent example with the Washington DC subway system shutdown. Initially, there are lots of safety regulations and redundancy, and the power plant goes for a while with no accidents. Then, either the people working there fall into complacency and get lax on the safety regulations, and/or politicians or higher-ups looking to cut costs cut some of the redundancy, in either case thinking "it'll be fine, there's never been an accident". Then the inevitable happens, and suddenly there's a renewed interest in safety and redundancy. Rinse and repeat. The implication of this is that while it might be theoretically possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely for an indefinite period, the inevitability of relaxing safety regulations after a long period of no accidents virtually guarantees an accident after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure if there's any empirical (i.e. non-anecdotal/confirmation biased) evidence to support this theory, or what could be done about it if it were true. See also: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases every few generations, because parents who never experienced the disease since their generation had the vaccine decide that their kids don't need the vaccine.
    - akkartik 10y ago
      I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience. One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.
- uola 10y ago
  "Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930" That isn't exactly unexpected when pretty much every factor in construction says that it gets harder to build the more developed an area is. Comparing pictures shows that plenty of high buildings has been built since then. [0] [1] "I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?" Politically motivated zoning rules isn't first and foremost about aesthetics, it's about preserving property values (at the high end) and not being squeezed out (at the low end). [0] http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Lower-Manhattan-from-airplane-looking-south-1934.jpg http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/... [1] https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.j...
- sbov 10y ago
  I'm not claiming there isn't a problem, but these numbers seem odd to me. 75% of the square footage was built between 1900 and 1930. But only 40% of the buildings could not have been built today. Is it that new buildings are roughly half the size? Or did they somehow manage to build buildings between 1900 and 1930 that could have been built today? If they could do it then, what is so hard about doing it now?
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    1. I'm assuming the 60% were small enough, short enough, set back enough from the property line, etc., that they would meet zoning regulations. 2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      >2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930. I don't think the population of NYC has increased that much from 1930. By 1930 NYC was a massive city and many boroughs have shrank since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor... Shows were population shrinkage and growth have occurred.
    - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
      True, but Manhattan, where people think it the most packed, hasn't. The population has gone down.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, for most visitors, Manhattan is basically midtown--and they've certainly seen pictures of the financial district even if they've never gone down there. Even for a lot of residents, Manhattan effectively ends at around 100th Street or so. (I've been going to Manhattan all my life and even lived there for a summer and I've never been north of Central Park except to drive into the city and to visit The Cloisters once.)
    - 10y ago
- nihonde 10y ago
  The reason those commutes are awful is not because Manhattan is unaffordable. The areas around New York City are among the least functional urban zones I've ever encountered. Total, utter, abject mismanagement of resources——and I say that as someone who used to live in Sheldon Silver's district of Manhattan. It's unreasonable to expect Manhattan to be affordable, but it's not unreasonable to expect the surrounding areas to be safe, able to operate trains, have reasonable housing, etc. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but New Jersey and Long Island are a toxic trash fire compared to somewhere like Tokyo. I wouldn't send my worst enemies to live in a place like Jersey City or East New York.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    I have to agree. It always boggles me when I visit Manhattan and think to myself: "This is one of the richest and grandest cities in human history - so why are the public spaces so putrid?" Constantly stepping on old gum and cigarette butts...and God help you if you need to use the subway on a hot summer day. I often feel the same way walking about San Francisco and encountering the unmistakeable stench of human excrement. Having been to old European cities like Berlin and Rome, I was surprised at how graffiti-strewn their walls tended to be, but at least their streets were CLEAN!
    - douche 10y ago
      Berlin is without a doubt the nicest city I have ever been to. Every time I go there, I think to myself, why couldn't the T in Boston be 10% as nice as the U/S-Bahn system? I absolutely hate cities, and I think I could possibly stomach living in Berlin.
      - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
        It's a shame the US really came into its own around the time of the automobile. Once cities were designed around cars, it became impossible to dislodge. Old European cities were constrained by the distance one could reasonably travel by foot, so they were densely packed together. When I lived in Rome for a short while, every service I needed - groceries, dining, haircut, gelato - was within a 3-block radius. Pretty much the entire city was like that. As much as we want to densify in the US, the fact is that two-lane streets with sidewalks HUGELY increase the distance between buildings and are horrible for walkability. Most of the twisty streets in Rome could fit 1 Fiat at a time. I wish we could do that here, but we would A: have to knock down almost everything and start from scratch, and B: figure out a way for emergency services to get there and back quickly.
- elahd 10y ago
  >There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. It's partly because of NIMBY zoning laws, but I'd say it has more to do with our awful public transit system. It's bad enough trying to head downtown within Manhattan on the Lexington Ave express -- commutes from the outer boroughs can be measured in hours. There are no plans for new subway lines (excluding the 2nd Ave subway, which isn't even fully funded) and city council won't approve true bus rapid transit.
- danielweber 10y ago
  > There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. Why are these people so eager to work in Manhattan if working there sucks so much? If employees refused to work in places with unacceptable commutes, employers will create other places to work. If enough people want to "live the dream" or have some reason they Absolutely Must Work in Manhattan, all the dressage in the world won't stop it from becoming intolerable.
  - swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
    While capitalism tends to balance itself out, zoning laws aren't as flexible. It's a fine line between inconvenient to intolerable, as more and more people living in San Francisco are discovering.
  - cauterized 10y ago
    Because an office in Manhattan gives you access to talent from the entire heavily populated (20 million) and relatively well educated NY metro area. (Which in turn grows because highly educated people are drawn there for employment opportunities. Positive feedback cycle.) An office in SmallTown USA gives you access to the talent of the 10,000 people who live in SmallTown and an additional 10,000 people who live in the vicinity and are willing to drive 30-60 minutes to your office. And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city.
    - danielweber 10y ago
      > And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city. If they've rationally moved to the larger city, I don't see why anyone should cater to their problems. You can't have it both ways, where people are rationally moving to cities but also surprisingly victimized by cruel city commute times. Also, there is also plenty of room between SmallTown and New York City. It's a strawman to think the alternate to to Manhattan is a town of 10,000.
      - cauterized 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago
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nxzero 10y ago
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-building-and-the-birth-of-nyc-zoning-law http://ny.curbed.com/2013/3/15/10263912/the-equitable-buildi... 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 10y ago
  Can I ask what a residential housing startup is?
  - nxzero 10y ago
    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/campus-san-francisco-group-housing-millennials.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/06... 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 10y ago
      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?
gregwtmtno 10y ago
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.
- lr4444lr 10y ago
  How about fewer residents?
  - ju-st 10y ago
    Why are there so many businesses/jobs in Manhattan?
    - afarrell 10y ago
      Before railroads, the Erie Canal was one of the few ways to ship bulk goods over the Appalachian divide. This caused the mouth of the Hudson to be a center of trade, particularly shipping goods to Europe. To make money on the return trip, they would put passengers in steerage and so lots of immigrants landed in New York City.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        Even before the Erie Canal, New York City was basically the best port on the Eastern seaboard so it was a natural trading center when it was initially settled by the Dutch. (And the Hudson provided good access to the interior even without the canal.)
    - michaelt 10y ago
      At least in London: Every employer moves to London because that's where the employees are; and every employee moves to London because that's where the employers are. Of course I don't mean /literally/ every employer or employee. But I've certainly been offered jobs in remote locations and turned them down because the locations only had one employer who needed someone with my skill set.
    - 10y ago
edwingustafson 10y ago
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.
- riskable 10y ago
  Cars are vastly different though. A building will persist for decades (sometimes hundreds of years!) and house dozens to thousands of people at once. They also use up vastly more energy and take up many orders of magnitude more space. An unsightly or unsafe car is easy to remove whereas doing the same with a building is (usually) cost prohibitive. We're all stuck with whatever ends up being built at a given spot for a long time.
- rmc 10y ago
  Many countries have legally required mandatory periodic tests of vehicles. If your car doesn't pass, you can't drive it.
  - ljf 10y ago
    There are usually 'grandfather' clauses to allow these to keep driving with some level of testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
- mseebach 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    I don't know about universally better... the prices are higher as well.
hackaflocka 10y ago
Times change. Situations change. It's understandable.
Spooky23 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
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- optimuspaul 10y ago
  did you miss the qualifier?
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > Most of those buildings could be built today, but would require a variance. If the buildings will be built anyway, why have the rules in the first place? How is having one set of written rules and another set of actual rules not a form of corruption?
  - Alex3917 10y ago
    > If the buildings will be built anyway, why have the rules in the first place? Because the developers have to do something for the city to get the variance, like creating a privately owned public space.
- akgerber 10y ago
  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.
hiou 10y ago
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?
- noobermin 10y ago
  It might not be that housing supply causes crime and gang activity as much as oversupply correlates with poor areas. I may be wrong.
  - hiou 10y ago
    Data certainly shows that oversupply of housing is almost always correlated with crime. Whether or not that is the cause is certainly up for debate but I am very curious about what the argument is that oversupply does not result in staging grounds for illegal activity. Especially based on what we have seen in the rust belt.
    - g_sch 10y ago
      The argument is very simple when you consider that the causality may run in the opposite direction. If economic opportunity in an area declines, people become poorer and/or leave. This results in a housing oversupply in addition to an increase in crime. To me, this is a far more plausible explanation than housing oversupply itself being the cause of crime.
      - dionidium 10y ago
        I don't think you're giving the parent enough credit. People didn't leave North St. Louis because of economic decline. There was never any such thing. People left North St. Louis for the suburbs on their own accord -- for lots of reasons. They wanted the new housing that the suburbs had to offer. They wanted to be further from blacks. The car made for an easier commute. This created an oversupply of housing in the region. St. Louis doesn't have too many houses because people went to other cities. It has too many houses because people abandoned the housing in the urban core and built new suburbs. That obviously did cause a loss of economic opportunity for the people left behind. But it didn't happen the other way around.
brudgers 10y ago
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.
Xcelerate 10y ago
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.
- mlinksva 10y ago
  Has it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_the_United_States#Tallest_under_construction.2C_approved_and_proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_t...
- mtalantikite 10y ago
  No hard data here, but it seems like most of the skyscrapers I see going up in Manhattan are luxury residential [1]. I'd assume it's a combination of scarcity of land, zoning, and project costs. Lately there seems to be a lot of new construction in downtown Brooklyn and many are definitely skyscrapers [2]. Same in LIC. [1] http://www.amny.com/real-estate/nyc-skyscrapers-tallest-buildings-that-will-change-nyc-s-skyline-1.10427086 http://www.amny.com/real-estate/nyc-skyscrapers-tallest-buil... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/nyregion/developers-plan-supertall-1066-foot-tower-brooklyn.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/nyregion/developers-plan-s...
- ghaff 10y ago
  There are some, but building very tall skyscrapers has always been a rather risky investment. (The Empire State Building was basically a financial failure.) It is difficult to get projects approved in many cities. But there's probably also just been a decline in companies and developers interested in playing the mine-is-bigger game. See also for some discussion http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wilshire-grand-is-las-newest-skyscraper/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wilshire-grand-is-las-newest-sky... ADDED: As others have said, there are plenty of skyscrapers going up in cities like New York. What you don't have going on as much in the US these days are the very tall iconic prestige/vanity projects that get all the press.
  - 10y ago
Shivetya 10y ago
Okay I cannot find it, but is there a square footage requirement per occupant for new living spaces?
- epc 10y ago
  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.
dankohn1 10y ago
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-burton-visual-analysis-17.jpg http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tim-... 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-density http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-de... (Written from the 22nd floor of the first LEED Platinum certified apartment building in Manhattan.)
- fraserharris 10y ago
  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-13-eixample-barcelona-ildefons-cerda-planner-urbanisation http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/01/story-cities-1...
jdnier 10y ago
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.
sandworm101 10y ago
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.
kazinator 10y ago
That helps give NY its grit. If you want some pink little buildings, to to Miami Beach.
Mz 10y ago
It's a shame that so much about urban planning just proves the saying "That government is best which governs least."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anizan 10y ago
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
tomohawk 10y ago
Big ball of mud. The code that is the most impenetrable and hardest to refactor lasts the longest.
patmcguire 10y ago
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-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 http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/four-leading-ar...
coldtea 10y ago
>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 10y ago
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.
gbourne1 10y ago
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.

321 points by strivedi 10y ago

> 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  "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 10y ago
    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,"
    - s_q_b 10y ago
      Yeah, it's so common as to have become a television trope. It's not difficult to see how a life of luxury can cause one to divorce the notion of wealth (or power) from the hard work necessary to obtain it.
    - nxzero 10y ago
      Formal name for the pattern is regression toward the mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      That reads more like a joke about Land Rover maintenance costs.
    - gohrt 10y ago
      that quote is just about oil running out.
      - gozur88 10y ago
        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.
  - ef4 10y ago
    It's much more universal than that. Variations on this proverb occur in many, many cultures and languages: there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance 富不过三代 (wealth does not pass three generations)
- akgerber 10y ago
  Many urban building typologies are effectively illegal in nearly all of the country (but not Manhattan below 110th Street) due to parking minima, even in supposedly-unzoned Houston. One of my great hopes for autonomous vehicles is that they will finally break the political logjam where existing neighborhood residents demand new housing/businesses in mostly parking-free neighborhoods require offstreet parking to preserve their own access to street parking. (And that bike lanes/pedestrian space/etc that require taking back some of the land that car owners usurped at midcentury become possible.)
  - mjevans 10y ago
    For dense city cores I'd prefer parking at the edges (part of the city) and forms of people movers (think caves of steel / tomorrow land belts). For other places I agree that eliminating street parking is ideal, but believe that more underground/in-building parking is necessary, with enough space for useful vehicles to park safely.
    - anamoulous 10y ago
      Honestly, in Manhattan they should eliminate automobile access to a great deal of the streets and avenues.
      - AJ007 10y ago
        They are in the process of doing it, at least slowly. There still needs to be some sort of delivery truck access, irregardless. Parts of downtown Chicago provide an interesting example with multi-leveled streets, the big deliveries and trash collection can be all be done out of sight. I suspect very soon we will see a city, or multiple cities, start blocking off certain streets and then neighborhoods to non-autonomous vehicles. Maybe it will be Manhattan, maybe it will be another city. This lowers the bar for how advanced the self driving tech needs to be by a lot. You can have 100% traffic enforcement. Pedestrian deaths should almost be completely eliminated short of some very unusual edge cases.
        10y ago
- home_boi 10y ago
  NYC is still very cheap. With roommates and an hour long commute, you will be looking at $700-800/month rent.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    For how many square feet of non-shared personal space?
  - JDiculous 10y ago
    Why is an hour long commute considered acceptable? If you value your time at $50/hr, a daily 1-hr commute equates to an additional $2,000/month
    - jonknee 10y ago
      People who live with roommates an hour away to save money almost certainly don't value their time at $50/hr.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        In addition, it may be useful to have some sort of mental model of how you value your time. "Seriously, you make six figures and spend an hour a week doing some task you despise to save $5?" However, most people aren't in a position where they can directly trade in, say, an hour of commuting time for a check.
      - hx87 10y ago
        I value my time much more than my space. Hence living with roommates close to work.
    - grillvogel 10y ago
      what's so bad about sitting on a train for an hour? its some nice personal time to do whatever you want or just space out and relax.
      - JDiculous 10y ago
- rcthompson 10y ago
  I've recently been musing on a similar theory, but for safety regulations, redundancy, and preventable disasters, for example at nuclear power plants, or the recent example with the Washington DC subway system shutdown. Initially, there are lots of safety regulations and redundancy, and the power plant goes for a while with no accidents. Then, either the people working there fall into complacency and get lax on the safety regulations, and/or politicians or higher-ups looking to cut costs cut some of the redundancy, in either case thinking "it'll be fine, there's never been an accident". Then the inevitable happens, and suddenly there's a renewed interest in safety and redundancy. Rinse and repeat. The implication of this is that while it might be theoretically possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely for an indefinite period, the inevitability of relaxing safety regulations after a long period of no accidents virtually guarantees an accident after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure if there's any empirical (i.e. non-anecdotal/confirmation biased) evidence to support this theory, or what could be done about it if it were true. See also: The resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases every few generations, because parents who never experienced the disease since their generation had the vaccine decide that their kids don't need the vaccine.
  - akkartik 10y ago
    I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience. One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.
uola 10y ago
"Another part of the article says almost 3/4 of the square footage in Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930" That isn't exactly unexpected when pretty much every factor in construction says that it gets harder to build the more developed an area is. Comparing pictures shows that plenty of high buildings has been built since then. [0] [1] "I can understand that people want to preserve aesthetics, but at what cost?" Politically motivated zoning rules isn't first and foremost about aesthetics, it's about preserving property values (at the high end) and not being squeezed out (at the low end). [0] http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Lower-Manhattan-from-airplane-looking-south-1934.jpg http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/... [1] https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.jpg https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5133/5513286501_4589ac5cc0_b.j...
sbov 10y ago
I'm not claiming there isn't a problem, but these numbers seem odd to me. 75% of the square footage was built between 1900 and 1930. But only 40% of the buildings could not have been built today. Is it that new buildings are roughly half the size? Or did they somehow manage to build buildings between 1900 and 1930 that could have been built today? If they could do it then, what is so hard about doing it now?
- humanrebar 10y ago
  1. I'm assuming the 60% were small enough, short enough, set back enough from the property line, etc., that they would meet zoning regulations. 2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    >2. The population of NYC has increased quite a bit since 1930. I don't think the population of NYC has increased that much from 1930. By 1930 NYC was a massive city and many boroughs have shrank since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor... Shows were population shrinkage and growth have occurred.
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    True, but Manhattan, where people think it the most packed, hasn't. The population has gone down.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, for most visitors, Manhattan is basically midtown--and they've certainly seen pictures of the financial district even if they've never gone down there. Even for a lot of residents, Manhattan effectively ends at around 100th Street or so. (I've been going to Manhattan all my life and even lived there for a summer and I've never been north of Central Park except to drive into the city and to visit The Cloisters once.)
  - 10y ago
nihonde 10y ago
The reason those commutes are awful is not because Manhattan is unaffordable. The areas around New York City are among the least functional urban zones I've ever encountered. Total, utter, abject mismanagement of resources——and I say that as someone who used to live in Sheldon Silver's district of Manhattan. It's unreasonable to expect Manhattan to be affordable, but it's not unreasonable to expect the surrounding areas to be safe, able to operate trains, have reasonable housing, etc. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but New Jersey and Long Island are a toxic trash fire compared to somewhere like Tokyo. I wouldn't send my worst enemies to live in a place like Jersey City or East New York.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I have to agree. It always boggles me when I visit Manhattan and think to myself: "This is one of the richest and grandest cities in human history - so why are the public spaces so putrid?" Constantly stepping on old gum and cigarette butts...and God help you if you need to use the subway on a hot summer day. I often feel the same way walking about San Francisco and encountering the unmistakeable stench of human excrement. Having been to old European cities like Berlin and Rome, I was surprised at how graffiti-strewn their walls tended to be, but at least their streets were CLEAN!
  - douche 10y ago
    Berlin is without a doubt the nicest city I have ever been to. Every time I go there, I think to myself, why couldn't the T in Boston be 10% as nice as the U/S-Bahn system? I absolutely hate cities, and I think I could possibly stomach living in Berlin.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      It's a shame the US really came into its own around the time of the automobile. Once cities were designed around cars, it became impossible to dislodge. Old European cities were constrained by the distance one could reasonably travel by foot, so they were densely packed together. When I lived in Rome for a short while, every service I needed - groceries, dining, haircut, gelato - was within a 3-block radius. Pretty much the entire city was like that. As much as we want to densify in the US, the fact is that two-lane streets with sidewalks HUGELY increase the distance between buildings and are horrible for walkability. Most of the twisty streets in Rome could fit 1 Fiat at a time. I wish we could do that here, but we would A: have to knock down almost everything and start from scratch, and B: figure out a way for emergency services to get there and back quickly.
elahd 10y ago
>There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. It's partly because of NIMBY zoning laws, but I'd say it has more to do with our awful public transit system. It's bad enough trying to head downtown within Manhattan on the Lexington Ave express -- commutes from the outer boroughs can be measured in hours. There are no plans for new subway lines (excluding the 2nd Ave subway, which isn't even fully funded) and city council won't approve true bus rapid transit.
danielweber 10y ago
> There are many working class people who have unconscionable commutes into Manhattan partly because of NIMBY zoning laws. Why are these people so eager to work in Manhattan if working there sucks so much? If employees refused to work in places with unacceptable commutes, employers will create other places to work. If enough people want to "live the dream" or have some reason they Absolutely Must Work in Manhattan, all the dressage in the world won't stop it from becoming intolerable.
- swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
  While capitalism tends to balance itself out, zoning laws aren't as flexible. It's a fine line between inconvenient to intolerable, as more and more people living in San Francisco are discovering.
- cauterized 10y ago
  Because an office in Manhattan gives you access to talent from the entire heavily populated (20 million) and relatively well educated NY metro area. (Which in turn grows because highly educated people are drawn there for employment opportunities. Positive feedback cycle.) An office in SmallTown USA gives you access to the talent of the 10,000 people who live in SmallTown and an additional 10,000 people who live in the vicinity and are willing to drive 30-60 minutes to your office. And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city.
  - danielweber 10y ago
    > And anyone who's educated and had a choice has moved to a larger city. If they've rationally moved to the larger city, I don't see why anyone should cater to their problems. You can't have it both ways, where people are rationally moving to cities but also surprisingly victimized by cruel city commute times. Also, there is also plenty of room between SmallTown and New York City. It's a strawman to think the alternate to to Manhattan is a town of 10,000.
    - cauterized 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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nxzero 10y ago

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-building-and-the-birth-of-nyc-zoning-law http://ny.curbed.com/2013/3/15/10263912/the-equitable-buildi... 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 10y ago
Can I ask what a residential housing startup is?
- nxzero 10y ago
  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/campus-san-francisco-group-housing-millennials.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/06... 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 10y ago
    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?

gregwtmtno 10y ago

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.

lr4444lr 10y ago
How about fewer residents?
- ju-st 10y ago
  Why are there so many businesses/jobs in Manhattan?
  - afarrell 10y ago
    Before railroads, the Erie Canal was one of the few ways to ship bulk goods over the Appalachian divide. This caused the mouth of the Hudson to be a center of trade, particularly shipping goods to Europe. To make money on the return trip, they would put passengers in steerage and so lots of immigrants landed in New York City.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Even before the Erie Canal, New York City was basically the best port on the Eastern seaboard so it was a natural trading center when it was initially settled by the Dutch. (And the Hudson provided good access to the interior even without the canal.)
  - michaelt 10y ago
    At least in London: Every employer moves to London because that's where the employees are; and every employee moves to London because that's where the employers are. Of course I don't mean /literally/ every employer or employee. But I've certainly been offered jobs in remote locations and turned them down because the locations only had one employer who needed someone with my skill set.
  - 10y ago

edwingustafson 10y ago

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.

riskable 10y ago
Cars are vastly different though. A building will persist for decades (sometimes hundreds of years!) and house dozens to thousands of people at once. They also use up vastly more energy and take up many orders of magnitude more space. An unsightly or unsafe car is easy to remove whereas doing the same with a building is (usually) cost prohibitive. We're all stuck with whatever ends up being built at a given spot for a long time.
rmc 10y ago
Many countries have legally required mandatory periodic tests of vehicles. If your car doesn't pass, you can't drive it.
- ljf 10y ago
  There are usually 'grandfather' clauses to allow these to keep driving with some level of testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
mseebach 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I don't know about universally better... the prices are higher as well.

hackaflocka 10y ago

Times change. Situations change. It's understandable.

Spooky23 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
optimuspaul 10y ago
did you miss the qualifier?
humanrebar 10y ago
> Most of those buildings could be built today, but would require a variance. If the buildings will be built anyway, why have the rules in the first place? How is having one set of written rules and another set of actual rules not a form of corruption?
- Alex3917 10y ago
  > If the buildings will be built anyway, why have the rules in the first place? Because the developers have to do something for the city to get the variance, like creating a privately owned public space.
akgerber 10y ago
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.

hiou 10y ago

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?

noobermin 10y ago
It might not be that housing supply causes crime and gang activity as much as oversupply correlates with poor areas. I may be wrong.
- hiou 10y ago
  Data certainly shows that oversupply of housing is almost always correlated with crime. Whether or not that is the cause is certainly up for debate but I am very curious about what the argument is that oversupply does not result in staging grounds for illegal activity. Especially based on what we have seen in the rust belt.
  - g_sch 10y ago
    The argument is very simple when you consider that the causality may run in the opposite direction. If economic opportunity in an area declines, people become poorer and/or leave. This results in a housing oversupply in addition to an increase in crime. To me, this is a far more plausible explanation than housing oversupply itself being the cause of crime.
    - dionidium 10y ago
      I don't think you're giving the parent enough credit. People didn't leave North St. Louis because of economic decline. There was never any such thing. People left North St. Louis for the suburbs on their own accord -- for lots of reasons. They wanted the new housing that the suburbs had to offer. They wanted to be further from blacks. The car made for an easier commute. This created an oversupply of housing in the region. St. Louis doesn't have too many houses because people went to other cities. It has too many houses because people abandoned the housing in the urban core and built new suburbs. That obviously did cause a loss of economic opportunity for the people left behind. But it didn't happen the other way around.

brudgers 10y ago

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.

Xcelerate 10y ago

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.

mlinksva 10y ago
Has it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_the_United_States#Tallest_under_construction.2C_approved_and_proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_t...
mtalantikite 10y ago
No hard data here, but it seems like most of the skyscrapers I see going up in Manhattan are luxury residential [1]. I'd assume it's a combination of scarcity of land, zoning, and project costs. Lately there seems to be a lot of new construction in downtown Brooklyn and many are definitely skyscrapers [2]. Same in LIC. [1] http://www.amny.com/real-estate/nyc-skyscrapers-tallest-buildings-that-will-change-nyc-s-skyline-1.10427086 http://www.amny.com/real-estate/nyc-skyscrapers-tallest-buil... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/nyregion/developers-plan-supertall-1066-foot-tower-brooklyn.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/nyregion/developers-plan-s...
ghaff 10y ago
There are some, but building very tall skyscrapers has always been a rather risky investment. (The Empire State Building was basically a financial failure.) It is difficult to get projects approved in many cities. But there's probably also just been a decline in companies and developers interested in playing the mine-is-bigger game. See also for some discussion http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wilshire-grand-is-las-newest-skyscraper/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wilshire-grand-is-las-newest-sky... ADDED: As others have said, there are plenty of skyscrapers going up in cities like New York. What you don't have going on as much in the US these days are the very tall iconic prestige/vanity projects that get all the press.
- 10y ago

Shivetya 10y ago

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

epc 10y ago
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.

dankohn1 10y ago

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-burton-visual-analysis-17.jpg http://illusion.scene360.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tim-... 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-density http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-de... (Written from the 22nd floor of the first LEED Platinum certified apartment building in Manhattan.)

fraserharris 10y ago
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-13-eixample-barcelona-ildefons-cerda-planner-urbanisation http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/01/story-cities-1...

jdnier 10y ago

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.

sandworm101 10y ago

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.

kazinator 10y ago

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

Mz 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

anizan 10y ago

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

tomohawk 10y ago

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

patmcguire 10y ago

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-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 http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/four-leading-ar...

coldtea 10y ago

>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 10y ago

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.

gbourne1 10y ago

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.