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Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind. The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use

Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind. The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile. If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city. We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through. It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable. What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei. If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them. It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider. If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States. So yeah, no towers please.

dr_dshiv 7y ago
Why can't we simply say, "what are the greatest places to live densely" and just copy-paste design elements? The Netherlands is one of the most dense regions in the world. But it doesn't feel like it -- at all. It is human-scale. We don't have to sacrifice our humanity or quality of life. There is plenty of room.
- rhacker 7y ago
  Are people in the Netherlands similar to people in the United States? In the US you will primarily get a neighbor that is watching football, shouting swear words and always accompanied with the smell of budweiser as you pass them in the halls. You will always know when they are home... And if you don't get that guy it will be the screaming couple.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    From my own perspective, the Dutch are more similar to educated Americans than any other country in Europe, including UK. Kind of a midwest friendly vibe.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    I think the problem perhaps is that in house-owning countries, the apartments are usually cheaply built, or cheaply converted, so leak sound like sieves, because everybody who has any money wants to live in a suburb. In apartment-living countries, they put earth between the floors, and the walls are pretty heavy duty. So you don't really have that much noise pollution.
  - StudyAnimal 7y ago
    Dutch weed stinks more than American beer
balfirevic 7y ago
> We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through. I've never been to NY. What makes those parts miserable?
- tartoran 7y ago
  Rich people move in, place looses its vibrancy, everything starts to look the same, etc. Ofc, the miserable part is not true for the affluent who gentrify the place. New York is a dirty old place but sometimes something special happens naturally, when people from all over the world, from all cultures, blend in and create something, it’s very hard to describe if you don’t experience it in person. The problem is that New York’s specialness is slowly dying out
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    Wait, correct me if I misunderstood something - building high-rise apartment buildings makes living there more expensive? But how does that happen, since high rises provide greater supply of living space?
    - cogman10 7y ago
      Supply vs Demand. There is a lot of demand for high rises close to city center and not enough supply of those buildings for the entire population. Similar to how all real estate works really. Pick any small town Kentucky and you'll find housing prices that are dirt cheap with huge lots. Why do you find those? Because very few people want to live in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.
    - dr_dshiv 7y ago
      It is so strange. I'd love to read an economics paper on it. I think it has to do with the fact that building a lot of expensive (above market) housing stock in an area tends to increase surrounding housing prices. It makes sense, but somehow seems to violate supply vs demand.
hyperpape 7y ago
In general, I'm pretty sympathetic to this point, but how many square feet per person does the East Village have compared to other metropolitan areas?
dtwest 7y ago
Queens and Brooklyn can't get up to that level of density unless we build more transit lines. This is very difficult to do in NYC. Without additional lines, the city's road infrastructure would not be able to handle the additional traffic. I think the author's point is to build more density along existing lines. Many stops in Queens and Brooklyn already have 3-5 storey development around them. Thus, build higher in those areas. I agree that 3-5 storey development is a nice density for living in (I choose to myself). But practically speaking, spreading that zone wider in NYC, without any sort of transit plan, is not possible. You might not like walking through it, but I think Long Island City is a success story for this model. Thousands of workers, who otherwise would've been driving up rent in Manhattan, decide to live near the LIC transit hub in high rises, and I think the city as a whole is better off because of it.
- L_Rahman 7y ago
  Walking through LIC makes me deeply unhappy but I agree with you completely. In terms of its ability to deliver on raw numbers of housing increase it has been a total success and arguably helped keep rental pressure off my crappy Alphabet City apartment (and by extension the cheaper apartment I would have moved to and so on down the chain) by drawing away midtown finance types. I do wonder which is harder: changing zoning laws in Gramercy and the West Village or fixing capacity problems on the F/G/NQR or LIRR
L_Rahman 7y ago
Replying to this after having a spent a few days in Tokyo, a city based on which Alon makes many of his arguments and I have to say it is also miserable. The experience of Tokyo neighborhoods is a relentless wall of gray, right until you take the train into an outlying neighborhood which is of course mostly three and four story mixed use apartment buildings and homes.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Why can't we simply say, "what are the greatest places to live densely" and just copy-paste design elements? The Netherlands is one of the most dense regions in the world. But it doesn't feel like it -- at all. It is human-scale. We don't have to sacrifice our humanity or quality of life. There is plenty of room.

rhacker 7y ago
Are people in the Netherlands similar to people in the United States? In the US you will primarily get a neighbor that is watching football, shouting swear words and always accompanied with the smell of budweiser as you pass them in the halls. You will always know when they are home... And if you don't get that guy it will be the screaming couple.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  From my own perspective, the Dutch are more similar to educated Americans than any other country in Europe, including UK. Kind of a midwest friendly vibe.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I think the problem perhaps is that in house-owning countries, the apartments are usually cheaply built, or cheaply converted, so leak sound like sieves, because everybody who has any money wants to live in a suburb. In apartment-living countries, they put earth between the floors, and the walls are pretty heavy duty. So you don't really have that much noise pollution.
- StudyAnimal 7y ago
  Dutch weed stinks more than American beer

balfirevic 7y ago

> We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through. I've never been to NY. What makes those parts miserable?

tartoran 7y ago
Rich people move in, place looses its vibrancy, everything starts to look the same, etc. Ofc, the miserable part is not true for the affluent who gentrify the place. New York is a dirty old place but sometimes something special happens naturally, when people from all over the world, from all cultures, blend in and create something, it’s very hard to describe if you don’t experience it in person. The problem is that New York’s specialness is slowly dying out
- balfirevic 7y ago
  Wait, correct me if I misunderstood something - building high-rise apartment buildings makes living there more expensive? But how does that happen, since high rises provide greater supply of living space?
  - cogman10 7y ago
    Supply vs Demand. There is a lot of demand for high rises close to city center and not enough supply of those buildings for the entire population. Similar to how all real estate works really. Pick any small town Kentucky and you'll find housing prices that are dirt cheap with huge lots. Why do you find those? Because very few people want to live in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    It is so strange. I'd love to read an economics paper on it. I think it has to do with the fact that building a lot of expensive (above market) housing stock in an area tends to increase surrounding housing prices. It makes sense, but somehow seems to violate supply vs demand.

hyperpape 7y ago

In general, I'm pretty sympathetic to this point, but how many square feet per person does the East Village have compared to other metropolitan areas?

dtwest 7y ago

Queens and Brooklyn can't get up to that level of density unless we build more transit lines. This is very difficult to do in NYC. Without additional lines, the city's road infrastructure would not be able to handle the additional traffic. I think the author's point is to build more density along existing lines. Many stops in Queens and Brooklyn already have 3-5 storey development around them. Thus, build higher in those areas. I agree that 3-5 storey development is a nice density for living in (I choose to myself). But practically speaking, spreading that zone wider in NYC, without any sort of transit plan, is not possible. You might not like walking through it, but I think Long Island City is a success story for this model. Thousands of workers, who otherwise would've been driving up rent in Manhattan, decide to live near the LIC transit hub in high rises, and I think the city as a whole is better off because of it.

L_Rahman 7y ago
Walking through LIC makes me deeply unhappy but I agree with you completely. In terms of its ability to deliver on raw numbers of housing increase it has been a total success and arguably helped keep rental pressure off my crappy Alphabet City apartment (and by extension the cheaper apartment I would have moved to and so on down the chain) by drawing away midtown finance types. I do wonder which is harder: changing zoning laws in Gramercy and the West Village or fixing capacity problems on the F/G/NQR or LIRR

L_Rahman 7y ago

Replying to this after having a spent a few days in Tokyo, a city based on which Alon makes many of his arguments and I have to say it is also miserable. The experience of Tokyo neighborhoods is a relentless wall of gray, right until you take the train into an outlying neighborhood which is of course mostly three and four story mixed use apartment buildings and homes.