This seems to me largely explicable even without reference to labor cost. I live in a downtown townhouse and asked my own builder why these kinds of projects ta

This seems to me largely explicable even without reference to labor cost. I live in a downtown townhouse and asked my own builder why these kinds of projects take so long compared to the cookie cutter suburban projects. Some of it is more difficult permitting, zoning, having to often clear existing buildings first. But part of it according to him is just a shortage of skilled tradespeople who are even qualified to do the work. Basic microeconomics would dictate you can just pay more and induce more people to take the job, but if you're talking about a usually lifelong career choice that takes years at bare minimum to master, and requires an apprenticeship with already existing masters, no matter what you offer to pay, you can only increase the labor supply so quickly, and even then it might take a generation. Very few, if any, businesses have that kind of time horizon. Thus, it does not happen, and instead, there simply aren't enough people who have the necessary skill to do certain jobs. I would imagine that all of the custom stonecutting and sculpting to create very ornate unique buildings is one of those sufficiently rare skills that, no matter how many cities and people might claim to prefer one type of architecture over another visually, you're instead going to get what is actually possible to build fast enough to meet the required rate for new buildings to go up, which means standard shapes and sizes that are pre-fabricated in abundance by robots.