This article and the study it cites miss the point.<p>Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone else as cheaply as possible. They are markets for jobs, goods and services. When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl, they have effectively failed. In a sense, they are not really cities, but just agglomerations of many towns without a center. This describes many so-called cities in America, with LA being one of the most egregious examples.<p>One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been entrusted to, well, developers. Those are the contractors that Buildzoom addresses as its audience, and the website is flattering their sensibilities. They like a supply chain that involves suburbs with lots of cookie-cutter mini-mansions. Easy to commodify and sell, and someone else can worry about the commuting headaches.
It's not. I'd recommend Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" to anyone interested in a comprehensive picture of what it takes to make cities livable:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0...</a><p>Also read up on all the work Singapore is doing to increase density without ruining their economy or environment while improving livability.<p>And some further reading on the dynamics of city growth: <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013541" rel="nofollow">http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....</a><p>I love thinking about this stuff, complex and fascinating :)
The main obstacle to building upwards in American cities is the illegality of it. It's zoned, and coded and regulated to death, and can only be done in a small portion of the land around.<p>Suburban sprawl, meanwhile, remains actively subsidized.<p>So if your high rise builders are hobbled, OF COURSE more sprawl will be the only way to address increasing demand.
It's cheaper only because nobody pays the true cost of transportation. Make gas $8 a gallon to cover for the damage to the environment and suddenly sprawl won't seem so cheap.
This article is a load of garbage. It's not a dichotomy between towers and sprawl. There are cities that strike a balance between these, with mid-ride and high-rise depending on the neighborhood and the intended use of the properties.<p>You can have human-scale development, buildings 5-7 stories tall, moderate density that promotes local commerce, safe environments for children and other vulnerable groups, easy access to amenities, and much more.
Relax zoning so you can have more jobs near housing. Then you won't have hundreds of acres of homogenous tract housing that requires such a long commute.<p>Houston has no single major business district. It does have a serious lack of solid transit. But if you want to live close to work, that doesn't necessarily mean in the "downtown" area like in many cities. There are huge concentrations of offices and stores in the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, Upper Kirby, the Bush airport area and several suburbs/exurbs.
Few people outside of Manhattan picture a home as an office building with a doorman.
A few (closer to 20 now that I looked) years ago, Atlanta had a mini-boom of hi-rise condo building. A couple of the properties did very well; they were mostly pre-sold, though probably to speculators. Some of the others had trouble selling all their units.
Going vertical also brings a problem, mentioned by another commentor, of "viewing" rights (i.e. no blocking the views of established properties.) I think Trump had a similar problem with one of his projects.
" . . . a website for contractors." I think that might be relevant. Not that I expect the WSJ to challenge the status quo. Any serious analysis would have to consider Copenhagen, Paris, Singapore, Austin at the least. And take livability analyses seriously, too.
The article fails to break out cost of building versus cost of litigating to be able to build. They mention the NIMBYs, but without putting dollar or % value on what costs they create.<p>Santa Monica and West LA are great examples - costs and rents have skyrocketed. However, much of the land is 1-2 stories, if that. Large portions of the housing stock is more than 50 years old.<p>If they were to make it 3-4 stories instead (hardly Manhattan density, or even SF), we could fit 2-3x people no problem. Unfortunately, between zoning, NIMBYs and rent control, you can pretty much forget about it.
It seems to me like the real solution to a lot of traffic and affordable housing problems is 'work-from-home' ideology. In the 1800s it was common for business owners to contract with homesteads to produce good for them, which is then picked up and sold in markets (i.e. shoes). These 'workers' were free to find work as they chose between seasons. Of course, a very different world now with scheduled mortgage payments and other needs, however there must be a tipping point. The 'sharing/contractor' economy seems to be an inevitable ideological revolution.
I have this theory that autonomous vehicles will enable a resurgence of the suburb. If I can disengage from the transporting myself into being <i>transported</i>, I can spend that travel time working instead of navigating. If I lived an hour away from work but I could spend 2 hours working via my car, I'd have no problem moving to the suburbs. But as it stands right now, the commute is the part that really freaks me out.
City "connectedness" is much more about time than space. So fast, affordable, convenient transport (a la Hong Kong) can make a big city feel smaller. Cars are the problem not the solution.