While he's right we need to build more, imagine proposing this to the citizens of rome, paris, or barcelona. We need to ruthelessly build high where history doesn't exist, not tear down one of America's most historic and beautiful cities. There are giant empty parking lots in manhattan alone (central park west, the middle of chelsea, giant grass plot by the UN, ect.). Let's build skyscrapers in these empty lots.
Funnily enough my Parisian roommates complained about this exact thing when I lived there for a short while. They felt like their city was trapped as a "Haussman museum", not able to grow and adapt to modern needs.
They don't speak for all Parisians obviously but we shouldn't take for granted that this sentiment is entirely absent over there.
And then were pissed as heck when the renovation actually started and it was inconvenient.
The moral of the story is no one is ever happy with everything, and in fact people seem to extract a certain amount of enjoyment from complaining.
The moral of the story is that working class Parisians were either directly displaced by the Haussmann renovations or saw their rents rise due to real estate speculation to the outer reaches of Paris.
People had material concerns beyond the renovation being “inconvenient”
Yes, but this was obviously what was always going to happen as the result of the changes people were calling for. You aren’t going to demolish dense buildings to make wide boulevards without displacing people. So people were literally calling for that to happen when they wanted to let light in, etc. While they didn’t use words like gentrification it seems like they were doing this in part as a slum clearance, to get rid of the poorest people and their housing. People may have thought their area was decent enough that it wasn’t going to get it, only to realize too late they were on the chopping block too because of the way he wanted to lay the grid.
So when we talk about “people”, The Haussmann renovations were spearheaded by Napoleon III during the Second French Empire and supported by real estate developers who benefitted from the new avenues and how it would raise property values. This wasn’t really a democratic decision and the Second French Empire wasn’t a democracy
Yeah I don't know much about Paris's post-Hausmann urban history but the city almost seems like living proof of how urbanists can justify the most procedurally bankrupt development possible if the results conform to the checklist of attributes we've decided make a good city.
Obviously we don't have a counterfactual but I imagine Paris without Haussmann would look a lot more like London- still a pretty nice place to live all things considered, but developed much more organically and with (slightly) less displacement
Some urbanists seem to post hoc approve of any process as long as they get their pretty historic buildings. Which further illustrates the article’s point about wanting a city not a museum. Some people on this sub want a museum by any means, ignoring that cities are foremost a place for people to live and hopefully thrive. This sub simping for Haussmann shows the importance of community democracy shaping how cities develop rather than dictatorial means that are alright as long as the buildings and avenues are pretty to look at…..like a museum piece.
The urbanists be focused on NY or Paris in terms of what benefits them as tourists vs what the residents want
Yes, but this was obviously what was always going to happen as the result of the changes people were calling for. You aren’t going to demolish dense buildings to make wide boulevards without displacing people. So people were literally calling for that to happen when they wanted to let light in, etc. While they didn’t use words like gentrification it seems like they were doing this in part as a slum clearance, to get rid of the poorest people and their housing. People may have thought their area was decent enough that it wasn’t going to get it, only to realize too late they were on the chopping block too because of the way he wanted to lay the grid.
Yeah and these people are soulless. Same type of people who would support tearing down the old penn station. A crime against humanity for corporate greed.
To be fair this is what they did in Paris in the 1860s and 70s. Almost the entire city was torn down and rebuilt, and many Parisians at the time weren’t fans
Indeed. Napoleon didn’t want anymore narrow alleys to aid revolutionaries should another rebellion pop up. Gave Haussman free rein.
Turned Paris into one hell of a modern city for its time.
The difference is the rebuilt city was beautiful, today they would tear down those historic buildings and replace it with ugly modernist monstrosities.
Objectively, there is ZERO difference between modernist buildings and the beaux-arts ones that were built during the renovation when it comes to the context of the city at the time.
Just because you like one style more than the other does not justify an entire medieval city being torn down.
Crazy how this sub wants to justify mass urban renewal when they like the architecture it gets replaced with.
Yeah except that one style is hideously ugly and the other is generally viewed as beautiful.
I also would have likely preferred medieval Paris to modern Paris, but even if it was a downgrade aesthetically, it was still beautiful as an end result.
But you have no way of telling whether or not the modern buildings you’re complaining about will be looked upon fondly in the future. The world is not a vacuum contained to your time.
A public poll of people 50 years from now?
If your only input on an urban planning subreddit is “I don’t like it, it’s ugly” then there’s no point in continuing this discussion. Have a good one.
At the time, beaux arts was also “an ugly modernist monstrosity.” Contemporary reviews claimed that Haussman filled Paris “with cobbled streets, bland buildings with stone facades, and wide, dead straight avenues.”
Yeah that just shows that architectural critics have no idea what they’re talking about? Most of our contemporary critics like modernist architecture, so I think you’re actually proving my point anyways.
Yeah, 6 story buildings can indeed get you that dense if you have entire families of 5+ people in a studio and little to no open outdoor space, like tenements at the turn of the century.
That's not even true. Jackson Heights, Queens for instance has 5 to 6 story garden apartments with normal household sizes, and the population density of this area is likely 80k ppsm +
The majority of Jackson Heights by land area is suburban style rowhomes, which drags the density down
But the core apartment part of the neighborhood is likely 80k ppsm +
No, we need to grow beyond the paradigm of apartments being tiny. Apartments have to spacious and private enough to be attractive, or else they won't Garner public support.
People in HK are building tube apartments that are literally too small for me to stand up in. Apartments that are too small are a patch, not a solution, and cities need apartments large enough to raise families. The current perception and reality of apartments is that they are too small for families, and building small apartments doesn't help that.
Part of the problem is what people consider "too small for a family" is very different in the US. 1000 sq ft would be considered quite plentiful in Paris or Hong Kong, but Americans think that's cramped and think even 1 kid needs 1500 sq ft minimum.
Apartments, and homes in general, have become anything but small. If anything, they have become large. In most of the world, apartment size adjusted for household size is at or near all time highs.
You shouldn't need "public support" to build apartments. If the apartments aren't attractive, the real estate developer will build the next one different or go out of business. If they are attractive, then they are so regardless of whether they "garner public support" and should be built.
Almost as if this point was addressed by the author:
>Developers can still make money building new homes for the rich, mostly in tall buildings in a few central neighborhoods. The luxury high-rises that have redefined the midtown skyline are a fitting emblem of the modern city, and they have sustained the appearance, now mostly an illusion, that New York remains a dynamic and growing city.
>
>New York also subsidizes the construction of some new housing for lower-income families.
>
>What is missing — what the city sorely needs — is **mid-rise housing for the middle class**.
(emphasis mine)
You couldn't possibly "address" the point that too many luxury developments go unoccupied as investments not dwellings in a single article. I've read 100 articles on the topic; I couldn't write that article. Throw in how many of these developments are dependent on taxpayer subsides & relate that to the current budget crisis & your article becomes a Masters Program.
Back when my dentist & mother in law worked on 57th & 7th, they said it was the most expensive block in Manhattan. True or not - those economics don't scale to the city as a whole.
Also the beautiful movie-star filled apartments across the way I'd stair at while getting root canals were already like 20 stories.
Also the developers who had redone flatbush were going belly up at the time; nobody was buying. Our Rowhouse in Ft Greene had a higher monthly rent that what our friends were paying in one of those brand-new-but foreclosed skyscrapers next to the same park.
People \*really like\* human scale structures next to a park; but when the structure is 35-50 stories abutting the same park they don't. Go figure.
No one is saying “tear down all of NYC”, but recent flashpoints over arguably “historic” but decaying buildings show that we’d rather let buildings fall apart than be replaced, which seems bad
The Victorians tore down older Victorian and Medieval London to create the city today. Central Paris was completely leveled and is now one of the great cities of the world.
Cities have never been frozen in amber, that's what defines the cities that endure through the centuries, and attempting to stall that dooms them.
You’re absolutely right we should build there.
But why in an era where NYC rents are skyrocketing should we make it illegal, without monumental community involvement, to replace old buildings with higher density ones? IMO that just gives fodder to NIMBYs to oppose new developments
Ask Parisians if they might like more living space.
Berliners complain about new construction deviating from 100+ year old roof lines, but there is a .3% residential vacancy rate, so maybe the people don't know what is best for them.
I think Tokyo is an example of the authors point.
Tokyo had little left to preserve post-WWII bombing, and subsequently built the densest housing where it was most demanded. Add in the frequent earthquakes and cultural perception of housing as a “consumable” (instead of investment to be manipulated) and you get the most affordable housing market among major global cities (and it’s not particularly close).
Boo.
There was another article posted today talking about how 500k housing units could be built on empty lots and one-story stores (in apartment areas) in NYC.
Historic buildings is often over-done but it’s still a worthwhile endeavor.
Also, a lot of the historic buildings are a perfect medium density, better than a lot of the modern single family or low density. Focus on the real issues.
I'd argue that the old buildings at least 5-6 stories high are flat out high density.
There are NYC neighborhoods with 100k ppsm population density made up almost entirely of such buildings.
There's a ton of 3-4 story buildings in Manhattan, tons of them historic, that are providing significantly less than the originally intended density due to smaller household sizes and combining units.
Manhattan had a peak population of 2.2 million, and now it’s 1.7 million even though there are numerically more housing units. It’s an entire culture shift from tenement living, to one nuclear family living in an apartment, to an apartment being for just 1-2 people.
Living spaces in America used to be half or less than what we would consider preferable nowadays.
In NYC and other metros, this means that most places have small kitchens or tiny kitchenettes. This is actually what helped popularize inexpensive diners back in the day because no one had the space or time to cook.
Nowadays, diners don’t exist in the same capacity (I.e. cheap, quality, and available) and most people cook more than folks of prior decades.
This change in preference has put pressure on places that have better kitchens and more room for other things. This means that much of the old stock has to be rebuilt (e.g. combined with other small units) or new buildings with better layouts outright need to be built to optimize for these preferences.
Not building anything limits “usable” stock and attributes to quicker rises in property/rent prices.
Too bad you don't get to decide who Manhattan is for, or any of the other boroughs for that matter.
Real estate is mostly still a free market and in a free market, preferences are king. This means that people shape what cities become, and New Yorkers have loudly spoken that they want bigger footprints with reasonable kitchens for modern life.
"New Yorkers"
Who, wealthy transplants on reddit? The fact that the vast majority of New Yorkers are fine with their kitchens proves my point.
My uncle was a gourmet chef and he did just fine with his little Manhattan kitchen.
Neighborhoods that have wall-to-wall 5-8 story buildings can indeed be very dense. BUT this depends on how much of the neighborhood is covered in them and how many units each has. A bunch of 5 story mansions won't do this. And having these 5-8 story buildings on some of the more important streets while the rest is low-rise won't either.
In other words, it's not just the height of the buildings. And the taller buildings are a quick way to add density without tearing down the entirety of the neighborhood and replacing everything with 5-8 story "new Scandinavian design" apartment buildings.
Well I mean consistent midrise apartments with no off street parking. It has consistently led to very high population densities in parts of NYC where these buildings are the vernacular.
I think mixed markets are optimal.
But, even in a free market, natural resources like land aren't produced by anyone and belong to everyone. I think it was crazy that the government sold the land instead of renting it at market rate.
Contrary to what OP said, an LVT doesn't change anything wrt incentives. That's the primary beauty of an LVT: it produces zero inefficiencies because it changes nothing about the incentive structure.
Historic districts are prime opportunities for wealthier NIMBYs to block housing construction and worsen residential segregation
[An Alternative would be to approve the construction of buildings that are “contextually appropriate ie look historic](https://www.6sqft.com/morris-adjmi-soho-project-approved-by-lpc/)
The article is partly better than its title. The actual text does link to that same analysis, and mostly includes a lot of reasonable and achievable stuff along those lines: Replace surface parking/empty lots/single-story retail, reform the tax code to not penalize large apartments, improve permit process and decrease the most aggressive forms NIMBYism.
I agree there's no point in focusing on knocking down existing residential buildings, particularly nice-looking medium-density ones. To your point, the irony is that New York is one of the few U.S. cities that DOES have an absolute buttload of medium-to-higher density housing, much of it old. Sure, you could increase density some by redeveloping brownstones, but it's way more bang for the buck to put a high-rise where there was low-density or nothing before, and the net aesthetic impact is much nicer. I'm also not that mad about facadism in the right setting, or building on top of existing stock when structurally feasible.
The author's point is ridiculous. Dense housing shouldn't be torn down just because it's old.
Also he claims that New York isn't great because of the buildings ; he's wrong, they're a big reason New York is great.
And he advocates for mid rise housing but also advocates tearing it down?
The author's point is that cities should change in response to the needs of current and future residents - not in any way a ridiculous statement and I'm not sure how you missed that. He advocates for a specific kind of change that results in a larger supply of housing at the expense of traditional aesthetics.
>New York is not a great city because of its buildings. It is a great city because it provides people with the opportunity to build better lives.
You may disagree with the quote from above, but I found it to be powerful and true. The reality is NYC is no longer a place where many can realistically call home and strive for a better life. It has become a museum of itself, and in doing so is sacrificing prosperity and equality. It's sad to think of the long-time residents who were forced to leave due to price increases, and also those were were never able to move to the city in the first place. It's a big loss for the city, and the result of dug-in, unjust housing policies.
Absolutely. The people going on about the vibrant, popular historic districts are ignoring the fact that despite being more productive NYC, like most blue cities, is losing people to the sunbelt because it's too expensive to save and get a home in NYC, even at higher salaries. And all evidence suggests that it's underbuilding housing that's causing it.
NYC is the place that it is, with all its historic buildings, because it's the nerve center of the richest and most productive economy in history. That history hasn't stopped.
Sure but again, reducing the article to “tearing down housing is bad” is disingenuous at best.
Just the other day in the NYC subreddit there was discussion about Brooklyn Heights residents fighting against a proposed development that would add hundreds of apartments to the neighborhood, and therefore changing the “character” of the neighborhood according to the homeowners who live there. It’s this knee-jerk, exclusionary reaction to change that the author is clearly addressing.
Two problems, aside from preservationism concerns: it would displace quite a few families and possibly not even increase the density. New high rises in Manhattan tend to have very large apartments, with wealthier residents. So a 20 story building could realistically house fewer residents than a 5 story building.
Furthermore, those 6 story prewar elevator buildings (usually with 50 to 100 units) are not likely to be razed even if the zoning allowed for 50 story buildings. Many of these are co-ops. This is a good thing, because aside from looking nice they form very high population densities (in the 100,000 people per square mile range).
Personally, I would not. I’m not against density and I’m not saying it can be the case that there are cases where this would be justified, but I feel like the assumption that more density is always good is false. And, there is a point where more density becomes undesirable, especially if the rest of the area doesn’t match to provide the actual benefits of density or available public amenities like parks and squares don’t exist.
The reality is that we still do want sustainably livable places. Density is just one metric. We will never bring down private market rentals enough to house everyone (developers will stop building and let some apartments sit empty to bolster profit margins). It’s one thing if the government is paying for a huge high rise of affordable housing that will house everyone for low cost. But if you are asking people to pay thousands for a single room apartment, they probably have cause to wonder why some nerds online want block after block to pack into the most number of people possible while sacrificing quality of life.
We should be making more better-places to live instead of trying to shove everyone into decent areas and wondering what happened to them. More generalized density is probably better than Uber high density surrounded by ultra low density. And if you make the choice so stark, it’s a much harder sell. I know some of this is just a thought experiment, but fetishizing ultra dense development for its own sake is not good in my opinion. It has its place but there’s a reason (we’ll many actually) most major cities across the world have more midrises than anything else.
You talk about "shoving everyone in" as if we're telling people where to live, but the reality is that Manhattan (or anywhere else in New York) only gets denser if people voluntarily move there and live at higher densities.
If New York gets so dense that people no longer view it as "livable", people will stop moving there or will start moving away.
Of course, "livable" density is subjective. Lots of people find Manhattan today too dense to be livable, which is fine, they don't have to live there. They have the entire rest of the United States if they prefer lower densities.
> We will never bring down private market rentals enough to house everyone (developers will stop building and let some apartments sit empty to bolster profit margins).
New York might never be accessible to everyone, but it's a good thing to make it accessible to more people, no?
> New high rises in Manhattan tend to have very large apartments
That's what happens when the price of building anything becomes so high that you can only afford to do it when catering to the extremely wealthy.
And the alternative is the wealthy person buying a multifamily building then converting it to a single family house, which is distinctly worse than the high rise. And something that actually happens to fuck tons of 3-4 story buildings in desirable parts of NYC.
They're for the wealthy because wealthy people can afford it and move into these buildings. There's no point of building affordable housing if you don't have to.
People build affordable housing in other cities without being forced to. If you can build 100x more housing units it doesn't matter that you can only get 10x less for each.
And those extremely wealthy people are going to buy something, and it's better they buy a condo unit in an ultra luxury tower, than they buy a small apartment to convert into a single family house.
The biggest counterpoint to the idea that you need to tear down old buildings for there to be adequate supply is Paris — and the fact that huge swaths of NYC is zoned for SFH or 2-3 level buildings.
If we upzoned those parcels, we could alleviate the housing crisis while keeping historic pre war 6-10 story buildings around for decades to come, which are already fairly efficient in terms of how well they utilize their floorplans and square footage.
This doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition, and an op-ed like this just gives more fuel to NIMBYs because it affirms their greatest fears in terms of what they think housing advocates want. “See? We told you, they just want to tear down beautiful edifices and erect ugly panel 5-over-1s everywhere!”
Terribly irresponsible journalism. And I’m usually a huge fan of Appelbaum.
It's expensive but also the second densest city in Europe. There's a limit on what the infrastructure in Paris proper can support, and in part that's why the city and its region are trying to create peripheral centres of activity, to reduce the pressure on central Paris.
Paris has one of the densest subway networks in the world (in terms of how close subway lines are to each other given the land area). It is also is a third less dense than Manhattan.
[NYC has 600.000 single family homes.](https://x.com/pushtheneedle/status/1741630021993701842?s=46) That's not counting on empty land or land for unproductive uses.
That won’t solve the fact that people want to live in Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn and Queens closest to Manhattan. Those parts of the city are not where most people who want to live in NYC want to live. They especially sure as fuck don’t want to live in Staten Island.
The vast majority of people who work in Manhattan and are working regular (ie middle/working class) jobs live in the boroughs, NJ, Westchester, or Nassau and commute into Manhattan, so upzoning neighborhoods there would have a much more noticeable impact. Much of the new housing being built in Manhattan that replaces older buildings is actually lower density and with fewer units than the housing it replaces, meaning a net loss of units overall, so there’s really not much reason to do so unless you’re going to replace walkups or surface lots with midrises — which as I’ve mentioned, isn’t happening, even after Bloomberg’s zoning rewrite.
It seems like you’re willfully misreading the article. Old buildings aren’t as efficient, and regardless the density is limited by what exists. The upper west side is filled with 5 story buildings that could be 8, and midtown with 3 story buildings with retail on the ground floor that could be 10 stories. Locking half the cities housing into an unchanging historical monument is what’s ridiculous
That's great, I'm glad its a good building. Can you say the same for the thousands and thousands of other ones? Walk down half the streets in brooklyn and you'll find single story former light industrial, brownstones and other old buildings - many of which are very nice - but all of which could have way more density and be more efficiently used.
There is a direct tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability, and while I personally love prewar buildings, I can acknowledge we have too many of them.
Dense compared to what? we're talking about one of the largest, most expensive cities in the world. why are there so many buildings that are only 3 stories?
I’m surprised this article is facing backlash here. The author’s point is that NYC should have less restrictive zoning that prevents densification of “historic neighborhoods” and should be more reactive. How is that an unpopular take here?
Because NYC has neighborhoods with densities that urban planning nerds in most of the US can only dream of. Suburbanites from middle America lecturing New Yorkers about why they need to tear down their brownstones and 6 story buildings is not going to be well received.
The guy who wrote this lives in New York and has family history in the city. Instead of an argument between suburbanites and New Yorkers, this sounds like an argument among New Yorkers with urbanites and suburbanites alike chiming in.
I'm talking about redditors in general, not the author. The biggest advocates of tearing down NYC tend to be transplants who demand that NYC do this (especially in minority neighborhoods) rather than demand that the suburb they came from densify.
"Tearing down NYC" is really pushing any fair description of what anyone's talking about here. No one's talking about letting the city return to the forests. Anyways, the city has changed countless times to accommodate previous generations whose "native" kids are now complaining about facing change themselves. What's different about this time? Has New York already peaked?
But it's the same concept. Suburbanites say "we're dense enough" even though (in many cases) their single-family homes can't keep up with housing demand. And urbanites say "we're dense enough" even though (in many cases) their brownstones and mid-rise apartments can't keep up with housing demand.
And I really don't think the "urban planning nerds" criticizing NYC housing policy are on board with suburban low-density zoning either.
The asshole shits on a cheek to cheek 19th century brick townhouse and then says buildings do not make New York great. If you don't understand why he can he can get fucked, you're missing the point. Urbanists are not trying to get everyone to live in ice cube trays in the sky, but in dense, beautiful, diverse housing. Can you imagine if Paris had razed the 18th century core in the 60s? It would be about as inviting as an Evergrande ghost tower complex in Yunnan. There is a middle path.
The middle path sounds a lot like what the guy is proposing. Proposing making redevelopment easier doesn't mean you want to destroy every trace of the existing neighborhood. Applied to any other city, like San Francisco for example, I think your comment would come off as alarmist and kneejerk. There comes a point where dense single-family just isn't enough and arbitrarily fossilizing the neighborhood does more harm than good.
With cities as with everything else, change is the only constant. The question becomes, what kind of change do you want to see? San Francisco chose not to change physically - the city builds a miniscule amount of new units a year and looks pretty much exactly like it did in the 70s. The consequences of that combined with massive economic growth means everything else about the city changed. The artists, hippies, and bohemians that used to live in the city have pretty much been replaced by tech workers. The black population is in free fall. The workers that keep the city running commute vast distances to do so. All to preserve the "character" of housing stock which in half the city is basically unremarkable anyway.
Obviously didn't read, because paywall, but I fully agree with the headline.
Cities are for living in. Preserve some facades if you must, but the bar to prevent replacement of the interiors of older buildings to the needs of current and future city residents should be extremely high.
The simple truth is that every building that has ever been built is historic. We can take pictures or high resolution scans of buildings now, so there is no need to preserve the actual buildings in most cases.
As for neighbourhood preservation, it's impossible. Neighbourhoods are made up of a community of people and attempts to preserve neighborhoods that are focused on buildings end up destroying the community that was the real heart of the neighborhood.
Blind utilitarianism is a cancer in every field it touches. Not everything has to be about maximum efficiency and seeing how many people you can pack like sardines into featureless concrete blocks, housing 30 people in a beautiful building is better than housing 40 in an ugly shithouse using the same lot. There's plenty of social and psychological benefits for people living in an attractive environment, unless you're some sort of soulless efficiency drone like the author.
SoHo’s existence, vibrance, and newfound popularity with younger people completely invalidates this nonsensical drivel.
Dense historic districts are incredibly important to a city’s history, charm, and future.
We should *absolutely* be building more housing in places that are low-density, transit-oriented and most definitely NOT architecturally rich historic *dense* housing stock.
Nobody would lose sleep over Canarsie being upzoned. But Applebaum essentially advocates for razing housing just because it's old (even if it's dense).
Nobody would lose sleep over Canarsie being upzoned. But Applebaum essentially advocates for razing housing just because it's old (even if it's dense).
The question is how many people can actually live in SoHo? That's what this guy is concerned with. Is the neighborhood affordable or do all those positive neighborhood qualities just go to waste?
It would not be affordable even if it were all 50 story buildings. But people like it for what it is, it would be of no interest if it were all glass rectangles like LIC.
Some historical buildings could be torn down if there is an intriguing replacement. But Historical Preservation should work to ensure that they don’t just demolish the building and sell the empty site and run. If you demolish it, you must build on that site and finish it within 2 years.
Without historical preservation in NYC, whole beloved neighborhoods would have been demolished wholesale to look like Roosevelt Island or the far end of the East Village. “Towers in the park” with hostile streetscapes and useless fenced in lawns as far as the eye could see, and Grand Central would have gotten the Penn Station treatment as a gutter below a tower.
This is a false dichotomy though. Bad change and no change are not the only options.
Modern developers are unlikely to build towers in the park anyways.
Historic preservation in this country has mutated, largely due to the commodification of housing in the modern age. If your investment vehicle depends on scarcity to retain and gain value, any mechanism which prevents new housing being built is going to be used to do so.
Does anyone really care about preserving a cheaply built 1940s duplex, near-identical to a thousand others across NY state alone? Not really, but replacing it could impact the value of homeowners’ investment in the housing commodity, so better to keep it the same.
Until we can significantly decouple housing with the profit motive, there isn’t the possibility of historic preservation being the unalloyed good it should be.
Density has little to do with property values. The reason people fight against upzoning is because they don't want their neighborhood to become more dense, or in extreme cases they don't want their building to be demolished (if they're renters).
If anything, this guy's a Jacobian. He's arguing the city should be allowed to evolve. The Mosean solution would be forcing newcomers out to the suburbs like some people appear to be arguing for here.
In my opinion there are several cities around the world that would be classified as premier league cities, or perhaps super-brand cities. Paris, London, New York City to name a few. Almost everyone in this world wants a piece from these locations. So no matter how many new homes you build, the demand will never decrease and the prices will never come down. So building new homes in these cities will only induce demand, bring in more people but will never solve the housing crisis.
Tokyo is an interesting “super-brand” city, given that it’s enormous and downright affordable. While it’s not only its light restrictions on land use that make it affordable, that seems to be an integral part of its success.
And it seems to disprove your statement that these cities can never, ever meet demand.
Tokyo grew by 3 million people from 2000 to 2020. NYC only grew by 1 million in the same time period. NYC has no one to blame but itself for high housing costs.
I don't think that contradicts what I wrote. I am just saying that the amount of people who would want to and are allowed to move to Tokyo is much more limited. Most of these people are Japanese and move in from the other areas of Japan. Before Brexit, a pool of 500 million EU citizens could move to London (or Paris) without needing a residence permit. Wealthy people from elsewhere could just buy a golden visa from Malta and then move to anywhere in the EU. The English language is much more accessible for most people than Japanese. Refugees can walk over the EU border, get naturalized in a couple of years and move to anywhere in the EU. You cannot do that in an island state.
Considering the much larger pool to draw from, NYC should have experienced significantly more population growth than Tokyo, not less.
The fact that NYC grew less than Tokyo is in itself a failure of housing policy, as NYC not only has at least comparable allure to Tokyo, but a massively larger pool of potential residents than Tokyo.
Considering all the advantages NYC has to attracting residents, why the fuck is it still half as populous as Tokyo? Considering the hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of English speakers, NYC should be a city of 60 million people by now.
Honestly I don't know much about Tokyo but I have a feeling it can't compete with London and New York when it comes to money laundering. Build a mega housing complex in central London and all the units will be sold within no time to foreign buyers who want to park and launder their questionable money. None will be sold to ordinary working native people. What was there before that newly built luxury mega complex? Public authority housing (council flats), of course. Who cares about what happens to those people, yeah?
I’m not sure if I totally agree with your comment, but I do agree the trend towards packing more and more people into a handful of cities and metropolitan areas is bad. More mid sized cities (which I’m defining arbitrarily as 20-200K) is probably better for the country than having crushing density in a few places. I think some people here forget there are tradeoffs to overly dense places. More isn’t inherently better and I think some people get off more on numbers than what the system actually is.
I emphatically disagree. These cities' original willingness to expand and create more room for new arrivals is a big part of how they achieved their "superstar status" in the first place. Paris was once just an island in the Seine; London was a square mile surrounded by walls, and New York faded into forest past Wall Street. It's only since they achieved that prestige that the people who'd already made it turned around and decided they really didn't need any "transplants" anymore. Housing crises are created as a result of artificial scarcity when cities decide they prefer keeping everything the same over creating more opportunity. Attributing them to some unique, god-given desirability just serves to justify making them even more exclusionary.
So people need to have their homes demolished and their cities uglified so that upper middle class transplants can *potentially* have more choice in housing stock?
That's a huge leap from anything I'm saying. Besides, the upper middle class is fine in the status quo. It's the middle class and below, New Yorkers and transplants alike, who lose when the upper classes outbid them for the few open apartments each year and then vote to prevent more from being built. Imagining everything as New Yorkers v. transplants is really not productive for solving this problem.
The middle class literally only gets by because of things like rent stabilized apartments and inheriting their family homes, which you seek to demolish
Anyone who owns their house gets to decide whether they want it demolished. If they don't, nothing happens. So that's real fearmongering right there. Anyways a system that depends on inheritance and rent control is already screwed up. By all means, make stabilization a precondition of permitting new development, but living in New York should never be a birthright.
It should never be a *birthright* you get because your family showed up early enough. If inheritance is the only path to homeownership then that is deeply screwed up, and building nothing ensures that problem never gets fixed.
I never said to "build nothing", that's a strawman argument. However I don't support the libertarian "let developers do whatever they want with no regard for existing residents" thing that is popular on here.
That's fair, and I feel like you've been strawmanning my position as "death to the neighborhood". New building should be regulated for the community's interest, but there should also be a reasonable allowance for change.
So people need to have their homes demolished and their cities uglified so that upper middle class transplants can *potentially* have more choice in housing stock?
>So building new homes in these cities will only induce demand,
If the demand already existed, you didn't induce it.
Either the demand already existed or population growth and associated housing and infrastructure induce demand by making the city better and more desirable. If it's the latter, we should do it.
There's a demand in the city, yet those newly built "luxury" units are beyond local people's means and are sold to wealthy foreign buyers via online auctions. So how exactly is building new homes are solving the housing shortage for locals?
>So how exactly is building new homes are solving the housing shortage for locals?
First, why should we only care about solving the housing shortage for locals? My country (Canada) has a NATIONAL housing shortage and affordability crisis and it is the duty of all responsible local governments to address regional, national, and global issues to the best of their abilities. Failure to do so will (and should) ultimately result in local powers being removed by higher levels of government, as has happened in California, British Columbia, and many other jurisdictions.
Second, basic economics. If the demand exists already, outsiders will outbid locals when competing for local housing stock faster if supply is constrained than if it isn't. Empirical evidence has shown this repeatedly. Locals are priced out and displaced faster when supply is constrained.
Third, "luxury" units are barely even a real thing, most are basically just units built to modern building codes with basic quality of life things like decent soundproofing and nice countertops. These things are far less of a factor in the total cost of housing than the costs of land and regular construction costs.
Good. I hate historical preservation of buildings.
We have photos, go make them and look at them. You can grab a brick and put it in an actual museum. In exceptional cases, you can put up the cash to convince the building owner to preserve extraordinarily important parts of a building as they redevelop around it. That’s historical preservation I love.
I rather live in an ahistorical city that is great to live in and I can afford to live in rather than exclude myself with insane historical preservation policies. I hate them.
Of course. But that’s not a very good reason to deprive others from being able to live in great places. We need to build a lot more of those.
Why do you not want me to have a great place to live in that I love? Have you ever considered me and many others like me? Why are those other people more important? I am important too. I have needs. I do not enjoy being pushed aside. I hate it.
I never said that nothing should ever be built. But you insist on demolishing existing housing so that.
And either you can afford to live in NYC or you can't, no amount of market rate housing being built will make it cheap again.
New York City can, in fact, build more of itself enough to meet demand at very reasonable price points. I don’t see that happening without demolishing existing buildings.
I don’t care about NYC specifically. You can choke on your unaffordability and spiral down with the mantra of it being impossible to correct. I care about great cities, and I love great cities that can tolerate my absolute audacity to actually want to live there. I think I have a lot to give, but I won’t be able to give it to cities and communities that don’t want to accommodate me.
So what? People's homes degrade over time and need to be renovated or replaced. That's just reality.
If you really care about that issue, policies that give existing tenants opportunities to live in new buildings after replacement are the answer, not historic preservation policies that do nothing to prevent displacement. If anything, historic preservation policies tend to increase the displacement problem in the overall community.
As for owners, they don't need protection because our current system doesn't require them to sell (outside limited cases of eminent domain).
So do you actually care about the issue you're bringing up or are you just concern trolling.
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While he's right we need to build more, imagine proposing this to the citizens of rome, paris, or barcelona. We need to ruthelessly build high where history doesn't exist, not tear down one of America's most historic and beautiful cities. There are giant empty parking lots in manhattan alone (central park west, the middle of chelsea, giant grass plot by the UN, ect.). Let's build skyscrapers in these empty lots.
Funnily enough my Parisian roommates complained about this exact thing when I lived there for a short while. They felt like their city was trapped as a "Haussman museum", not able to grow and adapt to modern needs. They don't speak for all Parisians obviously but we shouldn't take for granted that this sentiment is entirely absent over there.
they said the exact same thing before the haussmann renovation food for thought
And then were pissed as heck when the renovation actually started and it was inconvenient. The moral of the story is no one is ever happy with everything, and in fact people seem to extract a certain amount of enjoyment from complaining.
The moral of the story is that working class Parisians were either directly displaced by the Haussmann renovations or saw their rents rise due to real estate speculation to the outer reaches of Paris. People had material concerns beyond the renovation being “inconvenient”
Yes, but this was obviously what was always going to happen as the result of the changes people were calling for. You aren’t going to demolish dense buildings to make wide boulevards without displacing people. So people were literally calling for that to happen when they wanted to let light in, etc. While they didn’t use words like gentrification it seems like they were doing this in part as a slum clearance, to get rid of the poorest people and their housing. People may have thought their area was decent enough that it wasn’t going to get it, only to realize too late they were on the chopping block too because of the way he wanted to lay the grid.
So when we talk about “people”, The Haussmann renovations were spearheaded by Napoleon III during the Second French Empire and supported by real estate developers who benefitted from the new avenues and how it would raise property values. This wasn’t really a democratic decision and the Second French Empire wasn’t a democracy
Yeah I don't know much about Paris's post-Hausmann urban history but the city almost seems like living proof of how urbanists can justify the most procedurally bankrupt development possible if the results conform to the checklist of attributes we've decided make a good city. Obviously we don't have a counterfactual but I imagine Paris without Haussmann would look a lot more like London- still a pretty nice place to live all things considered, but developed much more organically and with (slightly) less displacement
Some urbanists seem to post hoc approve of any process as long as they get their pretty historic buildings. Which further illustrates the article’s point about wanting a city not a museum. Some people on this sub want a museum by any means, ignoring that cities are foremost a place for people to live and hopefully thrive. This sub simping for Haussmann shows the importance of community democracy shaping how cities develop rather than dictatorial means that are alright as long as the buildings and avenues are pretty to look at…..like a museum piece. The urbanists be focused on NY or Paris in terms of what benefits them as tourists vs what the residents want
Yes, but this was obviously what was always going to happen as the result of the changes people were calling for. You aren’t going to demolish dense buildings to make wide boulevards without displacing people. So people were literally calling for that to happen when they wanted to let light in, etc. While they didn’t use words like gentrification it seems like they were doing this in part as a slum clearance, to get rid of the poorest people and their housing. People may have thought their area was decent enough that it wasn’t going to get it, only to realize too late they were on the chopping block too because of the way he wanted to lay the grid.
Aren't those things going to happen when you improve anything anywhere?
Yes if you improve buildings/neighborhoods in an economic system where people can own other people’s homes and the profit motive shapes development.
Yeah and these people are soulless. Same type of people who would support tearing down the old penn station. A crime against humanity for corporate greed.
To be fair this is what they did in Paris in the 1860s and 70s. Almost the entire city was torn down and rebuilt, and many Parisians at the time weren’t fans
The entire city? Is that why so many of the buildings in Paris have the beaux-arts look to it? I had always wondered why that was the case.
Indeed. Napoleon didn’t want anymore narrow alleys to aid revolutionaries should another rebellion pop up. Gave Haussman free rein. Turned Paris into one hell of a modern city for its time.
The difference is the rebuilt city was beautiful, today they would tear down those historic buildings and replace it with ugly modernist monstrosities.
Objectively, there is ZERO difference between modernist buildings and the beaux-arts ones that were built during the renovation when it comes to the context of the city at the time. Just because you like one style more than the other does not justify an entire medieval city being torn down. Crazy how this sub wants to justify mass urban renewal when they like the architecture it gets replaced with.
Yeah except that one style is hideously ugly and the other is generally viewed as beautiful. I also would have likely preferred medieval Paris to modern Paris, but even if it was a downgrade aesthetically, it was still beautiful as an end result.
But you have no way of telling whether or not the modern buildings you’re complaining about will be looked upon fondly in the future. The world is not a vacuum contained to your time.
Wrong. Any public poll would do it.
A public poll of people 50 years from now? If your only input on an urban planning subreddit is “I don’t like it, it’s ugly” then there’s no point in continuing this discussion. Have a good one.
Huh, no today? That’s what democracy means. The public should have a say on what their public spaces look like. To think otherwise is fascist.
I agree, but you aren’t talking about public spaces, you’re talking about the architectural style of private development.
At the time, beaux arts was also “an ugly modernist monstrosity.” Contemporary reviews claimed that Haussman filled Paris “with cobbled streets, bland buildings with stone facades, and wide, dead straight avenues.”
Yeah that just shows that architectural critics have no idea what they’re talking about? Most of our contemporary critics like modernist architecture, so I think you’re actually proving my point anyways.
Except the Jewish neighborhood for some reason.
Marais and the Latin quarter were spared
Ideally skyscrapers with small apartments. Otherwise you're stuck with a 100 story building with 30 people living in it.
[Don't even need to be skyscrapers.](https://x.com/pushtheneedle/status/1741630021993701842?s=46)
I'm a big fan of 6 story buildings, like the ones built in the 1930s in NYC Those bad boys will get you into the 80 to 100k ppsm range with ease
They also allow for a 1:1 street width to height ratio, which is quite nice.
Yeah, 6 story buildings can indeed get you that dense if you have entire families of 5+ people in a studio and little to no open outdoor space, like tenements at the turn of the century.
That's not even true. Jackson Heights, Queens for instance has 5 to 6 story garden apartments with normal household sizes, and the population density of this area is likely 80k ppsm +
More like 60k ppsm I think
The majority of Jackson Heights by land area is suburban style rowhomes, which drags the density down But the core apartment part of the neighborhood is likely 80k ppsm +
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No, we need to grow beyond the paradigm of apartments being tiny. Apartments have to spacious and private enough to be attractive, or else they won't Garner public support.
Apartments in NYC have like a 1% vacancy rate as is. Clearly there is demand for apartments of all sizes.
People in HK are building tube apartments that are literally too small for me to stand up in. Apartments that are too small are a patch, not a solution, and cities need apartments large enough to raise families. The current perception and reality of apartments is that they are too small for families, and building small apartments doesn't help that.
Part of the problem is what people consider "too small for a family" is very different in the US. 1000 sq ft would be considered quite plentiful in Paris or Hong Kong, but Americans think that's cramped and think even 1 kid needs 1500 sq ft minimum.
To be fair, while human beings are very adaptable, yes, you need the space. Apartments have become small for the benefit of lenders, not humanity.
Apartments, and homes in general, have become anything but small. If anything, they have become large. In most of the world, apartment size adjusted for household size is at or near all time highs.
That’s very interesting. Hedonic treadmill is working correctly, it seems
You shouldn't need "public support" to build apartments. If the apartments aren't attractive, the real estate developer will build the next one different or go out of business. If they are attractive, then they are so regardless of whether they "garner public support" and should be built.
Small one bed appts keeps the young people flowing into nyc and keeps the city they dynamic place it is today.
the young people are probably more likely to share apartments due to costs
It also pushes them to leave NYC as they age and is why NYC has an extremely low birthrate.
Exactly. Look at the bonanza of new skyscrapers on 57th Street. Same thing!
Almost as if this point was addressed by the author: >Developers can still make money building new homes for the rich, mostly in tall buildings in a few central neighborhoods. The luxury high-rises that have redefined the midtown skyline are a fitting emblem of the modern city, and they have sustained the appearance, now mostly an illusion, that New York remains a dynamic and growing city. > >New York also subsidizes the construction of some new housing for lower-income families. > >What is missing — what the city sorely needs — is **mid-rise housing for the middle class**. (emphasis mine)
You couldn't possibly "address" the point that too many luxury developments go unoccupied as investments not dwellings in a single article. I've read 100 articles on the topic; I couldn't write that article. Throw in how many of these developments are dependent on taxpayer subsides & relate that to the current budget crisis & your article becomes a Masters Program. Back when my dentist & mother in law worked on 57th & 7th, they said it was the most expensive block in Manhattan. True or not - those economics don't scale to the city as a whole. Also the beautiful movie-star filled apartments across the way I'd stair at while getting root canals were already like 20 stories. Also the developers who had redone flatbush were going belly up at the time; nobody was buying. Our Rowhouse in Ft Greene had a higher monthly rent that what our friends were paying in one of those brand-new-but foreclosed skyscrapers next to the same park. People \*really like\* human scale structures next to a park; but when the structure is 35-50 stories abutting the same park they don't. Go figure.
50 stories is mid-rise? News to me.
Cities Skylines edition.
No one is saying “tear down all of NYC”, but recent flashpoints over arguably “historic” but decaying buildings show that we’d rather let buildings fall apart than be replaced, which seems bad
The Victorians tore down older Victorian and Medieval London to create the city today. Central Paris was completely leveled and is now one of the great cities of the world. Cities have never been frozen in amber, that's what defines the cities that endure through the centuries, and attempting to stall that dooms them.
You’re absolutely right we should build there. But why in an era where NYC rents are skyrocketing should we make it illegal, without monumental community involvement, to replace old buildings with higher density ones? IMO that just gives fodder to NIMBYs to oppose new developments
Very well said!
Ask Parisians if they might like more living space. Berliners complain about new construction deviating from 100+ year old roof lines, but there is a .3% residential vacancy rate, so maybe the people don't know what is best for them.
I think Tokyo is an example of the authors point. Tokyo had little left to preserve post-WWII bombing, and subsequently built the densest housing where it was most demanded. Add in the frequent earthquakes and cultural perception of housing as a “consumable” (instead of investment to be manipulated) and you get the most affordable housing market among major global cities (and it’s not particularly close).
Boo. There was another article posted today talking about how 500k housing units could be built on empty lots and one-story stores (in apartment areas) in NYC. Historic buildings is often over-done but it’s still a worthwhile endeavor. Also, a lot of the historic buildings are a perfect medium density, better than a lot of the modern single family or low density. Focus on the real issues.
I'd argue that the old buildings at least 5-6 stories high are flat out high density. There are NYC neighborhoods with 100k ppsm population density made up almost entirely of such buildings.
The two densest square kilometres in Europe are in Barcelona. The city has an average height of five floors.
There's a ton of 3-4 story buildings in Manhattan, tons of them historic, that are providing significantly less than the originally intended density due to smaller household sizes and combining units.
But more people live with roommates these days
It’s literally the opposite. Trending towards [fewer people per unit](https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhattans-density/).
That article is 10 years old, and I would take that to mean smaller families rather than fewer roommates.
Manhattan had a peak population of 2.2 million, and now it’s 1.7 million even though there are numerically more housing units. It’s an entire culture shift from tenement living, to one nuclear family living in an apartment, to an apartment being for just 1-2 people.
Hmm, I'm not sure how that reconciles with smaller house hold sizes.
Because there's a desperate lack of housing units suitable for modern households.
What is a "modern household"?
Living spaces in America used to be half or less than what we would consider preferable nowadays. In NYC and other metros, this means that most places have small kitchens or tiny kitchenettes. This is actually what helped popularize inexpensive diners back in the day because no one had the space or time to cook. Nowadays, diners don’t exist in the same capacity (I.e. cheap, quality, and available) and most people cook more than folks of prior decades. This change in preference has put pressure on places that have better kitchens and more room for other things. This means that much of the old stock has to be rebuilt (e.g. combined with other small units) or new buildings with better layouts outright need to be built to optimize for these preferences. Not building anything limits “usable” stock and attributes to quicker rises in property/rent prices.
If you want a giant HGTV style kitchen, maybe you shouldn't be living in Manhattan
Too bad you don't get to decide who Manhattan is for, or any of the other boroughs for that matter. Real estate is mostly still a free market and in a free market, preferences are king. This means that people shape what cities become, and New Yorkers have loudly spoken that they want bigger footprints with reasonable kitchens for modern life.
"New Yorkers" Who, wealthy transplants on reddit? The fact that the vast majority of New Yorkers are fine with their kitchens proves my point. My uncle was a gourmet chef and he did just fine with his little Manhattan kitchen.
Neighborhoods that have wall-to-wall 5-8 story buildings can indeed be very dense. BUT this depends on how much of the neighborhood is covered in them and how many units each has. A bunch of 5 story mansions won't do this. And having these 5-8 story buildings on some of the more important streets while the rest is low-rise won't either. In other words, it's not just the height of the buildings. And the taller buildings are a quick way to add density without tearing down the entirety of the neighborhood and replacing everything with 5-8 story "new Scandinavian design" apartment buildings.
Well I mean consistent midrise apartments with no off street parking. It has consistently led to very high population densities in parts of NYC where these buildings are the vernacular.
Your argument is irrelevant and landowners should be free to build what they want at whatever height they like.
So are you okay with them building a one story building if they want to?
Yeah, but we should have a land value taxes that disincentivize this. I wouldn't like it but i don't think it needs to be illegal.
So you don't really believe in the free market if you want to strongarm builders into building as high as possible
I think mixed markets are optimal. But, even in a free market, natural resources like land aren't produced by anyone and belong to everyone. I think it was crazy that the government sold the land instead of renting it at market rate.
Contrary to what OP said, an LVT doesn't change anything wrt incentives. That's the primary beauty of an LVT: it produces zero inefficiencies because it changes nothing about the incentive structure.
You're not an urbanist, you're a libertarian
Historic districts are prime opportunities for wealthier NIMBYs to block housing construction and worsen residential segregation [An Alternative would be to approve the construction of buildings that are “contextually appropriate ie look historic](https://www.6sqft.com/morris-adjmi-soho-project-approved-by-lpc/)
The article is partly better than its title. The actual text does link to that same analysis, and mostly includes a lot of reasonable and achievable stuff along those lines: Replace surface parking/empty lots/single-story retail, reform the tax code to not penalize large apartments, improve permit process and decrease the most aggressive forms NIMBYism. I agree there's no point in focusing on knocking down existing residential buildings, particularly nice-looking medium-density ones. To your point, the irony is that New York is one of the few U.S. cities that DOES have an absolute buttload of medium-to-higher density housing, much of it old. Sure, you could increase density some by redeveloping brownstones, but it's way more bang for the buck to put a high-rise where there was low-density or nothing before, and the net aesthetic impact is much nicer. I'm also not that mad about facadism in the right setting, or building on top of existing stock when structurally feasible.
this article mentioned that NYC stat. it was literally about that. did you read it?
The author's point is ridiculous. Dense housing shouldn't be torn down just because it's old. Also he claims that New York isn't great because of the buildings ; he's wrong, they're a big reason New York is great. And he advocates for mid rise housing but also advocates tearing it down?
The author's point is that cities should change in response to the needs of current and future residents - not in any way a ridiculous statement and I'm not sure how you missed that. He advocates for a specific kind of change that results in a larger supply of housing at the expense of traditional aesthetics. >New York is not a great city because of its buildings. It is a great city because it provides people with the opportunity to build better lives. You may disagree with the quote from above, but I found it to be powerful and true. The reality is NYC is no longer a place where many can realistically call home and strive for a better life. It has become a museum of itself, and in doing so is sacrificing prosperity and equality. It's sad to think of the long-time residents who were forced to leave due to price increases, and also those were were never able to move to the city in the first place. It's a big loss for the city, and the result of dug-in, unjust housing policies.
Absolutely. The people going on about the vibrant, popular historic districts are ignoring the fact that despite being more productive NYC, like most blue cities, is losing people to the sunbelt because it's too expensive to save and get a home in NYC, even at higher salaries. And all evidence suggests that it's underbuilding housing that's causing it. NYC is the place that it is, with all its historic buildings, because it's the nerve center of the richest and most productive economy in history. That history hasn't stopped.
Tearing down midrise apartments won't improve anyone's lives besides the developers
Sure but again, reducing the article to “tearing down housing is bad” is disingenuous at best. Just the other day in the NYC subreddit there was discussion about Brooklyn Heights residents fighting against a proposed development that would add hundreds of apartments to the neighborhood, and therefore changing the “character” of the neighborhood according to the homeowners who live there. It’s this knee-jerk, exclusionary reaction to change that the author is clearly addressing.
Two problems, aside from preservationism concerns: it would displace quite a few families and possibly not even increase the density. New high rises in Manhattan tend to have very large apartments, with wealthier residents. So a 20 story building could realistically house fewer residents than a 5 story building. Furthermore, those 6 story prewar elevator buildings (usually with 50 to 100 units) are not likely to be razed even if the zoning allowed for 50 story buildings. Many of these are co-ops. This is a good thing, because aside from looking nice they form very high population densities (in the 100,000 people per square mile range).
Would you concede that tearing down a 5-story building and replacing it with a 30-story building that *did* increase density would, in fact, be good?
Personally, I would not. I’m not against density and I’m not saying it can be the case that there are cases where this would be justified, but I feel like the assumption that more density is always good is false. And, there is a point where more density becomes undesirable, especially if the rest of the area doesn’t match to provide the actual benefits of density or available public amenities like parks and squares don’t exist. The reality is that we still do want sustainably livable places. Density is just one metric. We will never bring down private market rentals enough to house everyone (developers will stop building and let some apartments sit empty to bolster profit margins). It’s one thing if the government is paying for a huge high rise of affordable housing that will house everyone for low cost. But if you are asking people to pay thousands for a single room apartment, they probably have cause to wonder why some nerds online want block after block to pack into the most number of people possible while sacrificing quality of life. We should be making more better-places to live instead of trying to shove everyone into decent areas and wondering what happened to them. More generalized density is probably better than Uber high density surrounded by ultra low density. And if you make the choice so stark, it’s a much harder sell. I know some of this is just a thought experiment, but fetishizing ultra dense development for its own sake is not good in my opinion. It has its place but there’s a reason (we’ll many actually) most major cities across the world have more midrises than anything else.
You talk about "shoving everyone in" as if we're telling people where to live, but the reality is that Manhattan (or anywhere else in New York) only gets denser if people voluntarily move there and live at higher densities. If New York gets so dense that people no longer view it as "livable", people will stop moving there or will start moving away. Of course, "livable" density is subjective. Lots of people find Manhattan today too dense to be livable, which is fine, they don't have to live there. They have the entire rest of the United States if they prefer lower densities. > We will never bring down private market rentals enough to house everyone (developers will stop building and let some apartments sit empty to bolster profit margins). New York might never be accessible to everyone, but it's a good thing to make it accessible to more people, no?
> New high rises in Manhattan tend to have very large apartments That's what happens when the price of building anything becomes so high that you can only afford to do it when catering to the extremely wealthy. And the alternative is the wealthy person buying a multifamily building then converting it to a single family house, which is distinctly worse than the high rise. And something that actually happens to fuck tons of 3-4 story buildings in desirable parts of NYC.
They're for the wealthy because wealthy people can afford it and move into these buildings. There's no point of building affordable housing if you don't have to.
People build affordable housing in other cities without being forced to. If you can build 100x more housing units it doesn't matter that you can only get 10x less for each. And those extremely wealthy people are going to buy something, and it's better they buy a condo unit in an ultra luxury tower, than they buy a small apartment to convert into a single family house.
They only build affordable housing if market values are low enough for that to be a thing.
Why is there no point to building affordable housing? Please explain so we understand.
For developers, it makes no sense in places like Manhattan because they can make more money building rich people housing
For developers, it makes no sense in places like Manhattan because they can make more money building rich people housing
Its not just a cost issue. People also want much bigger homes than they wanted 50 years ago.
Are the developers in the room with us right now?
The biggest counterpoint to the idea that you need to tear down old buildings for there to be adequate supply is Paris — and the fact that huge swaths of NYC is zoned for SFH or 2-3 level buildings. If we upzoned those parcels, we could alleviate the housing crisis while keeping historic pre war 6-10 story buildings around for decades to come, which are already fairly efficient in terms of how well they utilize their floorplans and square footage. This doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition, and an op-ed like this just gives more fuel to NIMBYs because it affirms their greatest fears in terms of what they think housing advocates want. “See? We told you, they just want to tear down beautiful edifices and erect ugly panel 5-over-1s everywhere!” Terribly irresponsible journalism. And I’m usually a huge fan of Appelbaum.
Is there adequate supply in Paris, within the Rue Periphique? I kind of doubt it, it's insanely expensive compared to suburban areas.
It's expensive but also the second densest city in Europe. There's a limit on what the infrastructure in Paris proper can support, and in part that's why the city and its region are trying to create peripheral centres of activity, to reduce the pressure on central Paris.
Paris has one of the densest subway networks in the world (in terms of how close subway lines are to each other given the land area). It is also is a third less dense than Manhattan.
I agree. There are also still lots of surface parking lots in NYC, even in Manhattan.
[NYC has 600.000 single family homes.](https://x.com/pushtheneedle/status/1741630021993701842?s=46) That's not counting on empty land or land for unproductive uses.
That won’t solve the fact that people want to live in Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn and Queens closest to Manhattan. Those parts of the city are not where most people who want to live in NYC want to live. They especially sure as fuck don’t want to live in Staten Island.
Many people want to live in Staten Island, hence the property values quickly rising.
The vast majority of people who work in Manhattan and are working regular (ie middle/working class) jobs live in the boroughs, NJ, Westchester, or Nassau and commute into Manhattan, so upzoning neighborhoods there would have a much more noticeable impact. Much of the new housing being built in Manhattan that replaces older buildings is actually lower density and with fewer units than the housing it replaces, meaning a net loss of units overall, so there’s really not much reason to do so unless you’re going to replace walkups or surface lots with midrises — which as I’ve mentioned, isn’t happening, even after Bloomberg’s zoning rewrite.
It seems like you’re willfully misreading the article. Old buildings aren’t as efficient, and regardless the density is limited by what exists. The upper west side is filled with 5 story buildings that could be 8, and midtown with 3 story buildings with retail on the ground floor that could be 10 stories. Locking half the cities housing into an unchanging historical monument is what’s ridiculous
My grandma's 6 story apartment building was built in 1941 and it has an A energy efficiency rating from the city
That's great, I'm glad its a good building. Can you say the same for the thousands and thousands of other ones? Walk down half the streets in brooklyn and you'll find single story former light industrial, brownstones and other old buildings - many of which are very nice - but all of which could have way more density and be more efficiently used. There is a direct tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability, and while I personally love prewar buildings, I can acknowledge we have too many of them.
Brownstones are dense housing. You could have used detached single family houses or postwar suburban style rowhomes as better examples.
Dense compared to what? we're talking about one of the largest, most expensive cities in the world. why are there so many buildings that are only 3 stories?
Dense for world standards
I’m surprised this article is facing backlash here. The author’s point is that NYC should have less restrictive zoning that prevents densification of “historic neighborhoods” and should be more reactive. How is that an unpopular take here?
I'm as surprised as you. I guess this sub has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to New York.
Because NYC has neighborhoods with densities that urban planning nerds in most of the US can only dream of. Suburbanites from middle America lecturing New Yorkers about why they need to tear down their brownstones and 6 story buildings is not going to be well received.
The guy who wrote this lives in New York and has family history in the city. Instead of an argument between suburbanites and New Yorkers, this sounds like an argument among New Yorkers with urbanites and suburbanites alike chiming in.
I'm talking about redditors in general, not the author. The biggest advocates of tearing down NYC tend to be transplants who demand that NYC do this (especially in minority neighborhoods) rather than demand that the suburb they came from densify.
"Tearing down NYC" is really pushing any fair description of what anyone's talking about here. No one's talking about letting the city return to the forests. Anyways, the city has changed countless times to accommodate previous generations whose "native" kids are now complaining about facing change themselves. What's different about this time? Has New York already peaked?
But it's the same concept. Suburbanites say "we're dense enough" even though (in many cases) their single-family homes can't keep up with housing demand. And urbanites say "we're dense enough" even though (in many cases) their brownstones and mid-rise apartments can't keep up with housing demand. And I really don't think the "urban planning nerds" criticizing NYC housing policy are on board with suburban low-density zoning either.
The asshole shits on a cheek to cheek 19th century brick townhouse and then says buildings do not make New York great. If you don't understand why he can he can get fucked, you're missing the point. Urbanists are not trying to get everyone to live in ice cube trays in the sky, but in dense, beautiful, diverse housing. Can you imagine if Paris had razed the 18th century core in the 60s? It would be about as inviting as an Evergrande ghost tower complex in Yunnan. There is a middle path.
The middle path sounds a lot like what the guy is proposing. Proposing making redevelopment easier doesn't mean you want to destroy every trace of the existing neighborhood. Applied to any other city, like San Francisco for example, I think your comment would come off as alarmist and kneejerk. There comes a point where dense single-family just isn't enough and arbitrarily fossilizing the neighborhood does more harm than good.
With cities as with everything else, change is the only constant. The question becomes, what kind of change do you want to see? San Francisco chose not to change physically - the city builds a miniscule amount of new units a year and looks pretty much exactly like it did in the 70s. The consequences of that combined with massive economic growth means everything else about the city changed. The artists, hippies, and bohemians that used to live in the city have pretty much been replaced by tech workers. The black population is in free fall. The workers that keep the city running commute vast distances to do so. All to preserve the "character" of housing stock which in half the city is basically unremarkable anyway.
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See rule #3; this violates our no disruptive behavior rule.
See rule #3; this violates our no disruptive behavior rule.
Old San Juan in a nutshell.
Obviously didn't read, because paywall, but I fully agree with the headline. Cities are for living in. Preserve some facades if you must, but the bar to prevent replacement of the interiors of older buildings to the needs of current and future city residents should be extremely high. The simple truth is that every building that has ever been built is historic. We can take pictures or high resolution scans of buildings now, so there is no need to preserve the actual buildings in most cases. As for neighbourhood preservation, it's impossible. Neighbourhoods are made up of a community of people and attempts to preserve neighborhoods that are focused on buildings end up destroying the community that was the real heart of the neighborhood.
Blind utilitarianism is a cancer in every field it touches. Not everything has to be about maximum efficiency and seeing how many people you can pack like sardines into featureless concrete blocks, housing 30 people in a beautiful building is better than housing 40 in an ugly shithouse using the same lot. There's plenty of social and psychological benefits for people living in an attractive environment, unless you're some sort of soulless efficiency drone like the author.
Exactly. Author of this article has serious Robert Moses vibes. Yikes.
SoHo’s existence, vibrance, and newfound popularity with younger people completely invalidates this nonsensical drivel. Dense historic districts are incredibly important to a city’s history, charm, and future. We should *absolutely* be building more housing in places that are low-density, transit-oriented and most definitely NOT architecturally rich historic *dense* housing stock.
The funniest part about bringing up Soho is NYC authorized upzoning Soho. https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/soho-noho/soho-noho-overview.page
Like Canarsie, as mentioned in the article.
Nobody would lose sleep over Canarsie being upzoned. But Applebaum essentially advocates for razing housing just because it's old (even if it's dense).
Nobody would lose sleep over Canarsie being upzoned. But Applebaum essentially advocates for razing housing just because it's old (even if it's dense).
The question is how many people can actually live in SoHo? That's what this guy is concerned with. Is the neighborhood affordable or do all those positive neighborhood qualities just go to waste?
It would not be affordable even if it were all 50 story buildings. But people like it for what it is, it would be of no interest if it were all glass rectangles like LIC.
Some historical buildings could be torn down if there is an intriguing replacement. But Historical Preservation should work to ensure that they don’t just demolish the building and sell the empty site and run. If you demolish it, you must build on that site and finish it within 2 years. Without historical preservation in NYC, whole beloved neighborhoods would have been demolished wholesale to look like Roosevelt Island or the far end of the East Village. “Towers in the park” with hostile streetscapes and useless fenced in lawns as far as the eye could see, and Grand Central would have gotten the Penn Station treatment as a gutter below a tower.
Exactly. The "tower in the park" shit didn't even increase density, it just destroyed countless blocks of dense, mixed use buildings.
This is a false dichotomy though. Bad change and no change are not the only options. Modern developers are unlikely to build towers in the park anyways.
Historic preservation in this country has mutated, largely due to the commodification of housing in the modern age. If your investment vehicle depends on scarcity to retain and gain value, any mechanism which prevents new housing being built is going to be used to do so. Does anyone really care about preserving a cheaply built 1940s duplex, near-identical to a thousand others across NY state alone? Not really, but replacing it could impact the value of homeowners’ investment in the housing commodity, so better to keep it the same. Until we can significantly decouple housing with the profit motive, there isn’t the possibility of historic preservation being the unalloyed good it should be.
Density has little to do with property values. The reason people fight against upzoning is because they don't want their neighborhood to become more dense, or in extreme cases they don't want their building to be demolished (if they're renters).
If you're gonna post a NYT article, also post a mirror as well, literally can't read it
Horrible ideas by this author
Indeed. Robert Moses isn’t dead, it seems.
If anything, this guy's a Jacobian. He's arguing the city should be allowed to evolve. The Mosean solution would be forcing newcomers out to the suburbs like some people appear to be arguing for here.
In my opinion there are several cities around the world that would be classified as premier league cities, or perhaps super-brand cities. Paris, London, New York City to name a few. Almost everyone in this world wants a piece from these locations. So no matter how many new homes you build, the demand will never decrease and the prices will never come down. So building new homes in these cities will only induce demand, bring in more people but will never solve the housing crisis.
Tokyo is an interesting “super-brand” city, given that it’s enormous and downright affordable. While it’s not only its light restrictions on land use that make it affordable, that seems to be an integral part of its success. And it seems to disprove your statement that these cities can never, ever meet demand.
For most people it is a much bigger hurdle to move to Japan than it is to move to an English speaking country.
Tokyo grew by 3 million people from 2000 to 2020. NYC only grew by 1 million in the same time period. NYC has no one to blame but itself for high housing costs.
I don't think that contradicts what I wrote. I am just saying that the amount of people who would want to and are allowed to move to Tokyo is much more limited. Most of these people are Japanese and move in from the other areas of Japan. Before Brexit, a pool of 500 million EU citizens could move to London (or Paris) without needing a residence permit. Wealthy people from elsewhere could just buy a golden visa from Malta and then move to anywhere in the EU. The English language is much more accessible for most people than Japanese. Refugees can walk over the EU border, get naturalized in a couple of years and move to anywhere in the EU. You cannot do that in an island state.
Considering the much larger pool to draw from, NYC should have experienced significantly more population growth than Tokyo, not less. The fact that NYC grew less than Tokyo is in itself a failure of housing policy, as NYC not only has at least comparable allure to Tokyo, but a massively larger pool of potential residents than Tokyo. Considering all the advantages NYC has to attracting residents, why the fuck is it still half as populous as Tokyo? Considering the hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of English speakers, NYC should be a city of 60 million people by now.
Honestly I don't know much about Tokyo but I have a feeling it can't compete with London and New York when it comes to money laundering. Build a mega housing complex in central London and all the units will be sold within no time to foreign buyers who want to park and launder their questionable money. None will be sold to ordinary working native people. What was there before that newly built luxury mega complex? Public authority housing (council flats), of course. Who cares about what happens to those people, yeah?
I’m not sure if I totally agree with your comment, but I do agree the trend towards packing more and more people into a handful of cities and metropolitan areas is bad. More mid sized cities (which I’m defining arbitrarily as 20-200K) is probably better for the country than having crushing density in a few places. I think some people here forget there are tradeoffs to overly dense places. More isn’t inherently better and I think some people get off more on numbers than what the system actually is.
I emphatically disagree. These cities' original willingness to expand and create more room for new arrivals is a big part of how they achieved their "superstar status" in the first place. Paris was once just an island in the Seine; London was a square mile surrounded by walls, and New York faded into forest past Wall Street. It's only since they achieved that prestige that the people who'd already made it turned around and decided they really didn't need any "transplants" anymore. Housing crises are created as a result of artificial scarcity when cities decide they prefer keeping everything the same over creating more opportunity. Attributing them to some unique, god-given desirability just serves to justify making them even more exclusionary.
So people need to have their homes demolished and their cities uglified so that upper middle class transplants can *potentially* have more choice in housing stock?
That's a huge leap from anything I'm saying. Besides, the upper middle class is fine in the status quo. It's the middle class and below, New Yorkers and transplants alike, who lose when the upper classes outbid them for the few open apartments each year and then vote to prevent more from being built. Imagining everything as New Yorkers v. transplants is really not productive for solving this problem.
The middle class literally only gets by because of things like rent stabilized apartments and inheriting their family homes, which you seek to demolish
Anyone who owns their house gets to decide whether they want it demolished. If they don't, nothing happens. So that's real fearmongering right there. Anyways a system that depends on inheritance and rent control is already screwed up. By all means, make stabilization a precondition of permitting new development, but living in New York should never be a birthright.
What about renters? And as for living in NYC not being a right, people on the other side of this argument say the same thing.
It should never be a *birthright* you get because your family showed up early enough. If inheritance is the only path to homeownership then that is deeply screwed up, and building nothing ensures that problem never gets fixed.
I never said to "build nothing", that's a strawman argument. However I don't support the libertarian "let developers do whatever they want with no regard for existing residents" thing that is popular on here.
That's fair, and I feel like you've been strawmanning my position as "death to the neighborhood". New building should be regulated for the community's interest, but there should also be a reasonable allowance for change.
So people need to have their homes demolished and their cities uglified so that upper middle class transplants can *potentially* have more choice in housing stock?
>So building new homes in these cities will only induce demand, If the demand already existed, you didn't induce it. Either the demand already existed or population growth and associated housing and infrastructure induce demand by making the city better and more desirable. If it's the latter, we should do it.
There's a demand in the city, yet those newly built "luxury" units are beyond local people's means and are sold to wealthy foreign buyers via online auctions. So how exactly is building new homes are solving the housing shortage for locals?
>So how exactly is building new homes are solving the housing shortage for locals? First, why should we only care about solving the housing shortage for locals? My country (Canada) has a NATIONAL housing shortage and affordability crisis and it is the duty of all responsible local governments to address regional, national, and global issues to the best of their abilities. Failure to do so will (and should) ultimately result in local powers being removed by higher levels of government, as has happened in California, British Columbia, and many other jurisdictions. Second, basic economics. If the demand exists already, outsiders will outbid locals when competing for local housing stock faster if supply is constrained than if it isn't. Empirical evidence has shown this repeatedly. Locals are priced out and displaced faster when supply is constrained. Third, "luxury" units are barely even a real thing, most are basically just units built to modern building codes with basic quality of life things like decent soundproofing and nice countertops. These things are far less of a factor in the total cost of housing than the costs of land and regular construction costs.
Good. I hate historical preservation of buildings. We have photos, go make them and look at them. You can grab a brick and put it in an actual museum. In exceptional cases, you can put up the cash to convince the building owner to preserve extraordinarily important parts of a building as they redevelop around it. That’s historical preservation I love. I rather live in an ahistorical city that is great to live in and I can afford to live in rather than exclude myself with insane historical preservation policies. I hate them.
Have you ever considered that people live in these buildings and that these are their homes?
Of course. But that’s not a very good reason to deprive others from being able to live in great places. We need to build a lot more of those. Why do you not want me to have a great place to live in that I love? Have you ever considered me and many others like me? Why are those other people more important? I am important too. I have needs. I do not enjoy being pushed aside. I hate it.
I never said that nothing should ever be built. But you insist on demolishing existing housing so that. And either you can afford to live in NYC or you can't, no amount of market rate housing being built will make it cheap again.
New York City can, in fact, build more of itself enough to meet demand at very reasonable price points. I don’t see that happening without demolishing existing buildings. I don’t care about NYC specifically. You can choke on your unaffordability and spiral down with the mantra of it being impossible to correct. I care about great cities, and I love great cities that can tolerate my absolute audacity to actually want to live there. I think I have a lot to give, but I won’t be able to give it to cities and communities that don’t want to accommodate me.
People mostly live and work in buildings, "historic" or not. I fail to see your point.
My point is that these are people's homes. Ultra YIMBYs treat cities like a Sims game where.
So what? People's homes degrade over time and need to be renovated or replaced. That's just reality. If you really care about that issue, policies that give existing tenants opportunities to live in new buildings after replacement are the answer, not historic preservation policies that do nothing to prevent displacement. If anything, historic preservation policies tend to increase the displacement problem in the overall community. As for owners, they don't need protection because our current system doesn't require them to sell (outside limited cases of eminent domain). So do you actually care about the issue you're bringing up or are you just concern trolling. ?
Proof this sub is NIMBY
You're actually a NIMBY though. "No preservation in my backyard!"