The northeast corridor is it’s own overdeveloped mess, but at least it has the makings of a DC-Boston route. Part of the problem with pushing to the midwest is you have Bus Companies and Airlines like Southwest who’d much prefer taking their own brand of travel than put up with the headache of building trains.
What interests me more is connecting the rust belt cities and having different options to getting from the east coast to Chicago and points west.
Then you have to cut through a ton of farm land and, in some areas, mountains. I’m from Illinois and living in Missouri. Having a reliable rail would be incredible but we can’t even get people in the KC-area to understand that building local public transit won’t just invite gangs into their precious suburbs. Shit’s messed up.
To be fair, “white people being racist” has pretty universally been the post-war argument against public transit. It’s only in places that the physical universe has conspired to fuck cars (New York, Boston) that transit has taken hold as a public need.
I can’t remember which thread on the forum, but someone said something like “We can’t have high towers all over the place, because apartments in them cost too much!”
It reminded me of something I read somewhere years ago that the cost per floor of a building on the same plot of land is higher for low buildings, then gets lower as they get higher to a certain point, and then get higher again.
Decades ago it was about six floors, because that is about as high as you can get without needing elevators. They added huge costs to the building, but were the only way to make money from higher floors.
Once elevator technology got cheaper, then the limiting cost was structural things like concrete strength, dealing with high winds and earthquakes, etc.
Now it seems it’s back to elevators and fire safety measures. The taller the building, the more elvators needed… until the whole bottom floor of the building is purely elevators.
Anyway, at the moment it seems the cost per floor stabilises at about 35-45 floors. After that, it gets more expensive per floor of a building to build higher, and then the economics don’t work out. So if you’re going to build an apartment block in a city and want the highest population density for the lowest cost per apartment, you should aim for about 40 floors. A 5 floor building will cost less to build in total, but over time the developer/city will make more from 40 floors. Above that the extra technicalities and costs make it not-worth-it.
Sources:
"At that point, the costs of providing an additional floor becomes greater. For example, the cost of adding the 51st floor is more than the cost of adding the 41st floor. Where that turning point is remains an open question, and, as I will show below, it seems to be different in different cities.
The economic theory of skyscrapers says that the profit maximizing developer keeps adding floors until the revenue of the last floor just equals the cost of providing it. One floor less means leaving money on the table since the revenue from another floor will be greater than the cost. Building one floor above the profit maximizing height means losing money since the cost of the last floor was greater than the revenue is generates."
https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/remav.2015.23.issue-1/remav-2015-0002/remav-2015-0002.pdf
“When comparing optimal building heights derived from the two measures of investment effectiveness (profit and rate of return), one needs to remember that because the cost of the development and the income it can generate are related to each other, the rate of return indicates the optimum height earlier than maximum profit does. In other words, a building height obtained by maximizing the rate of return will be lower than one established by maximizing the profit - hRR<hprofit (Fig. 7).”
Please tell this to Sim Tower.
This video explains a bit more about optimal floor count in relation to nation states and global economic factors.
Those places aren’t half-bad if you can’t afford or don’t want to live in NYC. There are also jobs there. If you work and live there, life can be pretty good, and you can go to the city very easily when you need to.
Things were cheaper than I expected. I just assumed being so directly close to NYC and connected via train that the rent and property rates would be much higher. Not in anyway convincing me to leave Philly, but I found it interesting the ways that it challenged my face value assumptions about Yonkers and New Rochelle that I formed only by driving through them on my yearly Philly to Vermont thanksgiving pilgrimage.
The thing is, you are probably going to need a car in those places. I mean, it’s technically possible to get by without one, but your range is going to be very small. Just stuck in a small downtown unless you take the train to the city. Tarrytown also has a similar situation.
That makes sense. I’d also imagine its a self-selection thing where if you moved to or were raised in NYC the cultural cachet of staying within the city proper has some power.
For a landlord with a rent-controlled building, a fire could be a boon. Insurance covers the rebuild, and any tenants who don’t move back — such as those who died or who can’t afford to wait for the reconstruction — make room for market-rate tenants.
Arson is a nearly perfect crime. Bill Smith, a retired fire captain from nearby Fairfield, explained how difficult they are to prove. “There’s a very small percentage, probably less than 5 percent, that make it to court,” he said. “How are you going to link someone to [arson] unless you actually observe them doing it? It’s that tough.”
Here’s a fun study that indicates that building market rate properties is about 65% efficient at freeing up properties in lower income areas.
As far as I can tell, this means that if you want to restrict the development of 100 market rate apartments in a wealthy area to avoid gentrification, you should build 65 subsidized apartments in lower income areas to compensate.
In the annals of markets don’t solve the housing question but punishing developers is still fun to watch
This isn’t quite in the vein of just Urbanism, but what I thought this brought up a bunch of interesting thoughts for me with respect to housing in general.
Housing is a big part of urbanism. This definitely qualifies to be included in this thread.
Piggy backing on Naoza’s comment, Housing and housing policy is the current top issue/priority in Urbanism and Planning. Just about every single other major problem in Urbanism circles back to housing availability and affordability with the exception of aging infrastructure (though even that can be tied back to housing in the way that sprawl creates very expensive infrastructure networks that are unsustainable on the local tax base.)
Some good reading on tenants issues in the not hot market area right now.
