How Skyscrapers Can Save the City

Friday, February 11th, 2011

After explaining their history in some detail, Edward Glaeser explains how skyscrapers can save the city:

The cheapest way to deliver new housing is in the form of mass-produced two-story homes, which typically cost only about $84 a square foot to erect. That low cost explains why Atlanta and Dallas and Houston are able to supply so much new housing at low prices, and why so many Americans have ended up buying affordable homes in those places.

Building up is more costly, especially when elevators start getting involved. And erecting a skyscraper in New York City involves additional costs (site preparation, legal fees, a fancy architect) that can push the price even higher. But many of these are fixed costs that don’t increase with the height of the building. In fact, once you’ve reached the seventh floor or so, building up has its own economic logic, since those fixed costs can be spread over more apartments. Just as the cost of a big factory can be covered by a sufficiently large production run, the cost of site preparation and a hotshot architect can be covered by building up. The actual marginal cost of adding an extra square foot of living space at the top of a skyscraper in New York is typically less than $400. Prices do rise substantially in ultra-tall buildings — say, over 50 stories — but for ordinary skyscrapers, it doesn’t cost more than $500,000 to put up a nice 1,200-square-foot apartment. The land costs something, but in a 40-story building with one 1,200-square-foot unit per floor, each unit is using only 30 square feet of Manhattan — less than a thousandth of an acre. At those heights, the land costs become pretty small. If there were no restrictions on new construction, then prices would eventually come down to somewhere near construction costs, about $500,000 for a new apartment. That’s a lot more than the $210,000 that it costs to put up a 2,500-square-foot house in Houston — but a lot less than the $1 million or more that such an apartment often costs in Manhattan.

Posted in Urbanism | 2 Comments »

Comments

  1. Foseti says:
    February 14, 2011 at 9:45 am

    Did you see Steve Sailer’s response?

  2. Isegoria says:
    February 14, 2011 at 11:46 am

    Yes, I did see Sailer’s response. For those who haven’t, here’s the central point:

    Glaeser complains that Napoleon III’s height limitations on Paris (basically, the core of the city is all six stories high) has meant that tall buildings have gone up only on the periphery. But he seems to miss the point that goal of the rulers of Paris is to keep peripheral people on the periphery, where they can amuse themselves setting fire to cars without pestering the real Parisians.

    In general, it’s hard to get American middle class families to live in high rises because, outside of Manhattan, without restrictive zoning it’s hard to get a high enough percentage of middle class children together in one spot to dominate a public school. For example, Glaeser celebrates the reasonably cheap highrises along Chicago’s lakefront, but they seldom have “good” schools, in contrast to certain thoroughly gentrified districts of three story buildings. Restrictive zoning is crucial to “good” public schools, but you aren’t supposed to talk about that.

    He also notes that engineers like nature, and that may explain the prevalence of Silicon Valley campuses. I’d say that many people like nature, especially parents with children, and that may explain the prevalence of suburbs across the country.

    Anyway, what struck me about Glaeser was his tone-deafness to issues of aesthetics and quality of life. You like Paris? Imagine how nice it would be if five times as many people got to live in Skyscraper-Paris! Non merci.

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