18 ms·

Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

158 points by brendannee 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago
> Lifting all the barriers to urban growth in America could raise the country’s GDP by between 6.5% and 13.5%, or by about $1 trillion-2 trillion. It is difficult to think of many other policies that would yield anything like that. And it would also reduce the real but unaccounted-for environmental and social externalities of our sprawling homogenous suburbs. Someone living in New York has half the energy footprint of the average American. And while the city is pretty segregated, the New York subway is a unique setting of rich and poor people of all races utilizing a public service together.
- rhino369 11y ago
  It is also the entire cause of the "gentrification" problem many are so pissed off about. Nobody wants to move into a poor area, they are forced into it because you can't build skyscraper high rises in the good areas.
  - lisper 11y ago
    You can in Manhattan. The tallest residential structure in the U.S. is going up within a few blocks of Central Park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue
    - dreamweapon 11y ago
      Though its owners may sometimes crash there, it's not really a "residential" structure, per se. The primary purpose it serves is as a sophisticated portfolio diversification instrument -- or (for offshore title holders), a convenient money laundering device: http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-york-real-estate-2014-6/index2.html http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-y...
    - gdilla 11y ago
      But it's already unaffordable for the average NYer before it's even ready. If wealthy foreigners can park their money in manhattan, they will, without living there. That doesn't help scarcity for actual residents.
      - drak0n1c 11y ago
        I don't see why that's an argument against. If they are going to plow their money into a city it's better if it's into 1 or 2 units in a dense skyscraper rather than buying entire mid and low rise buildings. Residential skyscrapers are strictly better at reducing price pressures.
      - bradleyjg 11y ago
        I'd have no problem at all with those billionaire towers but for the nonsensical property tax breaks (421a, J51, etc). Throw in a small non-resident property tax differential and I become an enthusiastic booster. If a bunch of billionaires want to pay property taxes while using barely any city services that sounds like a win to me. We can use that money to provide better services to the people that do live in the city year round. In my observation the people who are most bitter about billionaires "buying up Manhattan" are the multimillionaires who want to be on the top of the heap.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Woah there nelly. "Lifting the barriers" to development doesn't mean that a 50 story residential tower will be built in Central Park West. You are the barrier. Lifting them means that as a citizen, you lose control of your surroundings. So when a big company, say Pfizer, works with the city to raze your neighborhood through an eminent domain process, you're fucked. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London) It doesn't eliminate gentrification, it industrialized the process.
    - krschultz 11y ago
      Somewhat OT, but I worked in the building constructed due to that eminent domain process, it was really nice. Pfizer later sold the whole thing for pennies on the dollar to a defense contractor after pulling out of that town, all that after never actually building on all of the land that was leveled.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      I wouldn't call giving free reign to eminent domain "lifting barriers." I don't think Manhattan is a good example of a place with too restrictive laws. But SF and DC certainly are. In DC for example, you wouldn't see 80 story apartment buildings in Georgetown, but you would see them in Chinatown, NOMA, NavyYard, and other places. Instead lower middle class black neighborhoods are converting to overpriced condos as fast as house-flippers can do it.
  - melling 11y ago
    No, they are forced to move to these areas because they want to have a bearable commute. Your solution is to jam everyone into a more confined area. Another solution is to make commuting from a "long distance" (e.g. 60-120 miles) more bearable. In NYC, for instance, subways could be built to NJ. Faster trains (low-speed maglevs) could be built like what's being done in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR). Mountain View to San Francisco is 40 miles. Is there some reason that isn't a 40 minute commute?
    - SilasX 11y ago
      The train part itself is 46 minutes if you take a bullet (red columns): http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html That would only be your full commute, though, if you were doing deep SoMa to downtown Mountain View.
      - melling 11y ago
        Yes, this seems to be very successful. http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_26809055/herhold-baby-bullet-anniversary http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_26809055/herhold... We need more of this. I don't know where the low-hanging fruit is in mass transit, but a lot more could be done.
      - mikeyouse 11y ago
        The Caltrain electrification project will further speed this trip since electric trains can accelerate and decelerate more rapidly. The full San Jose to SoMa trip should be roughly 16 minutes quicker based on impact studies.
      - cbhl 11y ago
        Some 5 to 10% of Caltrains are delayed though, and if that delay happens to be a fatality, expect that train to be really late. (2011) http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Board+of+Directors/Presentations/2011/6-2-11+On-time+Performance-Harvey.pdf http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Boa...
    - 11y ago
- sbov 11y ago
  I can only find stats on carbon footprints. Somewhat surprisingly, California does very well on this statistic, despite its suburbs: it's just behind New York. So at least for carbon footprints, those don't necessarily seem to be linked to density. I couldn't find anything on energy footprint though.
  - santaclaus 11y ago
    Kind of interesting, the first link [1] that I found ranked Honolulu, Portland OR, and LA above the Tri-state area (which came in forth), in terms of per-capita carbon footprint. [1] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008/5/carbon-footprint-sarzynski/carbonfootprint_brief.PDF http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008...
    - cauterized 11y ago
      The tri-state area includes a LOT of suburbs. Carbon footprint in NYC proper is far lower.
  - pash 11y ago
    > So at least for carbon footprints, those don't necessarily seem to be linked to density. Every study I have seen shows the opposite, that carbon footprints are strongly linked to density and urban-suburban divisions. In 2012, for example, climate researchers at Berkeley put together a map for the entire United States showing average household carbon footprint by zip code [0]. They found that suburban emissions are markedly higher than emissions in their respective central cities almost everywhere, confirming a result that Edward Glaeser and other urban economists had already established [1]. The FAQ [2] for the Berkeley researchers' paper [3] summarizes the headline finding like this: There is an inverted-U relationship between population density and HCF [household carbon footprint]; HCF increases ... from low to medium population densities, and decreases from medium to high population densities. The turning point is about 3,000 persons per square mile, which is very close to medium population density of all locations, and a little higher than the population density of larger suburbs (which have densities of 2,700 persons per square mile). In other words, low- and high-density places (rural areas and cities) have low household carbon footprints and middle-density places (suburbs) have high footprints. Controlling for income, the authors found that the inverted U goes away and the relationship becomes more monotonic: population density is negatively correlated with carbon emissions across the spectrum of density levels. The upswing of the inverted U-curve that you see before controlling for income happens because, as American communities are actually arranged, middle-density areas (which are relatively dense suburbs) tend to be wealthy, and emissions are also strongly correlated with consumption; the consumption effect dominates the efficiency gains due to higher densities as you go from rural areas to suburbs, and it's not until you get to city-level densities (and poorer urban populations) that the efficiency gains due to density win out over consumption-driven emissions. So part of the reason that suburbs have high emissions is that the people who live there are relatively rich, and the richer you are the more stuff you consume. But no matter how rich or poor you are, the study suggests, you will likely have a noticeably lower carbon footprint if you live in a city and pursue a lifestyle typical of your income class there rather than doing the likewise in a suburb. The authors also found, by the way, that suburban sprawl around the central cities of large metropolises effectively offsets the carbon-efficiency of the dense cities themselves [4]; the larger the central city, the greater the sprawl surrounding it, and the number of inefficient suburban households tends roughly to balance out the carbon efficiency of households in the central city. 0. http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps 1. See, e.g., http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html 2. http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/files/coolclimate/Jones-Kammen-CarbonFootprint-FAQ-EST-1-10-2014.pdf http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/files/coolclimate/Jones-Kamm... [PDF] 3. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4034364 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4034364 [PDF] 4. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-cancels-carbon-footprint-savings-of-dense-urban-cores/ http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-ca...
- ctdonath 11y ago
  Seriously cutting one's energy footprint is not free, it comes with serious cost increases elsewhere. The average American can't afford to live in NYC without curtailing much of what constitutes average living conditions.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    Not only that. Suburban has more emissions per person but the city has far more emissions per square foot, meaning air quality is far worse and consequent health problems.
    - ctdonath 11y ago
      Do any such studies address sequestration (or other suitable term) of emissions? I may produce more emissions, but I also maintain near an acre (and aspiring to much more) of CO2/etc-absorbing forest & other foliage. Not sure how it all actually balances out, but I never see reported studies addressing suburban/rural foliage conservation impact vs urban bulldozing & paving every square foot for miles.
      - TheCoelacanth 11y ago
        If you have 1+ acres of forest on your property, you aren't living in the suburbs; that's exurban or rural. If anything taking sequestration into account would make suburbs look worse. 100 acres of dense urban development plus 400 acres of untouched forest is going to sequester much more carbon than 500 acres of suburbs with a few trees sprinkled throughout, yet they would hold the same number of people.
      - philwelch 11y ago
        If more people lived in cities, a lot of the rural/suburban land they live on would revert to wilderness, which would turn into CO2-absorbing forest and other foliage anyway. So it's disingenuous to try and claim credit for personally having title to any of it.
      - breischl 11y ago
- smutticus 11y ago
  Yes. Per-capital carbon production is lowest in dense urban environments. Suburbia and low density rural areas are the real carbon pigs on a per-capita basis. We need to change the wrong headed notion that dense urbanity is somehow bad for the environment. On the contrary, it's how we need to build in order to save the earth.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > We need to change the wrong headed notion that dense urbanity is somehow bad for the environment. Dense urbanity is bad for the local environment and, particularly, for human health in it. That's the cost of the lower per-capita impact on the global environment that it provides. We need to learn from what works (and what doesn't) in both dense and sparse environments to build lower-global-impact environments that remain high quality environments for human health and quality of life.
    - ef4 11y ago
      > for human health in it. In the US, life expectancy is higher for people in urban areas than rural areas. Urban areas have less obesity, lower rates of suicide, lower rates of accidental death, higher quality of life for the elderly, and higher rates of healthy exercise. It's true that some studies have shown higher rates of asthma and allergies in cities, but there are also contradictory studies saying that those things are just identified and treated more aggressively in cities -- because they tend to have much better access to healthcare services.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > We need to change the wrong headed notion that dense urbanity is somehow bad for the environment. On the contrary, it's how we need to build in order to save the earth. I'd like to see the capital/environmental costs of heavy urban development compared to electric cars in the suburbs and rural areas. I'll drive a Nissan Leaf ($199/month) if it means I don't have to live in an urban area (I work from home).
    - ch4s3 11y ago
- jseliger 11y ago
  Someone living in New York has half the energy footprint of the average American This is absolutely true and some of the daughter comments are missing the point; see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City (http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/0143120549?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...) for more details, but people in urban environments tend to drive less and drive shorter distances; they're less likely to own cars in general and more likely to take mass transportation or bike; and their overall energy usage for heating and cooling is much lower because they share those costs (and walls) with neighbors. Everyone has to live somewhere, and every time a five to fifty story building gets blocked in a city, dozens or hundreds of high-energy-cost, detached single-family houses get built in Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.
aurora72 11y ago
The problem is not the poor land use, it's the inefficient capital use!
- jchrisa 11y ago
  Also too much paved surface area.
  - ctdonath 11y ago
    I keep wondering when building over roads will become common. Traffic only needs a couple stories of vertical space; everything above that should be profitably/affordably usable (once ventilation is addressed).
    - Symbiote 11y ago
      There are already buildings built over railways (as well as many railways tunnelled under things). But they're much safer (hardly any accidents, trained people who know evacuation routes etc) and the noise and smell isn't as bad as it would be for a road. The examples I think I've seen are hard to verify on Google Maps, it's a brown-grey mush, and in any case they're all odd buildings rather than a 'tunnel' created out of buildings.
    - krallja 11y ago
      I-290 in Chicago runs through the Old Chicago Main Post Office: http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/wls/images/cms/124812_1280x720.jpg http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/wls/images/cms/124812_128...
    - philwelch 11y ago
      Unless the road was built in a tunnel in the first place, there are structural issues as well. You can't just put some concrete structure over the top of a road and have it support multiple stories of building on top of it. Plus, streets work better as open-air outdoor spaces, especially for pedestrians.
rwmj 11y ago
Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. So allow people to cluster in high quality virtual environments.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Is there anyone preventing you from doing that?
  - rwmj 11y ago
    I use consumer video conferencing* a lot, but there are clearly huge leaps waiting to be made. It could be easier, larger, higher quality and fit more seamlessly into the environment. My point is that fixing video conferencing is a lot cheaper than building skyscrapers in the centre of San Francisco, and certainly more politically acceptable. If you mean, what stops me from fixing video conf, then largely it's because I have a much more interesting job already. * So far: Skype, Hangouts, Webex, Bluejeans
  - logicallee 11y ago
    there are no high-quality virtual environments (except for killing each other)? you literally cannot even throw an idea up on a whiteboard and have it be there two weeks later: there is no such thing online. (virtual second-life collaborative spaces.) online collaborative meetings are a joke compared to real life - as a piece of evidence, if they weren't you wouldn't have teams having to scramble to move to silicon valley, you would just have virtual incubators: in terms of its "manufacturing" output anything an online startup needs can be done over the wire. (phone and server costs are basically it.)
    - guard-of-terra 11y ago
      "there are no high-quality virtual environments" But there are high-quality cities - tech hubs. That answers your question.
    - jimbobimbo 11y ago
brendannee 11y ago
"According to one study, employment in the Bay Area around San Francisco would be about five times larger than it is but for tight limits on construction."
pmontra 11y ago
"land-use regulations in the West End of London inflate the price of office space by about 800%; Milan and Paris the rules push up prices by around 300%." I live in Milan so I think I'm qualified to write about this. The office space one wants is close to home or to metro or train stations, unless one lives outside the city. In that case the best office space is close to the highways on the same side of the city you're from. I used to work at 10 minutes by feet from office, then exactly at the other side of the city. It took one hour to get to office, by car or public transport. I preferred public transport because of the free time for reading. I work mostly from home now with customers within 30 minutes (walking of cycling), which is even better. I can understand that zoning rules limit the number of offices and houses that can be build close to the best areas but as a city dweller do I really want to see buildings built everywhere, in every single space between existing buildings or replacing smaller ones? Call me selfish because I don't care about raising the country GDP but I don't think so. Maybe it's because I'm European but my ideal of a city is not a large archaeology. It's more like this http://goitaly.about.com/od/moreitaliancities/tp/small-italian-cities.htm http://goitaly.about.com/od/moreitaliancities/tp/small-itali... and Milan is a reasonable compromise between access to fast Internet, customers and quality of life. People born in those other cities won't agree but they still come here to work :-)
- swombat 11y ago
  > my ideal of a city is not a large archaeology You mean arcology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
  - pmontra 11y ago
    Yes, thanks.
graeme 11y ago
Something that annoys me about these articles is that they're basically saying "the world's densest cities should make themselves denser" Maybe we should just copy what those cities did. Imagine what america's GDP would be like if it had ten cities like the current NYC. I live in one of the densest neighborhoods in north America, the plateau in Montreal. It achieves this density with low rise buildings, and it's a very pleasant area. People say we should build taller buildings here. But I say we should build more plateaus elsewhere. The problem is that our current regulatory environment makes it very difficult to build new versions of the world's most popular neighborhoods. So instead the call is to modify existing, successful neighborhoods.
- krschultz 11y ago
  I think if you expand a low-rise city you end up with Washington DC or LA, meaning debilitating traffic. The density is not high enough to support mass transit effectively, but it's too high for effective roads.
  - Jacqued 11y ago
    As I said in response to another comment, you actually can. Paris has a density of 50000/sqmi (to compare with Manhattan's 70000) without high rise buildings. What you can't have though, is large avenues and parking lots everywhere. Every inch of space than can be build has to be built.
- Tiktaalik 11y ago
  Exactly. We don't necessarily need to build skyscrapers to achieve substantial density improvements. There are easier gains out there. In Vancouver you have conflict over the height and density of new buildings, meanwhile South of the small downtown core there's 60 blocks of ultra low density detached single family houses. Even the small step of transitioning this to row houses or stacked townhouses would allow significant population increases.
j_baker 11y ago
> Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvements. +1000 Living in West Oakland next to a vacant lot, I think there's a lot of merit to this idea. As it stands right now, there's no harm to the owner of that lot to just let it lay vacant for a decade. If it cost the owner some money, people might actually do something with these kinds of lots.
- Frozenlock 11y ago
  The harm for the owner in leaving the lot vacant for a decade is opportunity cost. If he is in a valuable spot, it would be advantageous to sell and just do something else with the money. Imagine high land taxes in the middle of the desert. Is it an incentive to build? Quite the contrary.
  - omegaworks 11y ago
    >Imagine high land taxes in the middle of the desert. Can't build something more profitable then the land taxes? Then sell it, or give it back to the state.
  - panglott 11y ago
    This is the point of land-value taxes rather than simple land taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax The site-value of unoccupied desert is pretty low, so the land-value taxes on it would be low, which gives incentive to build there rather than elsewhere. Whereas an empty lot on valuable real estate in the city would face not merely the opportunity cost but also a high land-value tax. A lot of tax policy in John Locke and Henry George's day was about getting "unused" land into "productive" uses.
    - Frozenlock 11y ago
carapat_virulat 11y ago
This seems like a very interesting subject but the analysis seems very one-handed. You can't just project like that, remove current regulations and expect the city to remain the same except for all the economical growth. Would people with money actually stay there or would those cities turn into a unbreathable bee-hives from which people would flee as soon as they had any money to do it? It would be interesting to see comparison inside the same country of cities with harsher versus lighter regulations and how they actually evolve economically and socially. Maybe it's not even possible to remove certain regulations in western cities without committing political suicide and having them removed once the next major comes to power.
dankohn1 11y ago
I may live in the densest neighborhood of any HN participant: North Battery Park City [1] in Lower Manhattan. As an example, my son's 500 kid elementary school serves 9 buildings. And I'm here to tell you, the future feels great. Specifically, living vertically has all sorts of wonderful aspects in terms of community (the kids can trick-or-treat without leaving the building), access to resources (my kids can ride the elevator barefoot to the waterpark out the back door in the summer) and environmentally (we live in the first LEED platinum residential building in the US). The only problem is that it is expensive, and it doesn't need to be as expensive as it is. Building lots more residential skyscrapers, eliminating parking minimums [2], and reducing the incentive to warehouse vacant lots through land taxes or similar can all make New York City even more livable than it already is. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_City [2] http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/03/21/report-details-how-onerous-nycs-parking-regressive-minimums-really-are/ http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/03/21/report-details-how-one...
- _delirium 11y ago
  What's odd is that Manhattan's population density has on a long timescale been declining rather than growing, despite quite a bit of construction. In the 1900 census the population was 1.85 million (density ~80,000/sq mi), and it reached its peak of 2.33 million (~100,000/sq mi) in the 1910 census. Since then it's on the way down, with some bumps here and there: 1.96 million (~85,000/sq mi) in 1950, and all the way down to 1.54 million (~70,000/sq mi) by the 2000 census, having lost a full 1/3 of its population since 1910. The 2013 census estimate does put it at least on a growth trajectory again, to 1.63 million, but it'll be a while before it climbs up past 2 million again at that rate. The main reasons, as far as I can gather, seem to be: 1) lower-class residential towers are being replaced by higher-end residential towers with larger units and fewer people per sq ft; 2) even given the same units, people are living fewer to a unit (fewer children, fewer multigeneration households); and 3) commercial real estate is crowding out residential real estate.
  - mc32 11y ago
    That and overcrowded tenement buildings full of fire hazards going away helps push down density, but in this case for the better.
michaelochurch 11y ago
We need to do a few things. I agree on shutting down the NIMBYs. It's zero-sum activity that hurts young families and contributes to the generational screw-over that Generation X and Millennials have experienced. We also need to block nonresident foreigners from buying real estate here. They can stay in hotels. Until housing is cheaper than 0.35% of the median annual income per SF (at that level, you can afford 1200-1500 SF on a median income) it is a crime to let these nonresident foreigners (often laundering dirty money) buy properties that will go uninhabited for 11 months each year. Finally, there's a capital allocation problem. Look at Silicon Valley itself. It takes in passive capital from all over the country-- teachers' pension funds from Ohio, firefighter AD&D funds from Georgia-- and distributes the job-creation in a tiny geographic area: Silicon Valley. Jobs disappear in Ohio and Georgia, while NorCal booms. Now, the passive capitalists would be fine with this if that were a working investment strategy. It's not, though: VCs have been losing money for more than a decade. The concentration of funds into the Bay Area (which makes that area unaffordable, because housing creation is always slower than job creation) has more to do with feudalism than any sound investment policy.
drussell 11y ago
Eventually the market would eliminate wasteful land use because whatever was occupying the land would be willing to sell to someone who could benefit from it more. Bureaucracy and entrenchment get in the way of that though.
drussell 11y ago
Eventually the market would eliminate wasteful land use because whatever was occupying the land would be willing to sell to someone who could benefit from it more. Bureaucracy and entrenchment get in the way of that though.
mikelyons 11y ago
We need to rethink our cities as commerce/life supporting machines instead of aggregate plots of land for private investment. Or are we not mega-scale engineers yet...?
6t6t6 11y ago
Tokyo is a public-transport-centered city and has an interesting structure. The land value depends directly on the distance to the metro or train station and the importance of the line. The train station is the center of a self-contained community and most of the services like shops, restaurants, supermarkets, etc use to be next to the station. Also, the buildings tend to be taller the closer they are from the station. I find it a quite convenient way to organize a city.
jbb555 11y ago
Ah skip to the last paragraph. It's just the usual "things would be better if only we took away more of people's money by force" article. Ignore it. It's just pro-tax stupidiy
pitt1980 11y ago
"Two long-run trends have led to this fractured market. One is the revival of the city as the central cog in the global economic machine (see article). In the 20th century, tumbling transport costs weakened the gravitational pull of the city; in the 21st, the digital revolution has restored it. Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. The economies and populations of metropolises like London, New York and San Francisco have rebounded as a result." Is this really true? seems like anyone with an internet connection can interface with someone from SF or NYC

158 points by brendannee 11y ago

> Lifting all the barriers to urban growth in America could raise the country’s GDP by between 6.5% and 13.5%, or by about $1 trillion-2 trillion. It is difficult to think of many other policies that would yield anything like that. And it would also reduce the real but unaccounted-for environmental and social externalities of our sprawling homogenous suburbs. Someone living in New York has half the energy footprint of the average American. And while the city is pretty segregated, the New York subway is a unique setting of rich and poor people of all races utilizing a public service together.

rhino369 11y ago
It is also the entire cause of the "gentrification" problem many are so pissed off about. Nobody wants to move into a poor area, they are forced into it because you can't build skyscraper high rises in the good areas.
- lisper 11y ago
  You can in Manhattan. The tallest residential structure in the U.S. is going up within a few blocks of Central Park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue
  - dreamweapon 11y ago
    Though its owners may sometimes crash there, it's not really a "residential" structure, per se. The primary purpose it serves is as a sophisticated portfolio diversification instrument -- or (for offshore title holders), a convenient money laundering device: http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-york-real-estate-2014-6/index2.html http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-y...
  - gdilla 11y ago
    But it's already unaffordable for the average NYer before it's even ready. If wealthy foreigners can park their money in manhattan, they will, without living there. That doesn't help scarcity for actual residents.
    - drak0n1c 11y ago
      I don't see why that's an argument against. If they are going to plow their money into a city it's better if it's into 1 or 2 units in a dense skyscraper rather than buying entire mid and low rise buildings. Residential skyscrapers are strictly better at reducing price pressures.
    - bradleyjg 11y ago
      I'd have no problem at all with those billionaire towers but for the nonsensical property tax breaks (421a, J51, etc). Throw in a small non-resident property tax differential and I become an enthusiastic booster. If a bunch of billionaires want to pay property taxes while using barely any city services that sounds like a win to me. We can use that money to provide better services to the people that do live in the city year round. In my observation the people who are most bitter about billionaires "buying up Manhattan" are the multimillionaires who want to be on the top of the heap.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Woah there nelly. "Lifting the barriers" to development doesn't mean that a 50 story residential tower will be built in Central Park West. You are the barrier. Lifting them means that as a citizen, you lose control of your surroundings. So when a big company, say Pfizer, works with the city to raze your neighborhood through an eminent domain process, you're fucked. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London) It doesn't eliminate gentrification, it industrialized the process.
  - krschultz 11y ago
    Somewhat OT, but I worked in the building constructed due to that eminent domain process, it was really nice. Pfizer later sold the whole thing for pennies on the dollar to a defense contractor after pulling out of that town, all that after never actually building on all of the land that was leveled.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    I wouldn't call giving free reign to eminent domain "lifting barriers." I don't think Manhattan is a good example of a place with too restrictive laws. But SF and DC certainly are. In DC for example, you wouldn't see 80 story apartment buildings in Georgetown, but you would see them in Chinatown, NOMA, NavyYard, and other places. Instead lower middle class black neighborhoods are converting to overpriced condos as fast as house-flippers can do it.
- melling 11y ago
  No, they are forced to move to these areas because they want to have a bearable commute. Your solution is to jam everyone into a more confined area. Another solution is to make commuting from a "long distance" (e.g. 60-120 miles) more bearable. In NYC, for instance, subways could be built to NJ. Faster trains (low-speed maglevs) could be built like what's being done in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR). Mountain View to San Francisco is 40 miles. Is there some reason that isn't a 40 minute commute?
  - SilasX 11y ago
    The train part itself is 46 minutes if you take a bullet (red columns): http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html That would only be your full commute, though, if you were doing deep SoMa to downtown Mountain View.
    - melling 11y ago
      Yes, this seems to be very successful. http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_26809055/herhold-baby-bullet-anniversary http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_26809055/herhold... We need more of this. I don't know where the low-hanging fruit is in mass transit, but a lot more could be done.
    - mikeyouse 11y ago
      The Caltrain electrification project will further speed this trip since electric trains can accelerate and decelerate more rapidly. The full San Jose to SoMa trip should be roughly 16 minutes quicker based on impact studies.
    - cbhl 11y ago
      Some 5 to 10% of Caltrains are delayed though, and if that delay happens to be a fatality, expect that train to be really late. (2011) http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Board+of+Directors/Presentations/2011/6-2-11+On-time+Performance-Harvey.pdf http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Boa...
  - 11y ago
sbov 11y ago
I can only find stats on carbon footprints. Somewhat surprisingly, California does very well on this statistic, despite its suburbs: it's just behind New York. So at least for carbon footprints, those don't necessarily seem to be linked to density. I couldn't find anything on energy footprint though.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  Kind of interesting, the first link [1] that I found ranked Honolulu, Portland OR, and LA above the Tri-state area (which came in forth), in terms of per-capita carbon footprint. [1] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008/5/carbon-footprint-sarzynski/carbonfootprint_brief.PDF http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008...
  - cauterized 11y ago
    The tri-state area includes a LOT of suburbs. Carbon footprint in NYC proper is far lower.
- pash 11y ago
  > So at least for carbon footprints, those don't necessarily seem to be linked to density. Every study I have seen shows the opposite, that carbon footprints are strongly linked to density and urban-suburban divisions. In 2012, for example, climate researchers at Berkeley put together a map for the entire United States showing average household carbon footprint by zip code [0]. They found that suburban emissions are markedly higher than emissions in their respective central cities almost everywhere, confirming a result that Edward Glaeser and other urban economists had already established [1]. The FAQ [2] for the Berkeley researchers' paper [3] summarizes the headline finding like this: There is an inverted-U relationship between population density and HCF [household carbon footprint]; HCF increases ... from low to medium population densities, and decreases from medium to high population densities. The turning point is about 3,000 persons per square mile, which is very close to medium population density of all locations, and a little higher than the population density of larger suburbs (which have densities of 2,700 persons per square mile). In other words, low- and high-density places (rural areas and cities) have low household carbon footprints and middle-density places (suburbs) have high footprints. Controlling for income, the authors found that the inverted U goes away and the relationship becomes more monotonic: population density is negatively correlated with carbon emissions across the spectrum of density levels. The upswing of the inverted U-curve that you see before controlling for income happens because, as American communities are actually arranged, middle-density areas (which are relatively dense suburbs) tend to be wealthy, and emissions are also strongly correlated with consumption; the consumption effect dominates the efficiency gains due to higher densities as you go from rural areas to suburbs, and it's not until you get to city-level densities (and poorer urban populations) that the efficiency gains due to density win out over consumption-driven emissions. So part of the reason that suburbs have high emissions is that the people who live there are relatively rich, and the richer you are the more stuff you consume. But no matter how rich or poor you are, the study suggests, you will likely have a noticeably lower carbon footprint if you live in a city and pursue a lifestyle typical of your income class there rather than doing the likewise in a suburb. The authors also found, by the way, that suburban sprawl around the central cities of large metropolises effectively offsets the carbon-efficiency of the dense cities themselves [4]; the larger the central city, the greater the sprawl surrounding it, and the number of inefficient suburban households tends roughly to balance out the carbon efficiency of households in the central city. 0. http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps 1. See, e.g., http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html 2. http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/files/coolclimate/Jones-Kammen-CarbonFootprint-FAQ-EST-1-10-2014.pdf http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/files/coolclimate/Jones-Kamm... [PDF] 3. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4034364 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4034364 [PDF] 4. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-cancels-carbon-footprint-savings-of-dense-urban-cores/ http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-ca...
ctdonath 11y ago
Seriously cutting one's energy footprint is not free, it comes with serious cost increases elsewhere. The average American can't afford to live in NYC without curtailing much of what constitutes average living conditions.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Not only that. Suburban has more emissions per person but the city has far more emissions per square foot, meaning air quality is far worse and consequent health problems.
  - ctdonath 11y ago
    Do any such studies address sequestration (or other suitable term) of emissions? I may produce more emissions, but I also maintain near an acre (and aspiring to much more) of CO2/etc-absorbing forest & other foliage. Not sure how it all actually balances out, but I never see reported studies addressing suburban/rural foliage conservation impact vs urban bulldozing & paving every square foot for miles.
    - TheCoelacanth 11y ago
      If you have 1+ acres of forest on your property, you aren't living in the suburbs; that's exurban or rural. If anything taking sequestration into account would make suburbs look worse. 100 acres of dense urban development plus 400 acres of untouched forest is going to sequester much more carbon than 500 acres of suburbs with a few trees sprinkled throughout, yet they would hold the same number of people.
    - philwelch 11y ago
      If more people lived in cities, a lot of the rural/suburban land they live on would revert to wilderness, which would turn into CO2-absorbing forest and other foliage anyway. So it's disingenuous to try and claim credit for personally having title to any of it.
    - breischl 11y ago
smutticus 11y ago
Yes. Per-capital carbon production is lowest in dense urban environments. Suburbia and low density rural areas are the real carbon pigs on a per-capita basis. We need to change the wrong headed notion that dense urbanity is somehow bad for the environment. On the contrary, it's how we need to build in order to save the earth.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > We need to change the wrong headed notion that dense urbanity is somehow bad for the environment. Dense urbanity is bad for the local environment and, particularly, for human health in it. That's the cost of the lower per-capita impact on the global environment that it provides. We need to learn from what works (and what doesn't) in both dense and sparse environments to build lower-global-impact environments that remain high quality environments for human health and quality of life.
  - ef4 11y ago
    > for human health in it. In the US, life expectancy is higher for people in urban areas than rural areas. Urban areas have less obesity, lower rates of suicide, lower rates of accidental death, higher quality of life for the elderly, and higher rates of healthy exercise. It's true that some studies have shown higher rates of asthma and allergies in cities, but there are also contradictory studies saying that those things are just identified and treated more aggressively in cities -- because they tend to have much better access to healthcare services.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > We need to change the wrong headed notion that dense urbanity is somehow bad for the environment. On the contrary, it's how we need to build in order to save the earth. I'd like to see the capital/environmental costs of heavy urban development compared to electric cars in the suburbs and rural areas. I'll drive a Nissan Leaf ($199/month) if it means I don't have to live in an urban area (I work from home).
  - ch4s3 11y ago
jseliger 11y ago
Someone living in New York has half the energy footprint of the average American This is absolutely true and some of the daughter comments are missing the point; see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City (http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/0143120549?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...) for more details, but people in urban environments tend to drive less and drive shorter distances; they're less likely to own cars in general and more likely to take mass transportation or bike; and their overall energy usage for heating and cooling is much lower because they share those costs (and walls) with neighbors. Everyone has to live somewhere, and every time a five to fifty story building gets blocked in a city, dozens or hundreds of high-energy-cost, detached single-family houses get built in Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.

aurora72 11y ago

The problem is not the poor land use, it's the inefficient capital use!

jchrisa 11y ago
Also too much paved surface area.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  I keep wondering when building over roads will become common. Traffic only needs a couple stories of vertical space; everything above that should be profitably/affordably usable (once ventilation is addressed).
  - Symbiote 11y ago
    There are already buildings built over railways (as well as many railways tunnelled under things). But they're much safer (hardly any accidents, trained people who know evacuation routes etc) and the noise and smell isn't as bad as it would be for a road. The examples I think I've seen are hard to verify on Google Maps, it's a brown-grey mush, and in any case they're all odd buildings rather than a 'tunnel' created out of buildings.
  - krallja 11y ago
    I-290 in Chicago runs through the Old Chicago Main Post Office: http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/wls/images/cms/124812_1280x720.jpg http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/wls/images/cms/124812_128...
  - philwelch 11y ago
    Unless the road was built in a tunnel in the first place, there are structural issues as well. You can't just put some concrete structure over the top of a road and have it support multiple stories of building on top of it. Plus, streets work better as open-air outdoor spaces, especially for pedestrians.

rwmj 11y ago

Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. So allow people to cluster in high quality virtual environments.

guard-of-terra 11y ago
Is there anyone preventing you from doing that?
- rwmj 11y ago
  I use consumer video conferencing* a lot, but there are clearly huge leaps waiting to be made. It could be easier, larger, higher quality and fit more seamlessly into the environment. My point is that fixing video conferencing is a lot cheaper than building skyscrapers in the centre of San Francisco, and certainly more politically acceptable. If you mean, what stops me from fixing video conf, then largely it's because I have a much more interesting job already. * So far: Skype, Hangouts, Webex, Bluejeans
- logicallee 11y ago
  there are no high-quality virtual environments (except for killing each other)? you literally cannot even throw an idea up on a whiteboard and have it be there two weeks later: there is no such thing online. (virtual second-life collaborative spaces.) online collaborative meetings are a joke compared to real life - as a piece of evidence, if they weren't you wouldn't have teams having to scramble to move to silicon valley, you would just have virtual incubators: in terms of its "manufacturing" output anything an online startup needs can be done over the wire. (phone and server costs are basically it.)
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    "there are no high-quality virtual environments" But there are high-quality cities - tech hubs. That answers your question.
  - jimbobimbo 11y ago

brendannee 11y ago

"According to one study, employment in the Bay Area around San Francisco would be about five times larger than it is but for tight limits on construction."

pmontra 11y ago

"land-use regulations in the West End of London inflate the price of office space by about 800%; Milan and Paris the rules push up prices by around 300%." I live in Milan so I think I'm qualified to write about this. The office space one wants is close to home or to metro or train stations, unless one lives outside the city. In that case the best office space is close to the highways on the same side of the city you're from. I used to work at 10 minutes by feet from office, then exactly at the other side of the city. It took one hour to get to office, by car or public transport. I preferred public transport because of the free time for reading. I work mostly from home now with customers within 30 minutes (walking of cycling), which is even better. I can understand that zoning rules limit the number of offices and houses that can be build close to the best areas but as a city dweller do I really want to see buildings built everywhere, in every single space between existing buildings or replacing smaller ones? Call me selfish because I don't care about raising the country GDP but I don't think so. Maybe it's because I'm European but my ideal of a city is not a large archaeology. It's more like this http://goitaly.about.com/od/moreitaliancities/tp/small-italian-cities.htm http://goitaly.about.com/od/moreitaliancities/tp/small-itali... and Milan is a reasonable compromise between access to fast Internet, customers and quality of life. People born in those other cities won't agree but they still come here to work :-)

swombat 11y ago
> my ideal of a city is not a large archaeology You mean arcology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
- pmontra 11y ago
  Yes, thanks.

graeme 11y ago

Something that annoys me about these articles is that they're basically saying "the world's densest cities should make themselves denser" Maybe we should just copy what those cities did. Imagine what america's GDP would be like if it had ten cities like the current NYC. I live in one of the densest neighborhoods in north America, the plateau in Montreal. It achieves this density with low rise buildings, and it's a very pleasant area. People say we should build taller buildings here. But I say we should build more plateaus elsewhere. The problem is that our current regulatory environment makes it very difficult to build new versions of the world's most popular neighborhoods. So instead the call is to modify existing, successful neighborhoods.

krschultz 11y ago
I think if you expand a low-rise city you end up with Washington DC or LA, meaning debilitating traffic. The density is not high enough to support mass transit effectively, but it's too high for effective roads.
- Jacqued 11y ago
  As I said in response to another comment, you actually can. Paris has a density of 50000/sqmi (to compare with Manhattan's 70000) without high rise buildings. What you can't have though, is large avenues and parking lots everywhere. Every inch of space than can be build has to be built.
Tiktaalik 11y ago
Exactly. We don't necessarily need to build skyscrapers to achieve substantial density improvements. There are easier gains out there. In Vancouver you have conflict over the height and density of new buildings, meanwhile South of the small downtown core there's 60 blocks of ultra low density detached single family houses. Even the small step of transitioning this to row houses or stacked townhouses would allow significant population increases.

j_baker 11y ago

> Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvements. +1000 Living in West Oakland next to a vacant lot, I think there's a lot of merit to this idea. As it stands right now, there's no harm to the owner of that lot to just let it lay vacant for a decade. If it cost the owner some money, people might actually do something with these kinds of lots.

Frozenlock 11y ago
The harm for the owner in leaving the lot vacant for a decade is opportunity cost. If he is in a valuable spot, it would be advantageous to sell and just do something else with the money. Imagine high land taxes in the middle of the desert. Is it an incentive to build? Quite the contrary.
- omegaworks 11y ago
  >Imagine high land taxes in the middle of the desert. Can't build something more profitable then the land taxes? Then sell it, or give it back to the state.
- panglott 11y ago
  This is the point of land-value taxes rather than simple land taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax The site-value of unoccupied desert is pretty low, so the land-value taxes on it would be low, which gives incentive to build there rather than elsewhere. Whereas an empty lot on valuable real estate in the city would face not merely the opportunity cost but also a high land-value tax. A lot of tax policy in John Locke and Henry George's day was about getting "unused" land into "productive" uses.
  - Frozenlock 11y ago

carapat_virulat 11y ago

This seems like a very interesting subject but the analysis seems very one-handed. You can't just project like that, remove current regulations and expect the city to remain the same except for all the economical growth. Would people with money actually stay there or would those cities turn into a unbreathable bee-hives from which people would flee as soon as they had any money to do it? It would be interesting to see comparison inside the same country of cities with harsher versus lighter regulations and how they actually evolve economically and socially. Maybe it's not even possible to remove certain regulations in western cities without committing political suicide and having them removed once the next major comes to power.

dankohn1 11y ago

I may live in the densest neighborhood of any HN participant: North Battery Park City [1] in Lower Manhattan. As an example, my son's 500 kid elementary school serves 9 buildings. And I'm here to tell you, the future feels great. Specifically, living vertically has all sorts of wonderful aspects in terms of community (the kids can trick-or-treat without leaving the building), access to resources (my kids can ride the elevator barefoot to the waterpark out the back door in the summer) and environmentally (we live in the first LEED platinum residential building in the US). The only problem is that it is expensive, and it doesn't need to be as expensive as it is. Building lots more residential skyscrapers, eliminating parking minimums [2], and reducing the incentive to warehouse vacant lots through land taxes or similar can all make New York City even more livable than it already is. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_City [2] http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/03/21/report-details-how-onerous-nycs-parking-regressive-minimums-really-are/ http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/03/21/report-details-how-one...

_delirium 11y ago
What's odd is that Manhattan's population density has on a long timescale been declining rather than growing, despite quite a bit of construction. In the 1900 census the population was 1.85 million (density ~80,000/sq mi), and it reached its peak of 2.33 million (~100,000/sq mi) in the 1910 census. Since then it's on the way down, with some bumps here and there: 1.96 million (~85,000/sq mi) in 1950, and all the way down to 1.54 million (~70,000/sq mi) by the 2000 census, having lost a full 1/3 of its population since 1910. The 2013 census estimate does put it at least on a growth trajectory again, to 1.63 million, but it'll be a while before it climbs up past 2 million again at that rate. The main reasons, as far as I can gather, seem to be: 1) lower-class residential towers are being replaced by higher-end residential towers with larger units and fewer people per sq ft; 2) even given the same units, people are living fewer to a unit (fewer children, fewer multigeneration households); and 3) commercial real estate is crowding out residential real estate.
- mc32 11y ago
  That and overcrowded tenement buildings full of fire hazards going away helps push down density, but in this case for the better.

michaelochurch 11y ago

We need to do a few things. I agree on shutting down the NIMBYs. It's zero-sum activity that hurts young families and contributes to the generational screw-over that Generation X and Millennials have experienced. We also need to block nonresident foreigners from buying real estate here. They can stay in hotels. Until housing is cheaper than 0.35% of the median annual income per SF (at that level, you can afford 1200-1500 SF on a median income) it is a crime to let these nonresident foreigners (often laundering dirty money) buy properties that will go uninhabited for 11 months each year. Finally, there's a capital allocation problem. Look at Silicon Valley itself. It takes in passive capital from all over the country-- teachers' pension funds from Ohio, firefighter AD&D funds from Georgia-- and distributes the job-creation in a tiny geographic area: Silicon Valley. Jobs disappear in Ohio and Georgia, while NorCal booms. Now, the passive capitalists would be fine with this if that were a working investment strategy. It's not, though: VCs have been losing money for more than a decade. The concentration of funds into the Bay Area (which makes that area unaffordable, because housing creation is always slower than job creation) has more to do with feudalism than any sound investment policy.

drussell 11y ago

Eventually the market would eliminate wasteful land use because whatever was occupying the land would be willing to sell to someone who could benefit from it more. Bureaucracy and entrenchment get in the way of that though.

drussell 11y ago

mikelyons 11y ago

We need to rethink our cities as commerce/life supporting machines instead of aggregate plots of land for private investment. Or are we not mega-scale engineers yet...?

6t6t6 11y ago

Tokyo is a public-transport-centered city and has an interesting structure. The land value depends directly on the distance to the metro or train station and the importance of the line. The train station is the center of a self-contained community and most of the services like shops, restaurants, supermarkets, etc use to be next to the station. Also, the buildings tend to be taller the closer they are from the station. I find it a quite convenient way to organize a city.

jbb555 11y ago

Ah skip to the last paragraph. It's just the usual "things would be better if only we took away more of people's money by force" article. Ignore it. It's just pro-tax stupidiy

pitt1980 11y ago

"Two long-run trends have led to this fractured market. One is the revival of the city as the central cog in the global economic machine (see article). In the 20th century, tumbling transport costs weakened the gravitational pull of the city; in the 21st, the digital revolution has restored it. Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. The economies and populations of metropolises like London, New York and San Francisco have rebounded as a result." Is this really true? seems like anyone with an internet connection can interface with someone from SF or NYC