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How Important Are Skyscrapers, Really?

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Mary Newsom, in a review of Ed Glaeser’s new book Triumph of The City, makes some arguments about skyscrapers that I’ve never heard before:

In his eyes, skyscrapers are the height of green living. But as architect Michael Mehaffy and others have pointed out, tall buildings can be less energy-efficient than shorter ones. In cities lacking the intense development pressure of a New York or Hong Kong – i.e., most other U.S. cities – one skyscraper can suck up a disproportionate chunk of the existing market, leading to the odd sight of tall towers surrounded by surface parking lots – not your greenest landscape.

Houston Skyscrapers

Is Houston the skyscrapers’ fault?

Regarding the energy efficiency of skyscrapers, she doesn’t link to any one claim in particular so I’m not sure what exactly Michael Mehaffy’s argument is, but I suspect that it doesn’t account for transportation energy use. Tall buildings (4+ stories), when built in large numbers, transfer a lot of energy spent on transit from horizontal modes (cars, rail, your feet, buses) to the one relatively energy efficient vertical mode: the elevator.

As for skyscrapers surrounded by a sea of parking, when does this actually happen? I can think of two instances: public housing projects, and places with high minimum parking requirements. Neither of these are really the fault of skyscrapers.

Mary also makes some similar, more reasonable, arguments against Glaeser’s skyscraper obsession – as one blogger who I can’t remember or find right now pointed out a while ago [edit: It was Charlie at Old Urbanist], skyscrapers make up a pretty small portion of NYC’s total number of units. But then again, skyscrapers are also the most regulated-against form, so I’m not sure how much we can learn from revealed preferences.

I don’t have any one fact in particular to back this up, but I suspect that the demand for living in high-rises (say, 10+ stories) is actually a lot higher than a lot of urbanists suspect. New Urbanists idolize the three- and four-story towns of yore (James Kunstler famously announced the death of skyscrapers after 9/11), but I see skyscrapers sprouting essentially wherever they’re allowed.

When Mary says that most US cities other than New York couldn’t support them, she’s only right in as far as you consider Woodland Mills a city. There are many other large and mid-sized cities, though, that I think could definitely support a few dozen more skyscrapers. In the Northeast alone, the feeding frenzy in Northern Virginia demonstrates that the Washington region would obviously sprout tons of towers if they were allowed. But even outside of the red hot DC market, I think it’s safe to say that there’s demand for quite a few more high-rises in many neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Boston, North Jersey, Queens, and Brooklyn. Hell, I’m sure even some places that are very car-oriented nowadays but have good transit access – mainly wealthy suburbs like the Main Line outside of Philadelphia and Long Island and Westchester in the New York metro area – would see a few towers go up if they let them.

I have a feeling that a lot of urbanists downplay skyscrapers in order to appear politically palatable to places that are hesitant even about mid-rise New Urbanist-style development, but sometimes I think they get a little carried away. This sort of anti-skyscraper sentiment, when taken to the extreme as it is in DC, can have very real consequences. It may have forced the city to be a bit more proactive in other deregulatory moves, like parking minimums (as I understand it, DC’s plan will be the most radical off-street parking deregulation in the country). But unless the Height Act is repealed and a significant amount of skyscrapers are allowed, I worry that the city’s dizzyingly high rents will never fall.

  • Alex B.

    Important question – what do we mean by ‘skyscrapers’?

    20 stories? 40? 50? 100? There’s a huge difference between the Sears Tower and a 20 story apartment building.

    There is some truth to the idea, however. At some point, even if the definitions of efficiency or what’s being measured are different, where you reach a point of diminishing returns – more floor space (or energy) is devoted to vertical circulation than is gained from additional density. Where exactly that point of diminishing returns is would depend a great deal on how exactly we’re measuring all these factors, and which factors we emphasize.

  • Charlie

    Stephen — I think you’re referring to a post I put up a few weeks ago at the Old Urbanist blog (Can New York Build It’s Way Up To Affordability) where I calculated that less than one percent of residential units in NYC are above the 19th floor. Most 20+ story buildings are used as office space and for hotels although there’s been a trend to more residential towers in the last ten years.

  • one skyscraper can suck up a disproportionate chunk of the existing market, leading to the odd sight of tall towers surrounded by surface parking lots – not your greenest landscape.

    This statement by newsome is a little shortsighted. She (and Kunstler) is looking at the results from the narrow viewpoint of the performance of the building itself. The higher cost of building high reflects the inefficient side of skyscrapers, so to see the efficiency, we need to understand why those who use them choose to.

    Skyscrapers are efficient mainly for 1 reason: agglomeration. Skyscrapers allow large companies to have many employees in a well located place. Other companies locate nearby to share the services and amenities that locate in business districts. Highrise residential accommodates the need for efficient commute to and from the businesses. Here is where the efficiency is – not in the building itself, but in its relationship to society.

    This is why regulatory barriers to accommodating these efficiencies prevent societal efficiency, and hurt the environment.

    The parking lots in CBDs can be seen as someone who’s holding the option to build densely in the future. As I mentioned in a defense of land speculation, this is a good thing in the long run. http://www.marketurbanism.com/2009/01/22/taxing-land-speculation/

  • Anonymous

    Ive heard a lot about how skyscrapers “can” use more energy than shorter buildings. Whats the data on this? Do they or do they not, all other things equal?

    Are they comparing huge luxury apartments in skyscrapers with shoebox apartments in 4 story tenements?

  • Is that across all of NYC or just Manhattan?

  • Benjamin Hemric

    For those who are interested, here’s a link to a Michael Mehaffy essay that Mary Newsom might have be thinking of.

    http://tinyurl.com/64mvsjm

    If the link doesn’t work, one can use a search engine, using the words “Michael Mehaffy high rise,” to find it. Here are the details:

    “More low-down on tall buildings,” by Michael Mehaffy posted 2/21/11 on the New Urban Network.

    Benjamin Hemric
    Thurs., April 21, 2011, 9:42 p.m.

  • Benjamin Hemric

    For those who are interested, here’s a link to a Michael Mehaffy essay that Mary Newsom might have be thinking of.

    http://tinyurl.com/64mvsjm

    If the link doesn’t work, one can use a search engine, using the words “Michael Mehaffy high rise,” to find it. Here are the details:

    “More low-down on tall buildings,” by Michael Mehaffy posted 2/21/11 on the New Urban Network.

    Benjamin Hemric
    Thurs., April 21, 2011, 9:42 p.m.

  • Benjamin Hemric

    1) I haven’t had a chance to read the Mehaffy essay in detail, but from what I’ve seen so far I’m inclined to strongly disagree with the arguments that Mehaffy has presented. However, I’ve posted a link to it so that people can easily find and read a detailed version of the arguments for themselves.

    2) It seems to me that a number of the arguments that Mehaffy has gathered together are the ones that Glaeser has actually written his book to counter. These arguments have little — or nothing? — to do with the writings of Jane Jacobs, though. However, it’s “nice” to see the actual source of these anti-skyscraper arguments, to read them in more detail and to see where they are coming from.

    3) Again this is a quick impression, but It seems to me that a number of both the anti-skyscraper and pro-skyscraper arguments suffer from poorly defined terms, etc.

    Benjamin Hemric
    Thurs., April 21, 2011, 10:43 p.m.

  • Very interesting – thanks for that! This article is indeed very bizarre…the author seems to be averaging about two bold and totally unsupported claims per paragraph.

  • Alon Levy

    There’s a separate argument to be made against some skyscrapers in new cities, which is that they don’t really increase job density. The trend in cities like Dubai, Atlanta, and even Tokyo and New York (i.e. WTC) is to build entire developments centered around a skyscraper or two, with a lot of open land and low-rise buildings in between. As a result, the project-wide floor area ratio is surprisingly low – e.g. 10 for the old WTC vs. 33 at the Empire State Building. Often those projects have little or no more commercial floor space than what they displaced, and are billed as public plaza and open space projects as much as economic development.

  • That’s counting all the boroughs, e.p.c. Manhattan has just over 25% of all residential units in the city as a whole, so the figure for Manhattan would be a bit less than 3 percent.

    Doesn’t seem plausible, but the great majority of residential Manhattan today remains less than 20 stories, a fact which tends to get lost when looking at the skyline from afar or when walking around Midtown.

    http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/02/can-new-york-build-its-way-up-to.html

  • I think there is a mix of two arguments here. One is that skyscrapers are less energy efficient. And that’s true – all things being equal, a building with a larger surface area to volume ratio with use more energy, both for internal transportation and for heating and cooling, since the interface with the surrounding world is greater. Of course, all things aren’t equal and dense buildings promote more efficient transit choices most of the time. If you’d like, I can send you academic sources on this, because I just spent a semester working on a terrible research project trying to show otherwise, only to have every academic source tell me I was wrong.

    The second argument (which is probably what Newsom is actually trying to say) is that permitting high rises (through high rise zoning, or, as in Houston, through no zoning) can create a landscape like the one in the picture, where large towers are surrounded by parking. For example, in the 1980s, Midtown Atlanta was a low-rise commercial district with more-or-less unlimited zoning. In the early 1990s, the office market was ripe and several new high rises were built, including the tallest American building outside of New York or Chicago (who knew?). Developers, seeing the massive potential profits from extremely large towers, bought land and waited…and waited….and waited for the market to support new development of that scale. This lead to a landscape like in the photo above – a few towers and many, many parking lots — and not parking lots required by a minimum parking requirement, but pay lots owned by other developers who were holding sites for future development. In the early 2000s, the city downzoned much of Midtown from unlimited height to something in the neighborhood of 15 stories, and this produced many new developments. Each site had less potential, so each developer had less risk, making it more profitable to build than to wait.

    I believe this is what Newson is trying to say.

  • Wait, are you sure that downtown Atlanta had no parking minimums when all those towers/lots were going up? I haven’t looked too deeply into it, but this PDF from 2007 seems to suggest that they were trying to do away with the minimums back in 2007, but that they hadn’t done it yet.

  • Ray-ray

    this is weird

  • OhPatrick

    This was a long time ago, but I wasn’t trying to say Atlanta had no parking minimums. I was trying to say that midtown had parking beyond what was required by the minimums.

  • TM

    A 10 story apartment building is not a skyscraper.

  • TM

    “But unless the Height Act is repealed and a significant amount of
    skyscrapers are allowed, I worry that the city’s dizzyingly high rents
    will never fall.”

    This is just weird. What about NYC’s dizzyingly high rents? There is no evidence that skyscrapers promote affordable rents, just the contrary.

  • OhPatrick

    You have it backwards. People build tall buildings *because* the rent is high – it’s the only way it’s economical. If the rent is high beyond that it’s because demand still exceeds supply.

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