#there are IMO much more attractive models of dense low-rise development

[tanadrin]

Adam Something, the vaguely left-flavored Hungarian youtuber, has a video arguing that skyscrapers are a really bad solution to housing issues, and I tend to agree. The easiest concerns to point to are environmental and cost-based--skyscrapers are expensive as hell, and require a huge amount of concrete and steel!--and I would add a more marginal concern about safety to that, because fires in big buildings are rare, but very dangerous. He points out that low rise (~10 story) commie blocks are about as space-efficient and much cheaper to build.

His other big point is about alienation from the rest of the city, and I don’t like this argument because I think it’s kind of hard to pin down exactly what problem it’s pointing to. I think it’s better to rephrase it in terms of material tradeoffs, namely 1) street access is easier from a low-rise building, which means easier access to neighborhood amenities like parks; and 2) concentrating purely residential space in one area is likely to increase the distance that some of those residents have to travel to go to work or school, whereas a more even kind of mixed-use development will tend to reduce travel distances.

Very large high rise buildings seem to make sense only for certain kinds of commercial real estate, and even then, recent trends around remote work are starting to call into question whether they make sense even for that. The thing that seems to make high-rise residential buildings really attractive is that it’s conceptually easy. You don’t have to reanalyze your zoning and transport planning on a fundamental level, and you don’t have to start moving away from really nasty, sprawl-intensive policies. City governments can build a high-rise low-income housing project in a peripheral part of the city, move a bunch of people into it, and then abandon it, and when it inevitably decays due to failures of planning and maintenance, point to it as an example of why poor people don’t deserve housing.