Kind of amazing that the nation's 2d through 5th largest metro areas (LA, DMV, Chicagoland, Bay Area) have a grand total of 3 skyscrapers under construction.
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Yeah, skyscraper construction clearly isn't a good proxy for housing construction. The DMV is pretty good at building at housing, at least by the standards of big US metros, but the only 150m+ buildings are a handful in Baltimore. New York, meanwhile, still builds skyscrapers, but not housing.
NYC has the best bones for dense car-free housing but we're stuck in amber with incremental Rube Goldberg mechanisms. It's pathetic we couldn't just remove parking mins citywide. Like how it's pathetic there are urbanists opposing a centrally located privately financed arena atop transit in Philly.
At least New York is fairly unbalkanized compared to other large US cities, so we could potentially have meaningful ‘YIMBYism in one city’ reforms in parallel to state reforms, that is, once the state actually decides to act here
The SF-San Jose area is mostly low-built suburbs TBH. Some skyscrapers have been proposed, but it's pretty wild to imagine 37-story buildings standing in the middle of 2-stories at most. Would be more effective if 6/8-stories were allowed everywhere IMO.
"People are moving to lower/tax lower regulation areas." Motivated reasoning, ab absurdum.
The surprise winner of the skyscraper sweepstakes is tax-heavy, regulation-dense Canada. Note: none in provinces that want to emulate ignorant US public disinvestment politics (Alberta). And explain NYC.
Even if true, that wouldn’t prove your point. There is population, capital, and municipal planning to support growth in high-tax, high-regulation Canadian cities.
What trounces your point is that adding Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio gets you the same number of projects in SF.
There is in housing a myth that density creates affordability. Unfortunately density requires expensive Type 1 (non flammable) construction. So while you do create “more” housing it is inevitably only affordable to higher income people as seen in Vancouver and GTO especially
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I’m curious how many of these are residential / hotel rather than office / commercial.
Why not DC Metro?
The surprise winner of the skyscraper sweepstakes is tax-heavy, regulation-dense Canada. Note: none in provinces that want to emulate ignorant US public disinvestment politics (Alberta). And explain NYC.
What trounces your point is that adding Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio gets you the same number of projects in SF.