there is less space now. if you walked around NYC in the 1980's there were still a bunch of empty lots. these have been built over and so each new project is more expensive as the current building must be purchased, demolished and then rebuilt
When did New York start building slowly?
101–110 of 248 posts
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#102For small things, like 10-unit apartment complexes, the number of people available to run such projects in the 70s was probably pretty massive. Since then many people left the trades (presumably to mash their fat fingers at keyboards instead).
Now projects like that are likely harder as the companies that can do it are 1) busy, 2) expensive, 3) not in your area.
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. "Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch". If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric. Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minut…
You accuse others of 'swallowing urbanist propaganda' but that's both highly uncharitable and also grossly ignorant given the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
"pre-war"? WTF?
> the extremely high demand for pre-war and denser areas.
Of course there is a high demand for urban areas. It's an effect of runaway density. Companies have competitive advantage if they locate their offices in The Downtown of a large city. This in turn makes the area around it more expensive, as people try to move closer to avoid longer commutes.
This is a vicious circle, leading to a sort of "density pollution".
And it should be solved in exactly the same way we dealt with other forms of pollution: via regulation and gradual tightening of rules.
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#104Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…
There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Mose…
When each level of company extracts it’s profit, and is doing what it can to maximize profit, it’s not surprising what the end result is.
Cities used to/should have public works departments. Not hire a contractor who hires a paver who rents the machinery to fix a pothole. The city should just own it all and hire someone as it will forever need to fix potholes.
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?
Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.
With Italy, we may not want to use 'quickly' and 'cheaply' too soon.
The collapse of the Ponte Morandi / Polcevera Viaduct was just a few years ago and is still fresh in the minds.[1][2]
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi#Collapse
[2]
Police release new footage of doomed Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V479srTBlAk
Genoa motorway bridge collapse caught on camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pl0rsVdXxM
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alon Levy and the transit costs project are a great source of actual hard analysis on this- https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-c... has a great concise breakdown, pasted here because no one will click through: Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magni…
I can't speak too much to the first several points, but noting - agency micromanagement of contractors - general red tape is very fitting and a direct contribution to - too little competition I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts. According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using. Unfortu…
> According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using.
And owners have never lied about the superiority of their product, or what other people think.
Except that is pretty much all they do.
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll bite. He is probably talking about Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, China. They all build infra much faster than the US. If we move south, then Malaysia and Singapore also build very fast. For Europe, France builds much faster than the US, but it is more centralised.
What's their secret? How do they keep their standards up, but still build so fast, and so cheap (compared to the US)? It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†. † to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries
Part of it is the fact that they do it so much so they’re very good at it. China has laid more concrete since 2000 than the rest of the world combined prior to 2000. So the Chinese have a lot of expertise and a lot of the supply chain, and for example in Singapore the Chinese have built a lot.
By the way, much of the same can be said about manufacturing.
In the US a lack of construction has caused the industry to atrophy.
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s another very important factor about Moses that people overlook. They did things in-house. There’s an anecdote in the book about how they had a building on Randall’s Island with 100 draftsmen on call at any time. The minute the federal government announced more money was released they’d whip up designs for highways or bridges before anyone else and have the proposal in. There’s a lot of stories like that. Mose…
> It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. this is a giant issue in the angloshere And noone own the outcome for quality of the result. When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits b…
Britain feels even more corrupt than the US.
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> European and East Asian You just basically named two continents and said they build faster than the US and you're accusing someone else of simplistic takes? Which European country builds infrastructure faster than the US?
Berlin made great progress on the Brandenburg Airport, a shining example of German efficiency and construction prowess /s
People who'd like to understand the /s should check out "How to F#€k up an Airport" from Radio Spaetkauf: https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/
Re: When did New York start building slowly?
#110Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…
This is a simplistic take. European and East Asian democracies build infrastructure far faster and cheaper than the U.S. Often with even more stringent safety regulations and higher standards of quality. The question we are tasked with answering is: why?
What do we actually need to build? We have plenty of buildings to shelter people, but use them roleplay career professionals. More than enough roads and highways.
Plenty of farmland. Maybe could use some hospitals.
A real need to rebuild post-world wars seems to have become some mind virus we have to constantly crank out mega projects.
Can we get over the ridiculous hallucination we need to “drill baby drill” and grind through all the resources to goto Mars? You and I will be dead before that’s tenable let alone implemented… can we let the future sort itself out a bit?
Why do we still buy into the story of post-war shell shocked paranoids who spent decades huffing leased gas fumes, expropriating the world from everyone else dropping democracy bombs.
Decades of television as a carefully curated propaganda pipeline has messed the last generation up.