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When did New York start building slowly?

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#181

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cyberax wrote: post #87
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75

Earlier 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. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis). Roads are a bad value for wha…

> 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…

Houston is actually losing people, it’s growth occurring in the suburbs:

https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-dallas-led-metro-a...

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#182

Post by bluGill »

bonzini wrote: post #122
pchristensen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically all of them, and at 1/2 to 1/10 of the cost. Spain, Italy, the Nordic countries, and Turkey are all much more efficient at building infrastructure than the US. Alon Levy is the most accessible source for this kind of cross-national comparision. https://transitcosts.com/ and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/03/we-gave-a-talk... is a good place to start.

Wow it takes effort to be slower than Italy. :) There are some infamous cases here of highways taking decades to complete (and also some positive experiences such as an awesome high speed rail network). I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others m…

Italy had a corruption problem a few decades ago. They have done some major reform and things are better, but the reputation remains.

Note that Italy is not perfect. And like all cases of corruption it is worse in some areas than others. The construction costs project is about mass transit where Italy does fairly well, but they don't look at highways so we cannot say anything about how they do highways from the data here. (I'm sure someone reading this knows more than I do about Itally's highways and can comment)

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#183

Post by godtoldmetodoit »

wongarsu wrote: post #150
nicbou wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast. If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it. Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.

Interestingly, in situations where a bad roll of the monarchy dice isn't a big deal because people can just leave, dictatorship tends to become the preferred form of government. See for example open source projects with their BDFL; if you have a bad BDFL the project gets forked with new leadership. Another example are small to medium sized businesses, where customers and employees can just go elsewhere if the CEO tur…

I saw this effect directly in Eve Online. In the early days there was a lot of experimenting with how exactly to organize these large groups of players. Some groups tried democracy of some flavor or another, others dictatorship. Dictatorship easily won out in the end.

Most "dictators" in Eve actually end up being pretty good at their job, because it is a cutthroat market, and the most precious currency is players willing to fly for you and they can easily leave to join another group should you piss them off and not take care of them.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#184

Post by bluGill »

Retric wrote: post #180
acdha wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure he’s aware of which country Copenhagen is in but was simply pointing out as an example a much harder large, complex project in a dense urban environment built in far less time. The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper…

US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue. One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s. It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from mo…

The design should have added time (since is was a new thing and thus who knows how long before they can design something that works - this may require building labs to simulate things in). Everything else should just be a month extra. There is more to do not, but you can put the AC in on lower floors while placing beams for upper floors. Plus we have a lot of automation that has been made before this, so a lot of labor should go faster. A taller building will of course take longer to build than a short one, but it should be years difference.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#185

Post by bluGill »

klipt wrote: post #56
klooney wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably helps that wages are lower in Spain. Americans want cheap infrastructure but also want high wages and that's probably an impossible combination.

Wages are lower in Spain, but not by anywhere near enough to explain the cost difference.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#186

Post by quantumwannabe »

HNDen21 wrote: post #175
29athrowaway wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of what? traffic? air quality? schools? crime rates? housing? Exactly how is it a good place to live? Probably when Frank Sinatra was alive but certainly not now. What can you get in New York that you cannot get somewhere else?

I used to live in NYC, here are a few that come to mind... Art/museums... top notch collections Restaurants... you can find any type of food here Sports.. I used to go to the US Open tennis every year... then there is football, baseball, MLS soccer.. all of these are within 1 hour Sit down at a restaurant table on a sidewalk and just people watch Broadway shows Concerts Beaches are close by Hunter mountain for skiing…

The only things on your list that you can't get in every other city with more than a couple hundred thousand people is specific museums, seeing Broadway shows immediately upon release, and ultra-high end restaurants.

I wouldn't brag about NYC's beaches and skiing.

I’m not hating on the city, just pointing out that New Yorkers often believe that only NYC has stuff and every other city is a barren wasteland.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#187

Post by bluGill »

bradDonniger wrote: post #110
chitowneats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gri…

Population is expanding in many US cities faster than they are building houses. With houses we need to build schools, stores, parks, offices, and a long list of other things that an expanding population will use more of.

Old infrastructure wears out, and often it fails to meet modern standards and should be replaced (ex old houses often cannot be insulated to modern standards, old bridges we now realize were not built strong enough). Many have for various reasons concluded that some of what we have built in the past was a mistake and so we should tear some things down to replace with something else. (ex replace highways with mass transit)

While we don't need to build or rebuild everything we did in the past, there is still a lot of things that if we would build our life would be better.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#188

Post by xen2xen1 »

troad wrote: post #133
cyberax wrote: post #87

Earlier 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…

Just wanted to chime in and agree with cyberax. I’m living in a dense, beautiful European city, in a heritage listed building near the historic centre. If I got a US visa tomorrow I’d be on the first flight to the Houston or Dallas suburbs. Judging by the growth rates of Texas cities - compared to the growth rates of old European ones - lots of people agree. Pretty =/= functional. There are costs to density that aren…

I want a yard. Well, I want to live someplace with a yard, and I have one. A place with a pool, and room for my dogs to run. I live "in town" but I have a yard. I don't want to live in a dense urban area. Some do, but I'll bet they tend to be younger and don't have kids or have younger ones. People want space. How about we make roads and cars cheaper instead of demonizing owning actual land? That's why suburbs are popular, why they'll stay popular, no matter how much strongtowns.com tries to push something else.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#189

Post by bluGill »

bobthepanda wrote: post #25
chrisco255 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is NYC building skinnier skyscrapers? Is it air rights? Or is it easier to get approval to build such things on the few remaining smaller parcels and shorter buildings (which have to be knocked down first).

Consolidating lots is hard to do, because you have to be able to buy out other landowners, and they have to be willing to sell. Obtaining air rights is far easier. And the basic land plot unit in the New York grid is only 25 by 100 ft.

Many land owners have been around for a while and buying lots. They often already have two lots next to each other. In cases where they don't they may have a different lot that can be swapped (possibly with some dollars if one is in a more valuable location) with some other land owner so that both get two next to each other. while you cannot use the above to build in any one specific place, you can use it to get close enough.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#190

Post by bluGill »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #43

I agree with the premise, but keep in mind we weren’t always so concerned about injuries and deaths on the job. Many of our greatest works were built on pools of blood that would not be tolerated today.

Today we have a lot of tools and automation that we didn't in the past. Those tools should speed things up by far more than tighter safety standards slow things down.
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