Quote:
Originally Posted by yuriandrade
Yes, US$ 9,000. As São Paulo GDP per capita is 2.5 lower than Canadian metro areas, it seems labour costs are relatively lower in SP. As Brazil is still recovering from the 2014-2016 crisis, salaries are still depressed.
When it comes to apartment prices then São Paulo is considerably more expensive than Toronto and alligned with Vancouver, again, relatively speaking.
There are many pockets of low rise only areas as you can see clearly on Google Earth 3D, where buildings suddenly stop. Regulations affect mostly the total floor area vs size of the plot, which increases costs, induces land wasting which makes no sense in a 21 million people urban area.
In fact, those regulations impacted the entire urban area, causing crazy traffic jams and crowded public transit. The low rise residential districts on the far east parts of the city have densities up to 15,000 inh./sq km while more central districts where virtually all the jobs are could manage much higher densities without the regulations. For instance, Paris houses 2.2 million people in 120 sq km, same for Manhattan plus adjacents parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx while São Paulo has “only” 1.4 million people in its most central 120 sq km.
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ok that makes sense. The small footprint towers in Sao Paulo are different from the ones that have been posted so far from Toronto, New York and Chicago in that they're in a more lowrise setting.
Some of those North American examples actually don't have that small footprints, since even though they're narrow, they extend quite deep into the lot. Or they have a skinny width to height ratio but they're also much taller so they floorplates are actually not that small. But even the ones that do have small floorplates are usually in a "wall to wall" environment, surrounded by a lot of 3-10 storey buildings.
In Sao Paulo they're often built in semi-suburban areas, or at least areas that are not "wall to wall".
If the cost of construction labor, relative to housing costs or relative to upper-middle class incomes, is lower in Sao Paulo, then that could explain how they're able to compensate for some of the inefficiencies of small footprint buildings.
And Sao Paulo is building primarily in existing neighbourhoods, rather than on brownfield sites or vacant land like a lot of North American cities. That would explain why they often have to work with smaller sites, and if there's zoning that limits ground coverage, then that obviously leaves you with small building footprints.