7 Reasons Why High-Rises Kill Livability (Commentary)

[chris08876]

7 Reasons Why High-Rises Kill Livability

What do you do when you’re the city of Portland and millions of people are supposed to move into your city in the coming decades and you have an urban growth boundary? Build up, right? To a certain extent yes, but not above the fifth floor, says world-renown architect Jan Gehl. “I would say that anybody living over the fifth floor ought generally to be referring to the airspace authorities. You’re not part of the earth anymore, because you can’t see what’s going on on the ground and the people on the ground can’t see where you are,” he warns. As the Portland Comprehensive Plan update is underway, residents are looking on with alarm as the city is proposing to allow building heights up to 40 stories in such questionable places like historic neighborhoods and bridgeheads all in the name of density.

The high-rise is not the only answer to density. In fact, it may be a very unsuitable solution that undermines the character, livability, social fabric and even the public health of a city.

Below are 7 reasons why high-rises kill livability:

1. High-rises separate people from the street

According to Gehl, a city is best viewed at eye-level. Sure the views from a high-rise can be stunning, but you aren’t able to see people in a way that allows for connection. Because it’s not as easy as walking out your front door, people who live on the high floors of a high-rise are less likely to leave their houses. This separates people from the outdoors, the city and from other people. “What high-rise does is separate large numbers of people from the street, so we end up with a city that is detached from street life, we end up with a city that is based on enclaves and gated communities,” says urban planning expert Michael Buxton.

And Gehl maintains that “meaningful contact with ground level events is possible only from the first few floors in a multi-story building. Between the third and forth floor, a marked decrease in the ability to have contact with the ground level can be observed. Another threshold exists between the fifth and sixth floors. Anything and anyone above the fifth floor is definitely out of touch with ground level events.”

2. High-rise scale is not the human scale

High-rises are simply so tall that they make no visual sense to a pedestrian at eye-level. You can’t even see the whole building unless you’re in another high-rise. You become lost and engulfed in glass and steel canyons which can be isolating and dehumanizing.

The Preservation Institute tells us that when you walk through a traditional urban neighborhood, with buildings five or six stories high, you can see the faces of people looking out of their windows, and you can see personalizing details such as flowerpots in windows. When you walk through a high-rise neighborhood, you cannot see this sort of thing in most of the building’s facade. In other words, you lose sight of the human-scale in high-rise neighborhoods.

3. High-rises radically reduce chance encounters and propinquity

Because high-rises tend to separate people from the street and each other, they greatly reduce the number of chance encounters that happen, which are crucial to the liveliness of a city and to creating social capital. And because people are cooped up in tall buildings, they are less likely to experience propinquity, a concept introduced to me by architect and urban designer, Kevin Kellogg.

Propinquity is “one of the main factors leading to interpersonal attraction. It refers to the physical or psychological proximity between people. Propinquity can mean physical proximity, a kinship between people, or a similarity in nature between things,” according to Wikipedia. Propinquity happens in public spaces – on the street, in parks, public transportation and city squares. High-rises diminish people’s participation in public spaces and therefore diminish propinquity.

Living in a high-rise creates a very finite and encapsulated world in and of itself. The high-rise becomes your world, especially those which include a restaurant, market, gym and other amenities. You never have to go outside or encounter other people. Plus, this phenomenon creates the opposite effect of public spaces. It ensures that people mostly interface with others of the same socioeconomic strata. High-rises literally create silos, both physical, social and psychological.

4. High-rises are vertical sprawl

How could high-rises possibly be sprawl as they take up so little actual land? Sprawl is when something is built inefficiently and takes up too much space. With high-rises, they take up too much vertical space for something (in this case dense housing) that could be achieved with much less height.

Think of the South Waterfront in Portland, a sea of speculative high-rises that largely remain empty. Not unlike suburban sprawl that promotes isolation and is often devoid of people on the streets, high-rises offer up the same problems, but just from a vertical perspective. Plus, not unlike the vast swaths of suburban tract homes that are built during an economic bubble that often end up empty, high-rise bubbles can be just as unrealistic.

5. High-rises=gentrification and inequality; Low/Mid-rises=resiliency and affordability

According to Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard, co-founder and director of the Making Cities Livable International Council, “the construction industry is a powerful engine for fueling economic development. Tall buildings offer increased profits for developers. However, the higher a building rises, the more expensive is the construction. Thus, the tallest buildings tend to be luxury units, often for global investors. Tall buildings inflate the price of adjacent land, thus making the protection of historic buildings and affordable housing less achievable. In this way, they increase inequality.”

On the other hand, says Making Cities Livable, “small footprint shops and apartments in a fine textured urban fabric yield smaller profits, spread out among many individuals and businesses in the community. Over centuries, this human scale urban fabric has proved to be adaptable to changing political and economic times, making the community resilient, and durable. The City of Paris, with buildings no taller than 100’, supports continuous retail along the street, making every neighborhood walkable.”

6. Are High Rises Even Green?

Contrary to public opinion, which thinks high-rises must be sustainable because they allow for so much density, Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia says that high-rise buildings are not green at all. He says, “high-rise buildings are subject to the effects of too much sun and too much wind on their all-glass skins. And all-glass skins are, despite many improvements to the technology, inherently inefficient. Glass is simply not very good at keeping excessive heat out, or desirable heat in. Our high-rises, according to BC Hydro (the province of British Columbia’s main electric utility) data, use almost twice as much energy per square metre as mid-rise structures.”

Moreover, Condon says that high-rise buildings are less adaptable than mid-rise structures, and therefore are inherently less sustainable. Furthermore, he says, high-rise buildings are built largely of steel and concrete and are less sustainable than low rise and mid-rise buildings built largely of wood; steel and concrete produce a lot of GHG. Wood traps it. Concrete is 10 times more GHG-intensive than wood.

7. High Rises are not good for your health

This assertion may sound laughable to some, but the effects of the high-rise on mental health have been researched and documented. Psychologist Daniel Cappon writes in the Canadian Journal of Public Health that high-rises keep children and the elderly from getting the exercise the extra effort it takes to get outside encourages them to stay at home and flip on the TV. High-rises, he says, also deprive people and especially children of “neighborhood peers and activities.” And he believes that the level of alienation and isolation, things that have been proven to negatively impact health and even shorten people’s lives, increase with the height of the building.

In conclusion, I’ll quote Cappon at length:

“What is there to say? We must have the incontrovertible evidence and the mechanism whereby the high-rise leads to the low fall of urban humanity. Meanwhile, we must not go on blindly building these vertical coffins for the premature death of our civilization.

What shall we do instead while we are wanting to learn the ultimate facts? We can satisfy the economy needs for high density per land acre, which of itself is not likely to produce ill health, while restricting heigh and redistributing spaces in terraced, human-scale fashion, supporting social confluence and relationships or, at least, not impeding the nurturing of precious human resources.”

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September 29, 2014
Tazmine Loomans
http://sustainablecitiescollective.c...ill-livability

Original Source: http://bloomingrock.com/2014/09/25/7...ll-livability/

[Randomguy34]

Where do we begin with this...

[Perklol]

what is he smoking?

[chris08876]

^^^

I know. He had the nerve to post it on YIMBY. I redirected him here so that her argument could be dismantled if she wants to defend herself. He claims she has a Masters of Urban Planning when I told her that this is NIMBY propaganda, and utterly false, but I would like to question the merits of the institution that gave that degree.

[Iktomi]

The only one that is even close to a reasonable criticism of high rises would be #6, and even then Id weigh that any material inefficiencies would be outweighed by the more efficient land use it provides.

[Perklol]

Originally Posted by chris08876

^^^

I know. She had the nerve to post it on YIMBY. I redirected her here so that her argument could be dismantled if she wants to defend herself. She claims she has a Masters of Urban Planning when I told her that this is NIMBY propaganda, and utterly false, but I would like to question the merits of the institution that gave that degree.

It is a lady? Hmm seeing a dude there

[chris08876]

Woops. Lol

[fflint]

(There should be a link to the original source, by the way)

It is not obviously true highrises induce people to stay indoors more than lowrises do, nor must highrises necessarily be "sprawl," although I've got to admit the area in that photo at the top of the thread is despressing in its sterility, banality and alienating sameness--that is as bad as sprawl, IMO. But highrise residential areas need not be built like that. Just look at New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.

I do agree with the Jane Jacobs-inspired assertion that it's better to have eyes on the street, a connection between residents and streetlife below, in order to keep an area safe and healthy. But do we know for certain residents on the first few floors of highrises pay less attention to the street than residents on those same floors in shorter buildings?

And after five or six stories, the purported cutoff point at which residents are no longer connected with the street, what is the difference? No additional floors (and no more eyes on the street), or additional floors in which there is purportedly fewer and fewer eyes on the street?

The writer, who is far too strident considering the lackluster arguments, utilizes certain truisms to arrive at conclusions that don't necessarily follow.

[simms3_redux]

I think there is *some* truth to this. I do think it's overblown, but I also think that high-rises belong, along with other buildings, in a greater context defined at the local, and sometimes even at the regional/national level.

Living in a high-rise in New York is going to be different from living in a high-rise in Miami. Living in a high-rise in Miami might be similar to living in one of these new luxury mid-rises/shorter high-rises in DC. Living in a high-rise in NYC might be kind of like living in a walk-up in SF or a rowhouse in Philly.

I think it all depends on the context of the city.

[memph]

How about courtyard buildings? Is a midrise building with much of the units that have windows only facing private interior courtyards (and not the street) as with so many buildings in Paris just as bad as a highrise? And I would say that without the courtyards, Paris would need more streets to achieve the same density, which means the average street will have less pedestrian traffic and retail.

What about units on the 4th or 5th floor of walk-up (no elevator) buildings? Don't they discourage people from going down to the street as a highrise with elevators (although I don't think either are that bad)?

Aren't midrises worse for historic preservation since in order to reach a certain density or provide a certain supply/amount of building space you need to demolish more?

Also highrises can be more affordable, it just depends on the context. Highrises can have more units in less land so if the land costs are high, the lower land cost per unit for highrises can make up for the higher construction cost per unit. Highrises won't get build unless the neighbourhood is desirable enough (typically) to have high land costs. But if there's demand for luxury housing, it will get built, if not as highrises, then as midrises or lowrises.

Plus you can have housing bubbles with all sorts of housing types. I think the one in Spain was mainly involving midrises, and there have been many housing bubbles in lowrise markets too. Plus being built of all glass skins can happen with non-highrises too, and you can have highrises that aren't all glass...

That being said, it's not that I think there should be highrises everywhere. Every building type has its advantages so I think it's good to have a mix.

[memph]

Originally Posted by fflint

(There should be a link to the original source, by the way)

It is not obviously true highrises induce people to stay indoors more than lowrises do, nor must highrises necessarily be "sprawl," although I've got to admit the area in that photo at the top of the thread is despressing in its sterility, banality and alienating sameness--that is as bad as sprawl, IMO. But highrise residential areas need not be built like that. Just look at New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.

I do agree with the Jane Jacobs-inspired assertion that it's better to have eyes on the street, a connection between residents and streetlife below, in order to keep an area safe and healthy. But do we know for certain residents on the first few floors of highrises pay less attention to the street than residents on those same floors in shorter buildings?

And after five or six stories, the purported cutoff point at which residents are no longer connected with the street, what is the difference? No additional floors (and no more eyes on the street), or additional floors in which there is purportedly fewer and fewer eyes on the street?

The writer, who is far too strident considering the lackluster arguments, utilizes certain truisms to arrive at conclusions that don't necessarily follow.

One potential disadvantage of going all highrise, especially with highrises that lack podiums, is that in order to have adequate lighting for the lower units and street level, the buildings need to be spaced apart more. The result is a lot of ground level space that needs to be watched and fewer units near the ground to watch them.

However, commercial tenants usually don't need as much natural light and often desire floor plates much larger than would be desirable for residential uses. So you can make use of that. Same goes with light industry, although that would probably be in a separate (but possibly adjacent, so acting a bit like a podium) building. Plus if you have relatively few highrises, or you put them next to wide boulevards for example, this isn't really an issue.

[Leo the Dog]

I kind of agree with this.

Many high rise residential buildings are no different from suburban gated communities. Most have their own pool, gym, concierge, gated parking, private security. The residents have essentially walled themselves off from the city.

If someone is willing to live in an 800k+ condo, they're probably driving to and from their condo (or taxi/uber) vs. walking.

[ardecila]

Aren't midrises worse for historic preservation since in order to reach a certain density or provide a certain supply/amount of building space you need to demolish more?

Absolutely. Although I come down on the side of midrises. Screw historic preservation; we should save individual gems but not entire neighborhoods. Let the market transform neighborhoods instead of locking them in stasis while prices skyrocket.

[miketoronto]

As much as we love skyscrapers, my friend always says "name one neighborhood in any city that people love hanging out in that is full of high-rises".

Most of our coveted neighborhoods are not high-rise.

[mhays]

So many leaps of logic, debatable opinions, and factual errors! It's hard to take crap like this seriously, beyond "one guy doesn't like highrises and is inventing reasons to fit his opinion."

I'll grant that a highrise where the residents are on top of a parking podium, and most drive, probably isn't going to be very neighborhood-enhancing. But one with units on the street from the second floor on up?

Anyone at SSP would be able to name a million good neighborhoods with highrises. Much of Manhattan for starters. The best parts of Chicago, the best parts of Vancouver, and so on. Hong Kong is full of great highrise districts.

One BS concept is the idea that highrise residents don't leave as often, or reduce the number of encounters a person might have. So maybe there's a gym inside. But if the area is denser because of highrises, maybe there's more stuff to walk to as well.

Do highrise residents walk? In the better cities, in urban districts, highrises will often have a lot more units than parking spaces, and they're built on the concept that people will walk to work.

PS, my city puts a lot of its density in six-story woodframes rather than highrises. I'm used to defending the honor of this lowrise concept, which can be pretty dense. But you can't be New York that way.

[tech12]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

As much as we love skyscrapers, my friend always says "name one neighborhood in any city that people love hanging out in that is full of high-rises".

Most of our coveted neighborhoods are not high-rise.

Is your friend always drunk? Here's an answer: the downtown areas of a massive amount of cities throughout the world.

[chris08876]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

As much as we love skyscrapers, my friend always says "name one neighborhood in any city that people love hanging out in that is full of high-rises".

Most of our coveted neighborhoods are not high-rise.

If thats the case, most of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manhattan, Dubai, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, half of the eastern coast of Florida must be super boring to hang out in.

[Crawford]

He has a point. In most cities, the highrise districts have the worst core vibrancy. There are exceptions, though.

But I think he missed the biggest negative, at least in practice. With few exceptions, highrises are built stand-alone, meaning they break the streetwall, are not ideal for retail, and tend to have parking and other anti-pedestrian uses. Outside of NYC, older parts of HK, and a few other city centers (maybe parts of Boston, SF) highrises are generally built as individual objects rather than part of an urban ensemble. Even cities with incredible urbanity, such as Tokyo, have this issue. The worst pedestrian sphere is around the highrise clusters.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by chris08876

If thats the case, most of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manhattan, Dubai, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, half of the eastern coast of Florida must be super boring to hang out in.

I would actually agree with this statement in terms of highrise clusters. Generally speaking, the highrise sectors in these cities are far less interesting than the lowrise sectors.

Even in Manhattan, which does highrises far better than anywhere (in terms of street orientation), the most interesting, vibrant and desirable neighborhoods are not highrise neighborhoods.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by tech12

Is your friend always drunk? Here's an answer: the downtown areas of a massive amount of cities throughout the world.

Where, specifically? I mean, in Hong Kong, the busiest areas have incredible density, but are older midrise areas. In Manhattan, many of the busiest areas are full of skyscrapers, but mostly visitors or commuters. Again, I would say areas like Soho, Flatiron, Chelsea, Village, UES, UWS, Tribeca, while containing highrises, are not the main highrise clusters.

Not true in LA, Boston, SF, Philly, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans. The tallest buildings aren't in the most desirable blocks.

Offhand, I can't think of a major city where the skyscraper core is the most desirable part of the city for locals, though its common that the most desirable area(s) have some highrises and/or are very close to the skyscraper core.