HomeDiagramsDatabaseMapsForum About
     

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > City Discussions


Reply

 
Thread Tools Display Modes
     
     
  #1  
Old Posted Apr 29, 2021, 7:02 PM
M II A II R II K's Avatar
M II A II R II K M II A II R II K is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
The Institutionalization Of Real Estate And The Rise Of Placeless Places

Why Everywhere Looks The Same


April 28th, 2021

By Coby Lefkowitz

Read More: https://cobylefko.medium.com/why-eve...me-248940f12c4

Quote:
.....

America is home to an incredible diversity of regional architectural and planning styles. We cherish what makes each of these places special, traveling far and wide to take in their idiosyncrasies and beauty. But somewhere along the way we stopped building according to local traditions. Over the last 70 years, America hasn’t put its best foot forward. It would be disappointing enough to fail in gracing a land as physically beautiful as the US with the built companions it deserves. But it’s downright shameful that we deprive ourselves of living in interesting, meaningful and wonderful places, given the thousands of precedents for inspiration worldwide, and many hundreds within our borders.

- Instead, we’ve copied and pasted our society from the most anodyne, the most boring, and the most bleh. We’ve all seen them. Covered with fiber cement, stucco, and bricks/brick-like material. They’ve shown up all over the country, indifferent to their surroundings. Spreading like a non-native species. And no, I’m not talking about sprawling suburbs. They go by many names: Texas Doughnuts, Fast-Casual Architecture, McUrbanism, five-over-ones, those big bad boxes that stretch across the block. Spongebuild Squareparts. What’s behind this sameness? While it’s been well explained before, I think only part of the story has been told that it boils down to costs and codes. It goes beyond these two factors. — Everything looks the same because everything is the same! This overall effect is exaggerated where developers acquire entire city blocks. These are banal and monotonous structures that offer little relief or stimulation to passersby. Despite how soul-crushing these may be, the scale of institutional capital necessitates the development of the largest sites possible, built out to their full extent.

- It doesn’t make sense for firms playing around with billions of dollars to spend time breaking up a site into several smaller, fine grained buildings. Not only is this because block long monoliths are their equivalent to smaller projects, but also because the thought and consideration put into well planned sites is beyond the scope of institutional development firms. The teams are oriented in such a way that building a 20, 30 or even 50 unit development is quite literally not worth their time. It’s just too small. — Indeed, as institutional capital allocations have flowed into real estate over the last decade, the number of apartment buildings with more than 50 units has grown exponentially. If I were a statisticians, I’d say almost in correlation. This has come at the expense of smaller units, and by extension smaller developers. What these charts represent is nothing short of the institutionalization and homogenization of American real estate. We have copied and pasted ourselves into a world where everything looks the same, and yet nothing is familiar.

There are four reasons why our places are looking increasingly the same:

• Constrained by Codes: Zoning & International Building Codes

• Constrained land uses lead to more expense costs

• More Expensive Land Leads To A Concentration of Development by The Few, Most-Well Capitalized Groups

• Economies of Scale

.....













__________________
ASDFGHJK
Reply With Quote
     
     
End
 
 
Reply

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > City Discussions
Forum Jump


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 8:09 AM.

     
SkyscraperPage.com - Archive - Privacy Statement - Top

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.