A lot of people in the urbanist space don’t particularly like tall buildings. Their vision
for a dense urban environment is more Brooklyn than Manhattan, more Paris than Hong Kong,
and more Montreal than Toronto. This view isn’t universal but it’s pretty common. On
a personal level, we’re actually sympathetic to this—some of our favourite videos that we’ve made
highlight Montreal’s multiplex housing, which we praised as “not too tall that you need an
elevator to reach the ground or too spread out that you need a car to reach a grocery store”.
Medium-density housing is underappreciated in English North America and if we had to
design our ideal neighbourhood from scratch it would probably look something like that.
But preference is different from policy. We’re happy saying that on a personal level we prefer
a more ground-oriented density of three to maybe six storeys over a taller apartment building,
but we’re more hesitant when people point to the benefits of medium-density housing
as a reason to block taller buildings from being built. We’re not saying it’s wrong to
regulate housing in some ways, but urbanists should know the pitfalls of over-regulation
from looking at the highly-regimented suburbs that we so often criticize.
These were designed by people who want to tell you exactly what kind of housing you should live in
(single-family detached), how big your yard should be (big), and how much car parking
you should have (lots). This doesn’t take into account people’s different needs and preferences,
and it doesn’t appreciate costs and trade-offs. Urbanists need to be careful to not replicate
this heavy-handed approach, even if, and maybe especially because,
they’re so confident that their preferred level of density is the best one. In this
video we’re going to look at what the anti-tower perspective gets right and what it gets wrong.
One argument people give against allowing taller buildings is that they’re just not necessary
because mid-rise and even low-rise housing provides plenty of housing supply. This is usually
based on looking at European cities that achieve pretty high densities with four-to-eight storey
buildings. It’s true that you don’t need tall buildings to achieve a dense city, but if you’re
going this route of trying to emulate European cities then you need consistency and buy-in from
a lot of property owners and developers. Paris and Barcelona are very dense because they’re almost
entirely mid-rise buildings. Our approach in North America has been the opposite of consistency;
we try to limit density and concentrate it in less desirable spots, like arterial roads and former
industrial land, leaving most neighbourhoods limited to only low density housing.
This results in the extremes of “tall and sprawl”. We can and should change course here,
allowing medium-density development by default literally everywhere, and probably that would
reduce the need for higher densities, but it’s not magic. You can’t force people to
sell or develop their low density property and you can’t guarantee that every project will be
financially viable as medium-density. We’re not playing Cities: Skylines,
at least not until after this video, where we can demolish and rebuild a neighbourhood on a whim.
The second argument people give against allowing taller buildings is that shorter buildings are
actually just as dense, because extra height requires more space for reinforcement and
utilities like elevators and water pumps. This is relevant when you get really tall, maybe 60
to 70 storeys according to construction engineer Brian Potter. For buildings we’re concerned with,
you can reasonably expect that adding more floors will add usable space.
With that said, there is some truth to the idea that tall buildings aren’t always as dense as they
seem, but the key isn’t utilities or elevators so much as lot coverage. This isn’t relevant for all
high-rises, some of which use most of their lot, but many don’t and they could theoretically have
been built to use more of the ground space instead of going as tall. Of course, there are reasons,
right or wrong, why cities have preferred going taller. The 1960s-style “tower in a park” concept
was trying to provide greenspace, or in some cases the bastard cousin of greenspace,
surface parking, while the Vancouver-style slender point tower on a podium tries to
integrate into the streetscape while being less disruptive to light, views, and wind.
For many projects there is a legitimate debate to be had over the merits of wider versus taller,
but if you only want to cut down a tower without allowing it to go wider because you think fewer
elevators or whatever is going to make up for the lost floors, that’s just not realistic.
The third argument that people use against taller buildings is that they cost more to
build so they’re inherently going to be less affordable. It’s actually surprising how many
people think tall buildings are inherently luxury and unaffordable; if you’ve ever tried to find a
cheap apartment in a Canadian city, there’s a good chance you ended up in a high-rise built in the
1970s. Height does increase construction costs, for example, past a certain height the building
code prevents cheaper wood-framed structures (in Ontario the limit is six stories), but the key
detail people often forget is that adding more units reduces land costs per unit. According
to a recent study, a housing developer building a 3-storey apartment building in the median zip
code of San Francisco would have to charge rent of $4,400 a month for each unit to break even.
Because so much of this is land cost, if the building was 12 storeys, they would only have to
charge $2,300 to break even for the same sized unit. Still not cheap, but less of a disaster.
This pattern is not the same everywhere — in cities with cheap land, like San Antonio, 3-storey
buildings are cheaper per unit than 12-storey ones, and in other cities, like Portland, Oregon,
7 storey buildings are cheaper per unit, at least in the median zip code, which was the basis of
the study. With all that said, development cost is not everything. Even if housing is cheap to build,
if you’re not allowed to build enough of it relative to demand, you’ll still have a
supply shortage. This means high prices or long wait lists, depending on how it’s allocated.
The next argument people make is that taller buildings aren't as livable. Some people mention
social isolation, and while that definitely depends on your personality, it’s probably true
on average, with the same thing also applying to large houses in a low density neighbourhood.
When it comes to height, we also like not having to rely on an elevator to reach the ground,
and having our own front door is nice. I also find balconies a lot less pleasant when they’re high
up. But let’s put this in context — we’ve lived in taller buildings before and it’s not like we
hated them or anything, certainly not enough to want them banned. We’d even consider living
in one again, giving up easy ground access, if it meant a better price, commute, or location.
There’s actually a fundamental problem with how we talk about density and housing. People condemn the
livability of towers, saying they lead to social isolation or too much separation from the ground,
but it seems like critics don’t think really through the actual alternatives.
It’s like they’re imagining that people can say “instead of living in this tower,
I’ll take a detached house or a low-rise apartment in the same location for the same price”, but
that’s physically and economically impossible. If you reduce a 20 storey building to 4 or 5 storeys,
you’re probably going to raise the price for each unit and you’re definitely going to displace lots
of people. Let’s say they go live in a shorter building in a more distant neighbourhood — you’ve
just saved them a 30 second elevator ride but added 30 minutes to their commute.
That’s not a clear win for livability, that’s a trade-off that should be their decision,
not for us to tell them that “towers aren’t livable”.
Another detail that often gets forgotten is that taller buildings still have lower level units
closer to the ground. It’s even possible to build these as townhouses with their own entrances,
which is common in Vancouver. Towers can preserve many aspects of ground-oriented density while
also providing higher floor units for people who don’t care or even prefer living higher up.
Somehow we forget that many people really do like living higher for the views,
light, or just being removed from street noise.
The fifth and final argument we hear against taller buildings is that they create less pleasant
streetscapes because they're not at “human scale”. Arguably though, what’s more important for
creating a lively streetscape is having a variety of interesting features like doors, windows,
balconies, and stores close to the street, because that’s what you actually see unless
you spend all your time looking up. But let’s say you do look up a lot and you just don’t like the
look of tall buildings. Fair enough, but housing is first and foremost a place to be lived in.
Aesthetics matter and we should want nice looking cities but not at the cost
of excluding so many people from being able to live there, especially when it comes to
something as subjective and disruptive as just not liking the look of tall buildings. Again,
if you’d just prefer buildings to cover more of their lot before going taller then that’s
different, but substantially shrinking the number of units has real consequences.
In conclusion, we’re still big fans of ground-oriented density of three
to maybe six storeys and we want to see more of it in English North America.
That starts with legalizing it — everywhere. Multiplexes and small apartment buildings
should be allowed in every neighbourhood, and we should be careful about setbacks
and parking requirements that make these projects less viable. But our cheerleading
of medium-density was never meant as a denouncement of higher-density housing.
Fundamentally if someone proposes to build a tower in a city it’s because there’s a lot of demand to
live there. Cities can influence the form, design, and location of projects to some degree, but this
should be within a framework of housing abundance. Simple exclusion should not be on the table.
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