A few weeks ago, I was walking in Central Park on the Upper West Side. As I strolled past some benches near the Diana Ross Playground, I saw a young man, likely in his late twenties, with his face buried in a huge, white-covered book. When I got closer, I noticed he was reading a brand-new copy of Robert Caro’s 1974, 1,300-page biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
It struck me that I was witnessing a quintessentially New York act—to buy the Power Broker and read it in the park. In such an act, we glory in our ability to enjoy ourselves in the vast urban wonderland that is Central Park while reading a book about a man who built more parks in New York than anyone and yet who today is vilified as a power-hungry titan who initiated the fall of Gotham.
The Caro Narrative
It also occurred to me that Robert Caro’s legacy is not just that he provided a chronicle of 20th-century New York’s most important public figure but has also affected the course of public policy.
Caro’s story is about the abuse of power—how Moses transmogrified into a Kurtz-like figure in The Heart of Darkness. Moses began his career as an ambitious idealist Progressive. His genius and endless drive to create parks and parkways pushed him forward and showed New Yorkers how government can improve people’s lives. Yet, with each success, he became increasingly power-hungry and gamed the system to feed his bottomless appetite.
Because of the arrogance that was so basic to his nature…Moses’ susceptibility to the addiction of power was unusually strong….Once Robert Moses had sought power only for the sake of his dreams, only as a means to an end; even then, however, there were signs that he was beginning to seek it for its own sake, as an end in itself. And the avidity with which he sought power—and the lengths to which he went to get it—revealed the depth of his need for it.
After World War II, as Caro’s portrait goes, Moses became deeply entrenched in his “Fortress of Solitude” on Randall’s Island as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. With a wave of his hand, he clear-cut the “slums” that resulted in massive residential displacements; he ramrodded expressways through vibrant working-class neighborhoods; and his highway construction program drove New Yorkers to become automobile junkies while generating rampant white flight and the collapse of the subways.
Caro provides a gripping tale. We all love a Greek tragedy—the king who becomes so blinded by his power and is convinced of his own perfection that he is unable to see the damage he causes.
Robert Moses in 1939 viewing a model for a Battery Bridge (a tunnel was built instead). Source: Wikipedia.
The Caro Effect
Yet, whereas Moses, the man, was in power until the early 1960s, Caro’s portrait of Moses has been “in power” since 1974. He hovers as a living ghost that haunts New York and holds vast influence, perhaps more so than the flesh-and-blood version ever did.
This is not to say that Moses’s career was not problematic. His policies were not race- or class-neutral and often harmed people of color and the poor to benefit the white middle class. As a master bill writer, he crafted legislation that left him untouched by the democratic process to implement his programs as he saw fit. He swatted away community pushback with the epithet, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
Bogeyman Moses
However, the overly simplistic residual of Caro’s book—the belief that people cling to—is that because Moses was a power-hungry bully after World War II and presumably harmed New York, we shouldn’t build important megaprojects that the city needs today (megaprojects that other cities worldwide are building easily).
Because Moses brooked no community input, the logic seemingly follows, we must allow full-on community input, and, by extension, local veto power that stops the city from addressing its problems head-on. The defining legacy of Caro’s book is that we have become paralyzed by the fear of Moses’s ghost which Caro conjured to life.
The Harm
New York faces 21st-century crises that need to be addressed directly and strongly. Most notably, the city must become resilient against climate change, dramatically expand its housing stock, and upgrade and produce other services, including mass transit, to improve quality of life and prevent the high cost of living from pushing people out.
Today, Gotham is tiptoeing its way to climate change resilience. It builds out the shoreline here, adds some bluebelts there, and buys out some households over there. But the truth is that a patchwork of programs only offers partial protection against increasingly damaging storms, flooding, and sea level rise.
New York is on the path toward building $52 billion worth of seawalls that will be used sporadically to stop storm surges. Politically, erecting seawalls away from any residential neighborhood is the easy path, but practically, its cost-benefit ratio is questionable. Billions more will be spent against sea level rise and coastal disappearance.
The Housing Affordability Crisis
Just as important is housing affordability. Over half the city’s renters are rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income for housing, and one in three low-income households is severely rent-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income for an apartment. There is hardly any rental housing to be found with the current vacancy rate at a mere 1.4%, the lowest in half a century.
To his credit, Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Housing Opportunity will attempt to add more housing in each neighborhood, but it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on affordability. He has to tread gingerly to avoid total rejection of his plan.
Additionally, climate change resilience and housing affordability are not independent. Housing will become scarcer and more expensive as more land is removed from use because of rising sea levels or to mitigate flooding.
The Interchanges to and from the Cross Bronx Expressway ca. 1973. Source: Wikipedia.
Moses: A 20th-Century Centurion
In the decades following the Power Broker’s publication, there have been more nuanced reevaluations of Moses’s career and impacts. The most forceful and comprehensive is the 2007 book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, edited by Hillary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (which contains a comprehensive list of Moses’s New York City projects). But the revisionists have been drowned out by the howling of the Caro’s spirit.
Lost in the collective memory is that Moses was a product of his time. He rose out of the Progressive Movement, frustrated with machine politics’ failure to eradicate urban ills like overcrowding and lack of fresh air and sunlight. His genius was in figuring out (for good and for bad) how to overcome nimbyism and status quo politics. He had the support of leaders and the people because he delivered the results that they wanted.
Moses existed within the political spectrum of reformers. On the far left were the socialists who sought to abolish private property. Just to their right were those who wanted to master plan the metropolis, deconcentrate it, and create a network of garden cities. Moses pushed back against those that he saw as being too extreme. He decided that a project-by-project strategy was to be preferred to grand schemes. The populace agreed with him, being suspicious of grand plans that would disrupt the culture of laissez-faire New York.[1]
Slum Clearance
Moses did not invent slum clearance.[2] It had been the dream of reformers since after the Civil War with the rise of hyperdense slums in Five Points. In the 1890s, Jacob Riis’s expose, How the Other Half Lives, provided more fuel to the slum clearance movement.
One of the earliest examples of slum clearance was that of Mulberry Bend, a dense cluster of tenements in the Lower East Side that was notorious for its poverty, crime, and vice. It was cleared in 1904 and the land was converted into a park (today Columbus Park).
When Moses was in his heyday, slum clearance advocates were in positions of power through the New Deal programs. After World War II, Title I and public housing funds were made available on a level never seen before in human history.[3] Moses was able to grab the lion’s share for New York. He was largely supported in his endeavor because he was carrying out the work that previous reformers had been unable to accomplish. Moses was their Trojan Horse.
The Automobile
Moses did not invent America’s love of the automobile, and we can’t blame New Yorker’s car addiction on him (and which is certainly no worse as compared to the rest of the country). It’s good that he didn’t get his way in various projects, such as building elevated highways across Greenwich Village and SoHo, and it’s bad that he did not consider neighborhood impacts when helping to build America’s highway system within Gotham’s borders.
But America’s automobile dependence is based on a much larger institutional and cultural framework—subsidies for cheap oil, various Federal Highway Acts (the National Highway Act of 1956 had the Federal Government covering 90% of localities’ highway construction expenses), and the fact that people highly value the personal freedom that comes with cars.
Moses’s radial highway system for New York City was not his invention. As historian Leonard Wallock states:
Far from being novel, [Moses’s] ideas for a circumferential system of roadways were nearly identical to the ones proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, which in turn were based on Edward H. Bennett’s Brooklyn City Plan (1914) and Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909).
Parts of New York that Will Be Underwater if Sea Levels Rises by Six Feet (a likely projection by 2100). The green areas are those likely to be prone to flooding. Map Source: NOAA.
Moses and “The Fall”
The most influential element of Caro’s book has been its subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” as if Moses destroyed New York. Yes, Moses did some bad things, and blaming him for Gotham’s post-industrial woes makes for good copy, but it’s just plain wrong.
In fact, after the massive wave of deindustrialization that hit manufacturing cities in the 1960s, New York fared better than most. It lost population from 1970 to 1980 but rebounded after that, and today, the city holds its highest population ever. Detroit and St. Louis, on the other hand, are still losing people. Chicago, Boston, and Newark, for example, have rebounded, but their populations remain far lower than their peak in the 1950s.[4]
More broadly, while Moses is seen as godlike in his impact on New York, the truth is that there was nothing wholly unique about his building spree. As Wallock writes:
In The Power Broker…Moses is not merely the lawgiver but the creator, for he transcends the role of his Biblical progenitor and usurps the place of God. By making Moses the prime mover responsible for the city’s genesis, [Caro’s] interpretations disregard a crucial fact: from the 1920s through the 1960s, New York’s physical and spatial development was markedly similar to that of other large American cities….The Power Broker fail[s] to explain why other cities, not blessed with a Moses figure, assumed the same physical and spatial configuration as New York.
But Caro was writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s when New York was seemingly coming apart at the seams. To many, including Caro, the “fall” was brought about by Moses’s opening the barn doors. In hindsight, this seems to be a confusion of correlation with causation.
Ironically, in his Introduction, Caro hedges on Moses’s net impact, which is quite rich, given how powerful his book has become. He concludes:
Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? ….
Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.
Time to Move On
It’s time to move on. Let’s put Moses in the past where he belongs. We need to learn the true lessons of Moses and use them as a guide to improve New York’s future, rather than clinging to outdated myths that keep the city nearly paralyzed. The true lessons of Moses are that big projects that will benefit New York can and should be built, but they also need to minimize the negative spillovers and unintended consequences and be done in a way that engenders trust and confidence in the government. Getting community input is vital, but community input should not mean complete veto power.
How to Vanquish Moses’s Ghost
However, once lodged in the public consciousness, myths are hard to kill.[5] We long for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and when the “truthiness” of the simple explanations is strong, we cling to them. Blaming Moses for the planning mistakes of the 20th century is easy because he stood in the center of these changes and was seemingly waving his magic wand like Lord Voldemort.
So, how do we remove the Moses Myth from blocking policies needed to keep New York safe, affordable, and viable in the 21st century? I believe the answer is twofold. One approach must come from the top down and the other from the bottom up.
Trust Building
First is that our leaders need to engender trust. Nimbyism is, in large part, motivated by a failure of confidence that the government will do what’s good for individual residents and that large-scale building projects will do more harm than good. The legacy of Moses and Caro was to remove this trust.
Enabling communities to have strong veto power over large projects forces policymakers to employ half-hearted measures instead. When these measures fail to achieve their purpose, residents blame the government for its inability to solve problems, thereby reinforcing their mistrust.
Leaders need to say, “Yes, people like Moses were heavy-handed and their decisions led to projects that today we feel were poorly implemented, but we must move forward. Some large problems require big solutions, and we can’t tiptoe our way to the future. The cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action and we have learned from the mistakes of the past and will not repeat them. Here are the ways that we have your back….”
Just as importantly, leaders need to create the institutional mechanisms that will bring residents and communities on board. Community input is vital and should be part of the bargaining process. However, all large-scale policies need to lay out the costs, benefits, and the likely negative spillovers, and directly address how these spillovers will be mitigated to reduce the fear of change. (I have spelled out examples here). One mechanism is that a large project also comes with a compensation fund to which people can apply if directly harmed and which is objectively administered by an impartial board.
Rebranding Moses
While leaders work on the issue of trust and compensation, we, the people, need to rebrand Moses and reframe how he is seen in the public eye.[6] Yes, Moses did many things that, in hindsight, were regretful. But he also did many wonderful things. What’s wrong with a story about a complicated man who was a product of his time?
We need to change the narrative. We need to get the word out that Old Man Moses died in the 20th century and we refuse to be afraid of the Spooky Ghost Moses. Let’s put him in the history books along with other 20th-century figures like Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia. It’s time to create a future with new leaders who help build New York by incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.
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Notes
[1] When Jane Jacobs emerged on the scene in the early 1960s, her antidote to planning was to eliminate it altogether. Death and Life directly response to the wide-eyed planners who wanted to remake the city from scratch or to build towers in the park. Her “cure” for neighborhoods was to leave them alone (or allow residents to veto any new construction) and permit mixed uses. In terms of city planning, her recipe for utopia was to build more playgrounds and cut long blocks in half to create more sidewalks and street frontages.
[2] Moses did not invent the tower-in-park style of housing either. It was an invention of reformers and visionaries, such as Le Corbusier, starting in the 1920s. The planning consensus during the Great Depression and beyond was that building towers surrounded by green space would cure urban ills.
[3] Arguably federal mortgage programs that created redlining and with which Moses was not involved had a greater effect on cities like New York than Moses’s housing and slum clearance projects.
[4] Ironically, public housing—something in which Moses had a more behind-scenes role in developing—today is a success story in New York. Given the massive affordability problem, NYCHA housing provides a huge benefit for those with low incomes. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s book, Public Housing that Worked: New York in the 20th Century. More broadly, given recent economics research on the impacts of highways (such a Brinkman and Lin, 2024) and slum clearance on cities (such as Collins and Shester, 2013), measuring the net impact of Robert Moses on New York relative to what happened in other cities, would not be too difficult. To my knowledge, no one has specifically measured whether Moses’s projects were a net plus or negative for the city’s economic growth.
A few weeks ago, I received an email from an acquaintance with a link to an article about my research. I was naturally intrigued, but when I started reading it, I realized that the author was using my research against me, rotating the findings to suggest they meant the opposite of what they actually meant.
The article is “Death to the Skyscraper,” and the author paints a very dark—dystopian even—picture of the skyscraper. She is not alone, to be sure. Her article is part of a long-running genre of skyscraper-as-destroyer-of-cities.
Her focus is on the environmental impacts of tall buildings, particularly their greenhouse gas emissions. It’s true that tall buildings tend to produce more through operational and embodied carbon than their diminutive counterparts. And this observation is, correctly, worrisome.
For those who see these “towers of power” simply as carbon-spewing Godzillas, the natural conclusion is that they should be banned from existence. But as I teach my students in Economics 101, you can’t draw conclusions without evaluating the costs relative to the benefits. Unfortunately, the whole article reads as an exercise in bad economics.
The Enduring Skyscraper
The author’s key thesis is that the skyscraper requires more of society than it gives in return. This claim puts her within a century’s-long tradition of those who have shared that view. In fact, her words (which are factually dubious at best) that “Even at the city level, the huge carbon cost of skyscrapers fails to outweigh any potential benefits that they might achieve from restraining urban sprawl” echoes one of New York’s key reformers, Edward Bassett. He sought to eliminate the skyscrapers in Manhattan by focusing only on their construction costs while ignoring their benefits. In a 1913 report that led to New York’s 1916 zoning resolution, he wrote:
Few skyscrapers pay large net returns. Most of them pay only moderate returns….However, the very tall buildings demand many things out of proportion to their increased bulk. All piping has to be made disproportionately heavier; special pumps and relays of tanks have to be provided, foundations often call for special construction, wind-bracing assumes an important place, long-run elevators are more costly than short-run elevators, the extra space taken up by the express run of the elevators is an additional cost. Thus in the aggregate the total cost per cubic foot of a very tall building may be 60 to 75 cents per cubic foot where a low building of the same class would cost only 40 to 50 cents per cubic foot.
But just because something has higher costs (either to the builder or society at large) does not logically lead to the result that it should be eliminated. To evaluate the claims more fully about tall buildings, we need to take a step back—or up—and put them in context to view the skyscraper trees within their economic forest. One should not make pronouncements about urban real estate without more widely considering how cities function.
The Manhattan Skyline from Central Park.
Why Do Cities Exist?
Since the skyscraper is one species within the urban environment, we need to begin with the question: Why do cities exist? Or flipping the coin, why does the majority—and growing—of the world’s population live in cities? The fundamental answer is “markets.”
Cities are, first and foremost, labor markets. They are where people find jobs, and, in this sense, cities are the engines that power our economic lives. To take a simple case in point, the three most productive counties in the U.S.: Manhattan (New York County), Los Angeles County, and Cook County (Chicago), together generate 9% of the United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP), yet they use 0.18% of its land mass.
People come for the jobs but stay for the opportunity to experience all that a city has to offer, like restaurants, museums, or large urban parks. Even working from home will not drive us out of the city. It might cause some relocations and adjustments, but in the end, the city will maintain its roles.
Hivetropolis
And, as Jane Jacobs has argued, cities are inherently problem-solving machines that draw their power from density itself. Ideas and hive intelligence are in the urban ether, and if we allow cities to function as they should—if we allow people to live and work where they see fit—then cities can continue to provide both the income from our labor and the goods and services that we want as consumers and citizens.
Now, if you concede that the purpose of the metropolis is to be the center of what is necessary, right, and good, then we must ask, how is the city to organize itself to function for maximum efficiency and gain? The answer is through the land market.
Allocating Geography
As nicely summarized by urban planner and author Alain Bertaud, the land market
sends strong signals though prices when land is underused or the use is unsuitable for its location;…provides a strong incentive to users to use as little land as possible in areas where there is a strong demand, in particular in areas well served by transport networks; and…stimulates innovation in construction.
This means that to understand what “should” go where, land prices are the most valuable signal. But high land values are really a signal of the value of geography—that more people and businesses want to be in the same place at the same time. Thus, the skyscraper is a geography-shrinking machine. It pinches the land to squeeze out new land—land in the sky—which allows hundreds, if not thousands, of people to be in the same place at the same time.
Good Communities
But what are we to make of the author’s conclusion that:
High land prices, of course, are not good for ordinary people and communities: they segregate societies along socioeconomic lines, with high costs of homes and rent pushing people into low standards of living, and risking their health, development and life chances. A city birthing new skyscrapers is likely to be unaffordable for many of its residents.
I have a few responses. First, a trip to Hong Kong, Singapore, or any mainland Chinese city, for example, would reveal that high-rises are not just the province of the rich—rather, high-rise after high-rise is home to Asia’s burgeoning middle class. So, there’s nothing inherent in the economics of tall buildings that precludes their use by many across the income spectrum.
Second, the segregation of uses is only partly the result of land markets. Tall buildings in the center are economically rational because they satisfy the need for people to be closer to each other. They make businesses more productive and allow more residents to enjoy the fruits of the city by saving on commuting and travel times. And the empirical evidence strongly supports this conclusion.
But even in the most central locations, there’s ample opportunity for a mix of building types and income levels. A quick stroll down Wall Street—the center of global finance—will reveal short buildings next to tall ones and old buildings next to new ones.
Zoning
The more important issues, however, are planning and zoning. While Jacobs argued in the 1960s that planners ought to get out of the way and let cities be, the opposite has occurred. Bassett and those who followed him could not stomach population density and mixed uses. They created zoning arrangements that made mixed uses illegal. Even today, it’s impossible to have a tall building in New York that contains one-third for shopping and restaurants, one-third for offices, and one-third for apartments, despite that office buildings remain largely underused.
Regarding hyper-segregation, the evidence strongly suggests it is due, in large part, to the historical planners’ fear of mixed uses and their desire to surgically separate all land use types regardless if people wanted them or not. They aimed to keep factories away from residences and single-family homes away from apartment buildings. Zoning was meant as a backdoor to means to create the ideal cities according to planners’ view that workers should all live in Garden Cities, and the center should be designed according to the highest City Beautiful ideal.
Once zoning took root in the first half of the 20th century, wealthier residents used these restrictions to limit housing, which made access to these places nearly impossible for a vast swath of society. The concomitant redlining of neighborhoods was a product of racism and the Federal government’s desire to protect white people’s home values.
Nimby Nation
Because of the tight restrictions in suburban areas, nearly the only place in the city today where builders can provide needed housing is in the center, where the land values are the greatest and zoning tends to be less restrictive. The irony is that renters have made common cause with single-family Nimbyists because they see the “greedy developer” and the “greedy landlord” as “ruining their neighborhoods” and driving up housing prices, even though renters stand to gain the most from new construction, which will lower rents.
And the Nimbyists preaching the “Gospels of Saint Jane” to limit building heights in the name of the “human scale” are, in fact, making it harder to build new housing and causing land values and rents to rise. So, the very people who rail against tall buildings are incentivizing them by their very actions.
But taking a broader perspective, tall buildings are not causing the affordability problem. Using New York as an example, the city has 3.6 million housing units, and 77% are in buildings that are ten stories or less, and 2.7% of units are in buildings 40 stories or taller. Taking a global view, in the developed world, 86% of its structures are 25 meters (8 floors) or less, 94% are less than 15 stories, and 99% are less than 100 meters (25 stories). The supertall part of the spectrum represents only a tiny fraction of the world’s buildings.
Are There Too Many Skyscrapers?
So, with this in mind, we turn to the question of what’s to be done. There’s a valid argument that cities are getting too many skyscrapers because of restrictive building regulations in the suburbs and GHG emissions.
Skyscrapers produce a lot of CO2. No one disputes that. But this fact does not mean they should be banned from existence. Banning something that makes cities function properly is a bad idea. Density is what powers cities, and density should be encouraged rather than discouraged.
Using a data set with estimated average household carbon footprints for every zip code in the United States, we can conduct a thought experiment. Imagine we “Manhattanized” the two suburban counties adjacent to New York City—Nassau and Westchester—by having all their residents live at the same density. Those two counties would see a reduction in their residential carbon footprints by 41%.
Do We Really Need More Paris’s?
And yes, 5-story buildings are the best in terms of minimizing carbon emissions, but again it does not logically follow that we should require by fiat that every city be built like Paris. It is worth noting a few facts about the place. First, officials created a skyscraper district in La Défense because they knew they needed tall buildings for the economic health of the city. Second, if you look at Paris’s global ranking, in terms of its importance in the world economy, as measured by the size and number of international firms, it’s falling. Paris in 2000 was ranked 4th, and by 2020, it was bumped down to 8th, losing out to skyscraper cities. Is it because of Paris’ lack of tall buildings? The data are strongly suggestive, though more research is needed.
In the last decade, Paris has shrunk by 122,000 residents. As reported in Forbes.com, “Many of those leaving are choosing either the suburbs or countryside around Paris, or they are relocating to France’s smaller cities such as Bordeaux, Lyon, and Toulouse.” By limiting its building stock, Paris is driving up housing prices, pushing out residents, and causing suburban sprawl—hardly something worthy of emulation.
Average Household GHG Emissions by Zip Code for New York City. Note how the outer fringes of the city with free-standing suburban homes have much higher carbon footprints than dense Manhattan. Source: Map based on data from Jones and Kammen (2014).
Think Externalities
Critics love to blame tall buildings for destroying the environment, but they (like us all) think little of turning on the air conditioning when they are hot, charging their laptops when they want to check Twitter, or hopping on a jet to go on vacation. But we would hardly say these should be eliminated from our lives.
To offer another illustration, where I teach, most students commute to class. Every semester, I informally poll them by asking them to raise their hands if they decided not to drive to class that day and took mass transit instead because they knew their car would emit some carbon during their commutes. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student raise their hand in the affirmative. They decide to drive or not based on whether they have access to a car and on the availability of parking.
The point is that CO2 is what economists call an externality, an unintended by-product of our actions that generates a negative effect on society. Greenhouse gas emissions are the mother of all externalities and should be treated as such. Since no one is willing to give up their comfortable lifestyles, that means we must rely on carrots and sticks to generate technological improvements that replace our current products and energy production with carbon neutral alternatives.
Tax Carbon
As I teach my students in Economics 101, the key to solving the externalities problem is for producers to “internalize” them so they pay for the costs that they would otherwise impose on others. The most effective ways to do this are to tax carbon emissions or create a cap-and-trade scheme. Cities around the world, like New York with its Local Law 97 and London with its carbon taxes, are generating penalties for GHG-heavy building owners. This is good.
I would argue, however, that New York’s law, for example, does not go far enough. All households—not just those in large buildings—should face a carbon tax. If cities charged all household “over producers” and gave credits to “under producers” based on their emissions, it would not only be fair—the rich would pay more in taxes—but would also benefit those living in efficient buildings. A household carbon tax and a gasoline carbon tax, would also encourage denser, less-car-based lifestyles, which would lower GHG footprints that much more.
Federal Policies
Help must also come from the Federal Government, which should penalize CO2 creation and reward alternatives that use less or no CO2. For example, steel and cement producers need to pay for the carbon they generate, while R&D credits should be given to businesses that develop low-carbon products or production methods. Electricity providers need subsidies and incentives to switch to wind, solar, and other clean energy forms, as well as to upgrade the electricity grid.
And globally, the developed nations must help the developing countries to produce their skylines with low-carbon methods. They want American lifestyles and feel that they should not make the sacrifices that the West never made. At the end of the day, solving the global climate crisis must be an international effort.
Towers of Power?
Towers of Power—the supertall buildings for billionaires—are a result of booming cities, but they are not the cause of gentrification. Gentrification is due to the gummed-up nature of cities. It is largely driven by overly restrictive zoning and price controls enacted to save the city from itself but has served chiefly to inflict more harm than good.
Since the restrictive zoning is driving up land value in the city centers, we should eliminate the outdated zoning rules and replace them with a rational plan that more carefully weighs the costs and benefits to neighborhoods. By allowing more moderately taller, mixed-use buildings throughout the city, we would decrease the bottlenecks that make land prices skyrocket in the center, thus reducing the incentive for developers to build supertalls.
Affordability
It’s important to reiterate that if you ban tall buildings, it does not logically follow that you would get affordable housing for lower- and middle-income households. Banning skyscrapers will make the affordability problem that much worse because tall buildings, in fact, are helping the affordability problem by providing more housing on less land. However, it does so in a rather indirect way–by “greasing” the moving chains from the top to the bottom of the housing spectrum.
Money seeks its highest return. So, the question is, why doesn’t more real estate money flow to lower-income housing? Despite what many people think, the real estate market does not operate according to some made-up rule that either we get skyscrapers or we get affordable housing. Money is not flowing into middle-income housing because it is illegal to build it in most parts of big cities, thanks in large part to stringent planning and zoning regulations, and other frictions that need to be addressed by policymakers.
If people were really concerned about gentrification, they would demand their leaders enable builders to flood the market with middle-income housing in the suburbs. This would cool land values in the center and provide units for those who need them the most.
Skyscrapers and Cities
Skyscrapers don’t belong everywhere and are not for everyone. But policy discussions are severely harmed when people use loaded rhetoric, poorly-defined concepts, and buzz phrases to make grand pronouncements based on little more than casual observations. Skyscrapers have spread like a wave over the planet in the 21st century because they help cities grow and succeed.
But yes, we need to carefully consider their costs and benefits to evaluate where policy changes can offer improvements. And there’s room for disagreement, but we can all agree that cities should be open and accommodating to all who want to call them home.
Thanks to Troy Tassier for his editorial comments on an early draft of this post.
New York is a resilient city. In 1975, it was left for dead when President Gerald Ford failed to help stave off its Fiscal Crisis. But, the rise of high-tech and high-skilled industries has reinvigorated its economy, while the drop in crime has brought back consumers and tourists alike. Then, when the Covid-19 Pandemic hit, the commentariat was, once again, predicting the death of Gotham. Yet, the city endures.
New York’s problems today are, in some sense, crises of success rather than failure and abandonment, like in the 20th century. Housing is more unaffordable than ever. Too many people are chasing too few units, and prices have soared. On its streets, too many drivers are overwhelming roads never designed to handle such capacity. Decades of economic growth enabled by fossil fuels have put us on the brink of climate change catastrophes.
And what is New York City doing about these things? It’s playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
That is, Gotham is groping its way forward with half-baked policies that hardly address the problems at hand. The decentralized nature of its governance also means that agencies and authorities operate with little consideration that housing, transportation, and climate change are inextricably linked.
Thanks to its wealth and determination, New York may well muddle its way to the future. But this is wasteful, unnecessary, and will cause undo suffering.
Time for a New Master Planning Philosophy
It is time for a new master plan based on 21st-century thinking, not like the master plans of old that tried to tame the city or to micromanage what happens on every block. Rather, a city is a dynamic system of interrelated parts that feed back on each other and evolve based on changing forces both from within and outside the region. These forces create a type of order–a kind of controlled chaos, that should be embraced rather than squashed. A new master plan is needed that “listens” and adjust policies and investments as the times change in order to encourage improvements, adaptation, mobility, and growth without adding unintended harms.[1]
Housing Woes
Since New York’s renaissance began in the 1990s, there has been a pervasive sense that rising housing prices are the norm, and nothing can be done to change the tide. There is a deep mistrust of developers and the free market for housing since the thinking goes that if left unchecked, the market will exacerbate gentrification and cause prices to rise even higher.
As a result, the government has cobbled together a suite of policies that ignores the necessary solutions and worsen the problem. First has been the doubling down on rent stabilization. This policy only makes sense if you believe access to New York’s housing is a zero-sum game. Rent stabilization remains in effect if the citywide vacancy rate remains below 5%. But it remains below 5% in large part because of stabilization!
The other programs rely on subsidies to incentivize the development of affordable housing units. Sure, they have helped the lucky few who get access, but they have not addressed the fundamental problem–a demand-supply imbalance.
Over the decades, New York has erected many barriers to prevent the housing market from doing its job. Rent stabilization is only one problem; overly restrictive zoning is another. In Gotham, more than two out of every three residential properties are either above or very close to their allowable floor area caps. That is, it’s illegal or impractical to add more housing on these lots.
By law, the City prevents new housing and then blames developers for not providing it. When prices go up, it “punishes” “greedy” landlords by enacting price controls.
Stuck in Traffic
New York’s transportation situation is just as bad as its housing market. Regarding automobiles, no new roads have been constructed since the 1960s when Robert Moses was in power. But the system was never designed to handle the traffic of a metropolitan region with 19 million people and their truck-based freight. Too many cars are “chasing” too few roads, resulting in massive congestion, frustration, waste, and harm. Meanwhile, the MTA is struggling to get its straphangers back.
More broadly, the larger transportation network is run by a hodgepodge of agencies. The Port Authority oversees bridges and tunnels from New Jersey, and the Department of Transportation oversees bridges, tunnels, and roads within Gotham. Then there’s the MTA, which oversees subways, buses, and commuter rail. There is practically no coordination between them, even though they all provide the same product—mobility.
Climate Change Catastrophes
On September 1, 2022, Crain’s New York Business ran the headline, “One year after Ida, New York leans into nature-based climate strategies.” The article discusses how the City is increasing the number of “bluebelts”—natural wetlands that can absorb water from surges or torrential downpours.
This is certainly a promising program, but when you think about it, it’s just another example of how New York is groping its way to climate change resiliency. Bluebelts can only be one minor fix in very specific neighborhoods. The broader resiliency strategy thus far has been piecemeal and ad hoc: add to the bluebelt here, beef up a shoreline there, build a seawall here, etc. There is no larger framework, nor any consideration of how its actions will affect the cost and access to housing.
Yes, learning by experience and tweaking policies on the ground are important parts of the equation. But when you look at what’s being done, it’s clear that New York is taking the path of least political resistance—it “sneaks in” its resiliency projects where residents are not likely to complain. Hardly a rational plan.
Constrained New York. This graph shows that two out of three residential properties are at or above their allowable floor area ratio limits. Source: NYC PLUTO.
The VEAM Principle
It’s high time that the City updates its thinking about how cities work, how policies should be enacted, and how governance should be structured. It’s high time that Gotham creates a new master plan for the 21st century. The plan should be based on economic realities and not on visions of utopia or catering to narrow special interests. Such a plan should adhere to what I call the VEAM Principle.
V: The Value of Land
First is the value of the land. Land values represent the value of geography. Central places are more valuable than suburban ones. Blocks near train lines or parks are more valuable than those further away. And where land values are highest, more housing should be allowed and encouraged.
Because the zoning framers feared density, they set up a city where most of its land is forced to remain low density. As a result, there is hardly any flexibility for high-amenity neighborhoods to increase the amount of housing. In many places, the zoning codes are the same whether a property is one block or one mile from a rail line or large park. It makes no economic sense.
E: Externalities
However, the main problem of dense development is that it creates a host of negative externalities or harms that affect residents and visitors. Tall buildings can create shadows, and density can create congestion on the streets. City planning needs to minimize the damage without hurting residents.
Historically, in the name of limiting shadows and congestion, the City has resorted to building bulk limits. But this is a very blunt instrument because it creates housing scarcity and simultaneously curbs the negative and positive externalities.
If shadows from new construction are a problem, tax shadows or tax bulk or height above some “reasonable” level that gives back resources to the community to improve the quality of life.
A: Affordability
In New York City, rent stabilization remains in effect if the citywide rental vacancy is less than 5%. But rather than saying, “vacancy is too low, we need to implement price controls,” how about we imagine a world where citywide vacancy is always say 10% naturally—a world where there is so much housing and so many choices that rents are inherently affordable without unnecessary restrictions. The government needs to have more faith in the invisible hand. That’s not to say it can’t use a velvet glove to help adjust things from time to time.
M: Mobility
The goal of transportation policies should be to move the most amount of people with the least amount of congestion. This means rail, subways, roads, and the prices of using each should be coordinated to give people several choices and limit congestion. The more options people have, the more naturally they will eschew their cars. The key: all elements of the transportation system are linked—cars, buses, subways, commuter rail, walking, cycling, and scootering are all different forms of mobility and should be treated as such within a larger mobility framework.
Just as importantly, transportation goes hand in hand with housing—rail lines and subway stops should have more housing because not only is the land more valuable, but it also makes life easier for thousands of people. The City can’t just build a route to connect Queens and Brooklyn and say that it solved a problem. The new line will drive up the cost of housing and land. Without upzoning along the corridor and beyond, the affordability problem will worsen.
Pandemic Effects. Since the pandemic started in early 2020, mass transit ridership has been down, while driving has surpassed its pre-pandemic levels. Source: Newmark Research.
Elements of A Master Plan
A master plan, of course, is a detailed document. But here, I offer some key elements that adhere to the VEAM Principle.[2]
Rethink Zoning
The current zoning system, enacted in 1961, was based on the belief that density was bad. Today, cities embrace density for all its benefits. Thus, Gotham needs a zoning plan that reflects this. This could be done in, say, one of two ways. The first would be to upzone all neighborhoods initially and then provide local “bump ups” in the allowable floor area ratio (FAR) based on land values. Let demand dictate density.
The second possible strategy is to eliminate floor area ratios altogether and have developers pay impact fees or externalities charges that are a function of land values and current density. In suburban neighborhoods, the fees would rise dramatically, say after the fourth floor, whereas in Manhattan, fees would rise after, say. 30 stories. This way, the externalities are paid for without stifling needed housing construction.
Zoning regulations have also prevented the City from enacting transit-oriented design (TOD) policies. In many neighborhoods along the subway lines, it’s impossible to densify. A genuinely forward-thinking plan would encourage densification along the subway and commuter rail (which would also naturally increase ridership).
Congestion Pricing Everywhere
New York is on the brink of establishing “congestion pricing” for cars and trucks entering lower Manhattan (though parochialism may kill it yet). However, it’s not really a congestion charge since the fee will not move up or down based on how many cars want to enter (that’s a toll). Again, this plan illustrates the lack of systematic thinking. It charges only one price and is very localized, applying only to those entering Manhattan south of 59th Street (and does not consider that parking or traffic just outside the zone will likely become that much worse).
I have written on this subject before, so I will only say that a proper congestion pricing system goes citywide. It charges tolls on all the highways, bridges, and tunnels based on actual usage during the day. And fees for highways are linked to mass transit—if roads become crowded, the costs of using buses or subways fall simultaneously. Integrate the entire system.
Climate Change Impact Maps
New York should produce climate change impact maps that show the likely damages from surges, flooding, and other shocks.[3] The maps will give property owners the information they require, and will also suggest needed government investments for resiliency. The maps would work alongside the zoning maps and transportation plans so that a master resiliency plan does not backfire by harming other aspects of city living and affordability.
Tie Services Upgrades to Density
Upzoning and TOD mean higher-density neighborhoods. The master plan needs to outline the process by which local services, such as schools and parks, automatically get upgraded as the local population increases. This way, the government agencies are prepared ahead of time, and residents can rest assured that population increases will not reduce their quality of life.
Transition Requires Compensation
Rethinking and reorienting policies means change. However, people naturally resist it because they fear the new outcome will be worse than the status quo.[4] Thus, Nimbyism is a tremendous barrier to moving New York to a better place.
As I have argued elsewhere, a new master plan needs to spell out how transitions will proceed in a manner that makes people better off. One way to do this is to compensate those who will be harmed, such as offering land value insurance for homeowners and subsidies to renters who need to move when their building is redeveloped.
Housing Vacancy. This graph shows NYC rental housing vacancy rates since 1960. It has never risen above the 5% threshold needed to end rent stabilization. Source: NYC Rent Guidelines Board.
The Steps to a Better New York
What are the steps needed to create and enact such a master plan? The first thing is leadership—perhaps the scarcest commodity of all. The process would begin with the mayor and with a paradigmatic shift in thinking—that the metropolis is a complex system that, if guided properly, can generate order without design.
Reforming Governance
The mayor needs to assemble all the relevant agencies, authorities, and local, state, and federal leaders and have them map out the elements of governmental coordination. New York needs to build the capacity for systematic thinking and action.
A Blue Ribbon Panel of 100
The next step would be for the mayor to convene a Blue Ribbon Panel of 100 respected leaders and accomplished community members to create the master plan. A diverse panel, chaired by a seasoned but impartial public servant, would give its output legitimacy, as the plan must be fair and not favor one group or industry over another.
Having the panel issue the plan makes an essential statement that change is a community effort. It says, “Let’s collectively imagine a world where housing is more affordable, where traffic and transportation woes are not a constant part of daily living, and where we don’t need to live in constant fear of flooding.” Imagine that!
Its members could come together to engage in systematic thinking. Parks representatives will hash things out with housing advocates. Climate change experts will hash things out with transportation representatives, real estate developers will hash things out with social service providers, and so on.
Selling it to the Public
With a plan in hand comes the hardest part of all: selling it to the public. The pervasiveness of Nimbyism and the widespread cynicism about government effectiveness make any significant policy change nearly impossible. The Blue Ribbon Panel and city and state leaders must demonstrate how the plan will improve New Yorkers’ lives—that housing will be more affordable, transportation will be faster, and climate change damage will be minimized. The Panel can sell the plan without succumbing to parochialism.
The Future Today
We have, unfortunately, created a crisis of creative thinking—a kind of a prisoner’s dilemma world where protecting our self-interest seems preferable to working towards the common good.
As as the nation grew wealthier, its citizens asked its leaders to help preserve their gains. Governments thus have erected barriers to slow down or prevent dramatic urban changes. This, however, has cemented the notion that the expensive and congested status quo is preferable to any and all possible changes, even those that have the potential to create great good.
Despite what we tend to think, the status quo is not inevitable. But moving to a better world involves leadership and a deeper understanding of how cities function and succeed. I believe it can be done.
Read my Skynomics Blog posts about New York City housing here.
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[1] I’m grateful for Alain Bertaud’s masterful book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, which has inspired the ideas in this post. I do not, however, profess to speak for him or am I attempting to directly represent his views.
[2]For the sake of brevity, in this post, I avoid the discussion of real estate taxation, but any new master plan should consider a land value tax program.
Stefan Al is the author of Supertall: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives (Norton, 2022). Al earned a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a practicing architect and has taught at Virginia Tech, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Pennsylvania.
About Supertall
JB: Regarding your new book, Supertall, what is your main argument, and what are the key ideas that you want readers to come away with?
SA: By 2050, 2.5 billion more urbanites are projected to be living in cities. In addition to new housing, this urban drive will require a massive increase in city infrastructure, including roads, sidewalks, parks, and transit, as well as city sewage, water, and power lines. This is like building a new New York City every single month for the next thirty years. If we were to build sprawling Phoenixes, we would waste a lot more energy related to transportation and twenty times more environmental land. We don’t need to tread so hard across the earth if we can rise into the sky.
While high-rise living may not be for everyone, many people actually prefer being in central cities, close to offices, restaurants, and transportation hubs. High-rises can be built in these locations. The more viable urban centers we have, the less our cities have to sprawl.
Skyscraper Innovations
JB:What do you see as the key technological innovations that have allowed buildings to go taller and taller in the 21st century?
SA: With new manufacturing technology and the widespread availability of software simulations for wind and structural loads, it is becoming easier to make structures more material efficient. Structural members, like steel bars and concrete columns, used to be predominantly straight. Now, 3D printing can print materials in any shape and make custom molds for more elaborate concrete forms. Machine-aided manufacturing enables designers to bypass blueprints and communicate directly with machines, allowing more complex forms, such as curvilinear shapes optimized to reduce wind vortexes that the very tall buildings would create. With a wider palette of shapes at their disposal, engineers can also devise structures that more naturally and efficiently transfer horizontal forces to the ground. With less weight dedicated to structures, the building itself can become taller.
The Manhattan Skyline from Central Park.
Rise of Skyscraper Heights
JB:What is driving or propelling this movement toward taller and taller skyscrapers?
SA: Rapid urbanization has proved to be a major tailwind for skyscrapers, particularly in Asia. The twenty-first century is the first urban century. Never before has more than half of the world’s population lived in cities, attracted by the many and diverse opportunities of urban life. Some countries have even decided to base their national policy on the positive relationship between urbanization and economic growth. China has added roughly half a billion people to its cities. Not surprisingly, it has the world’s most skyscrapers.
JB: Relatedly, why do you think there has been a massive growth spurt in the number of skyscrapers (say buildings 150 meters or taller) around the world in the 21st century?
SA: What is surprising is that skyscrapers are even altering historic cities previously inhospitable to urban growth. For three centuries, the skyline of London was defined by St Paul’s Cathedral, with its silhouette of a dome and spires. Then, in the 2000s and 2010s, more unusual and often taller skyscrapers came in, crowding the skyline with ingenious shapes that earned them their nicknames, including the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, and the Cheesegrater. In the case of London, new social preferences and the desire for economic growth helped loosen planning restrictions that new skyscrapers faced.
Skyscrapers and Cities
JB:How do you see this growth spurt as affecting cities (either for good or for bad)?
SA: Skyscrapers can have negative impacts on cities, such as increased traffic congestion, a lack of human scale, and restricted views. But with good planning, these problems can be minimized. Even more, when done well, cities can use high-rise development as an opportunity to improve the quality of life for residents. For instance, a thoughtful approach to high-rise development makes it possible to increase green areas, improve public transit, and enhance a city’s vibrancy. Singapore’s LUSH incentives, or “Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-rises,” illustrate how policy can help promote a new generation of “green” skyscrapers, with tall buildings integrated with greenery. Hong Kong shows how to integrate subway stations in high-rise complexes, making it perhaps the world’s best example of Transit Oriented Development. And Vancouver’s “tower and townhouse” model — slim residential towers on a mixed-use podium often containing townhouses — illustrates how to minimize the impact of tall buildings on views while offering pedestrians a human-scale pedestrian experience.
Supertalls around the World. From left: Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, Burj Khalifa, Shanghai Tower.
Skyscraper Controversies
JB:Why do you think skyscrapers, especially very tall ones, have become so controversial over the last decade or so? And what might be some ways that cities can address these controversies?
SA: One of the reasons is a reaction to novelty. Very tall towers can be considered “too tall” in proportion to their surroundings. Even the Eiffel Tower, during construction in 1887, was despised by the city’s elite as “a dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack.” The city seriously considered demolishing it and selling it as scrap metal. Gustav Eiffel himself erected an antenna and financed wireless telegraphy experiments to prove the hollow tower’s utility. With the French military recognizing the tower’s newfound usefulness, a Parisian committee with authority for the structure’s fate only reluctantly let it stand. “One would wish it were more beautiful,” the committee stated.
“Quid pro quo” is one of the lessons here. The Rockefeller Center offered New Yorkers more than a collection of tall buildings to look at but also a remarkable public plaza to enjoy. The Midtown East rezoning in Manhattan offers developers more buildable floor area if they contribute to the public good through transit improvements, such as in the case of the One Vanderbilt tower, which contributed a pedestrian plaza and transit hall.
The Future of the Skyscraper
JB:What is the future of the skyscraper?
SA: For environmental reasons alone, the way in which we design our tallest buildings has to change. Architects are bound by a kind of “Hippocratic Oath” for the public realm and environmental stewardship. Instead of just thinking of about how to get taller-appearing structures, they should also aim to create buildings with smaller environmental footprints.
We need to recalibrate the race for the tallest building. We should aim for buildings to be the greenest, with the most landscaping, and the fewest carbon emissions. We need skyscrapers to generate the most renewable energy, produce the most food, and promote the healthiest environments for residents with the most biophilic benefits. We need tall buildings created with their entire life cycle in mind and to be disassembled in the end. We need the most resilient buildings able to withstand the ravages of climate change with not only practical design but also nods to aesthetics and beauty.
The good news is that many energy-efficient technologies and renewable-energy solutions are commercially available today and are already being applied. Renewable-energy supplies, cross-laminated timber, prefabricated modules, and super insulation are making a positive impact. Now we need a lot more. Despite advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, the built environment is still mostly a brick-and-mortar industry, capital-intensive, and locally fragmented. It tends to lag behind. The vast majority of buildings will become greener only if regulations both force and incentivize them to do so.
The Future of Cities
JB:You have a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning and you also practice as an architect. Given your background, what do you see as the main challenges that cities face in the 21st century?
SA:Climate change, urban population growth, and housing unaffordability are already impacting city life. The challenge is how to build up our cities to house more people, how to build more sustainably and equitably, and how to build to absorb the shocks that will come from the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events such as flooding and heat waves.
Rotterdam, The Netherlands: The Dakpark (roofpark) and the shopping mall underneath were built on an obsolete railway yard.
SA: Growing up in the Netherlands, a country that for centuries has fought the ocean, I have long admired its holistic solutions to flood protection. However, after several flooding events elsewhere, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I witnessed the building of new sea walls that obstruct people’s views and access to the waterfront. Instead, in my book, I argue for flood protection approaches that are nature-based, integrated with the public realm, and sensitive to local conditions and the community. This way, flood protection can also benefit communities and environments in other ways.
For instance, building flood management infrastructure in urban areas can be particularly difficult in dense cities where land is scarce. Fortunately, recently several innovative solutions have addressed these problems by integrating flood solutions into the public realm and with urban uses. These include the multi-functional flood defenses in Rotterdam. The Dakpark, Dutch for “roof park,” is a dike that also includes a retail and parking structure and a park.
New York is considering several such strategies for the south of Manhattan.
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Continue reading other Q&A blog posts in the series here.
