Manhattan - Building the Skyline

February 13, 2024 by Jason Barr 2 Comments

How Gotham Got Its Grid (Part I): From Mannahatta to Manhattan

Jason M. Barr February 13, 2024

[Note: Starting Monday, March 4, 2024, Gerard Koeppel and I will be co-teaching a six-week online course on the history of the Manhattan grid plan for the Gotham Center for New York City History. More information and registration can be found here.]

The Manhattan grid plan is one of New York’s most iconic elements, alongside the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and the skyline. The grid forms a vital part of Manhattan’s identity—to walk its streets and feel its repetitive rectangles is to experience “Manhattan-ness.”

Despite being so deeply embedded—both literally and figuratively—in Manhattan Island, the grid plan retains an ongoing fascination. In this first post in a series on the grid plan, we revisit its history to see how New York set the stage that led to its world-famous street system. The following posts will document how the plan was created in 1811, how it was “installed,” and its long run impacts on New York.

Going Dutch

Manhattan as we know it began as a Dutch experiment. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) was formed to exploit the resources of the temperate North American east coast, rife with beaver skins, timber, and optimistically grains and tobacco. Claiming the land from the Delaware River to the Connecticut River (though later reduced to the west of the Hudson), the company sought to stake its claim in the European Game of Empire. The directors enticed some French-speaking Walloon families and frontier traders to sail to America and send back its commodities.

When the settlers arrived in New York harbor, they witnessed the glorious Mannahatta—as the Lenape Indians called it—a natural wonderland abounding with fauna and flora. Its tidal estuaries were overflowing with oysters and fish. The island was covered in pine, oak, and tulip trees. Sparkling streams ran through its valleys, and marshlands swept along the coast. The Lenape had their various farming settlements and enjoyed the land’s natural bounty.

The pointy lower toe of the island, dubbed New Amsterdam, suggested itself as the place to set up shop. The tip offered a spot for defense, and thanks to the narrows pinching off the sea six miles below, the harbor waters were calm for ships laden with pelts, pines, and people.

Costello Map of New Amsterdam ca. 1660. Source: here.

So Random

Get to work they did. The new residents quickly scattered about the place. They could not wait, nor did they care to, for any official to lay out a plan for streets and property lines. They were scrambling to make ends meet and had to improvise. Though Dutch trading ships had plied the region’s waters since Henry Hudson’s first arrival in 1609, the settlement was a new and unknown experiment.

Households took as much land as they could cultivate, and country roads connected their properties. Evidently, the WIC hired a one Kryn Frederycks to create a city plan, but he never did. The most he could muster was to design a fort, built where the Museum of the American Indian resides today.

Lower Manhattan, or let’s say “Netherhattan,” had a raw fatherland feel to it, and the Dutch quickly began to re-work the landscape to facilitate trade and commerce. The wetlands were drained, and the creaks shored up into canals. The main canal, Heere Gracht, ran along today’s Broad Street.

While we can’t say what New York would have looked like today if the Dutch had retained control, one can’t help but think it would be crossed-crossed with canals from river to river, giving the city an Amsterdam-like appearance.

Stuyvesant High

When the corporation realized that their frontier town was a mess, they sent in the dour Calvinist Peter Stuyvesant to bring order. Having fought bravely for the company against the Spanish in the Caribbean—losing a leg in the process—he was promoted to governor of the New Netherland colony.

He enacted rules left and right. One prohibited new pubs and taverns from opening without permission. Another banned the sale of firearms and alcohol to the Indians. While yet another forbade residents from allowing their hogs to roam freely. And yet another prevented drivers from speeding—in their wagons, carts, and sleighs.

When the company directors back home found that their experiment was not working out so well, they started doling out large land grants to encourage settlement and allow settlers to keep more of the proceeds. But in 1651, the directors told Stuyvesant not to grant any more freehold land unless the new owners could demonstrate they would put it to good use. In the same year, however, Stuyvesant convinced the WIC to turn over “The Great Bowery” or Farm #1 to become his large estate, from today’s East 5^th Street to 17^th Street, which would later be folded into the Great Grid.

In 1653, after petitions from local merchants and landholders, the company granted limited self-government for New Amsterdam, which would be comprised of a schout (sheriff/prosecutor), shepens (aldermen) and burgomasters. And while Stuyvesant and his council would constantly butt heads with the new municipal government, it set the seeds for the evolution of local governance and how the grid plan would unfold some 150 years later.

The municipal leaders didn’t have much in the way of a budget to create public works. As one Manhattan historian relates:

On June 26^th [1658], the burgomasters appealed to Stuyvesant and the council for a loan to the city of ten to fifteen hundred florins, with which to repair “the City’s works as well at the City Hall as the sheet piling at the Graft [canal], etc.,” and promised “to repay it from the City revenue” at the earliest opportunity. By December 3d, the work of excavating and sheeting the graft, so as to make it accessible for small boats, was “just commenced”; but it was found that the people or their servants were throwing filth, ashes, dead animals, etc., into the ditch and “again filling up” what had been excavated. The work on the Heere Gracht (Broad Canal) was completed in 1659 and cost 2792.19 floors, which amount was levied early in 1660 on the owners of lots on both sides of the canal.

The Dutch Precedent

By the early 1660s, the Dutch created a small city of sorts with 1,500 residents, though it was not the profit paradise that the WIC had hoped for. But it held its own as a small trading town. Farms and estates ran up the rest of the island. Various hamlets and towns, like the Village of Harlem, around today’s East 120^th Street, were peppered throughout. Manhattan was connected by a few long roads, such as what would become Broadway and the Boston Post Road, that followed the natural topography. A small municipal council, with limited powers, had a say over local affairs, while the company’s governor made the big decisions.

Mannahatta. A re-creation of Manhattan’s ecology ca. 1609. Research by Eric Sanderson. Drawing by Markley Boyer. Source: Welikia Project.

Enter the English

Empire being Empire, the British did not like the Dutch occupying what they perceived as theirs. When King Charles II was restored to the throne, he “gave” the land to his brother, James, Duke of York, who, for some unknown reason, split up his holdings, giving away to his friends the half on the western side of the Hudson River—to be called New Jersey. Little did the duke know, some three and half centuries later, his two former holdings would be fighting over congestion pricing with New Jerseyans complaining about paying twice to enter Manhattan—once for the Hudson River crossing and again for the congestion toll.

When four warships arrived in New York harbor in 1664, the Dutch burgers were promised peace. They told Governor Stuyvesant that they refused to fight. Without firing a single shot, the British ferried their officials to the fort and declared the island a Ducal Fiefdom.

The Dongan Charter

In 1686, the colonial governor, Thomas Dongan, provided the city with a new charter. It empowered a Common Council, comprising a mayor, recorder, and aldermen, representing six newly created wards. Furthermore, the charter granted the Common Council control of “All the Waste, Vacant, unpatented, and Unappropriated lands…reaching to the low watermark.” In short, whatever land and shorelines that had not previously been granted was now the property of the Common Council.

Water Lots and New York’s First Efforts at “Planning”

Since the Dutch settlers set up their own ad hoc property lines and roads, and both the Dutch and English gave out land grants for much of the rest, there was little in the way of city planning. However, one issue would remain at the fore during the colonial period and could be considered a very early form of street planning—the creation of “water lots.” In essence, the water lots were the drawing of property lines extending from the shore into the water. The City would mark off the boundaries and then sell the lots to private citizens, who were obligated to fill them to create new land.

Originally, the lots were those exposed during low tide; but over the colonial period, the Common Council gained control over more and more of the water, first extending 200 feet under the Dongan Charter and then later to 400 feet under the Montgomerie Charter issued in 1730. Lot buyers—usually those who owned the adjacent shoreland—were required to build streets and occasionally had to provide a public wharf, though they were typically allowed to erect a private pier and charge docking fees.

But as Gotham grew, the Council would see to the expansion of the shoreline in a way that provided more land and a larger port for the growing commerce. As historian Hendrik Hartog writes,

The waterlot grants made by the city allowed it to shape, control, and profit from the development of its waterfront without any obligation to finance the process….Planning through the disposal of waterlot grants by necessity would be an incremental process, dependent in every instance on private market forces.

Hartog concludes,

Clearly, the waterlots grants made by the corporation changed the face of the city. Over the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the harborside facilities of New York were transformed. Two full blocks were reclaimed out of the East River….Perhaps the city would have grown at the same or an even greater rate had some other form of planning or port development been in effect. It is a certainty, however, that the waterlot grants were used, as they were designed, to provide New York City with the streets, wharves, and port facilities of a growing seaport.

The Large Estates and Private Subdivisions

But as the small outpost grew, it attracted more people, and like the squeezing of a plastic ketchup bottle, the population had little place to go but north. The demand for land meant that large landholders with their mediocre-performing farms could hire a private surveyor to divide the land to sell town lots.

One early example was the roughly 17-acre area bound by Broadway, Maiden Lane, Gold, and Ann Streets, known in the 17^th century as the Shoemaker’s Pasture. In 1696, the landowners subdivided the land into 164 lots. Though the blocks were not perfectly rectangular, they reveal a near grid-like pattern and were subdivided into roughly 25’ x 125’ foot lots, most with north-south orientations.

The Shoemakers’ Pasture. This land in Lower Manhattan which runs from Broadway to to the east and from Maiden Lane is an early example of private owners subdividing their parcels into grid-like blocks. Source: Valentine’s Manual (1860).

In 1741, Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey purchased a 340-acre farm on the lower east side of Manhattan. His son, James De Lancey, surveyed the land and mapped it into blocks with potential building lots. As historian Elizabeth Blackmar writes, “A 1766 city plan shows the farm laid out with ‘De Lancey Square,’ reminiscent of London’s Georgian residential squares, at its center.” However, when the Revolution came, because the De Lancey’s were loyalists, their land was confiscated by New York State. When later surveying the land for sale, the state preserved De Lancey’s plan but eliminated the large square. Houses, in this case, were given an east-west orientation.

Another example is that of Trinity Church, which was granted large tracts of land by the crown. In the 1750s, the church laid out a portion of land between Broadway and the Hudson River into a small neighborhood of several rectangular blocks around the newly formed Kings College at the town’s north edge, west of today’s Church Street. It was one the earliest examples of a private landlord imposing a grid formation on Manhattan.

Manhattan, 1776. This map shows the island at the start of the Revolutionary War. The city was at the lower tip, with farms and estates making up the rest. North of 14th Street in the center was rocky and hilly. Private land holders at the northern edge of the city started subdividing their land with little coordination.

The American Experiment

The War of the Dueling Georges, a/k/a the American Revolution, led to the new republic. And like that, the small city on the Hudson had to figure out what to do with itself. However, the historical rights given to those with private property combined with the Common Council’s limited powers meant there were bounds on what could be done in terms of planning.

The municipality was run by the landed wealthy to improve the lives of the landed wealthy, who were the citizens or “shareholders” of the municipal corporation. “Property rights and civil or individual rights,” Hertog reveals, “could not be placed in opposition to one another. They were of a piece and conceptually identical. It was the quality, the permanence, and the security of an individual’s property rights that gave him political significance.”

The Common Lands

But the Common Council did own 1,300 acres originally granted by the Dongan Charter, called the Common Lands, along the spine of Manhattan. The land ran from about today’s 23^rd Street to Harlem, and from about Second Avenue to Seventh Avenue. The land was rocky and rugged and of little use for farms. Today, it comprises a hearty chunk of Central Park. The municipality aimed to raise money to refill its coffers after the war and hoped to sell the land.

In 1785, the Common Council hired the surveyor Casimir Theodor Goerck to map and subdivide the land. His instructions were to create large parcels of five acres. For access, Goerck placed one main road up the middle. But after platted, there were few takers, and sales were shelved.

In 1794, the Councillors turned again to Goerck to make an updated Commons Lands map. He added two more north-south avenues on the edges. Furthermore, he made each block perfectly rectangular to form a gridiron plan. But to keep the five-acre requirement, each of the lots was arranged so the length ran east-west about 866 feet and with a north-south width of about 264 feet (sound familiar?). This time, the city’s growth seemed more promising, and the sales generated revenue.

Commons Land Plan by Casimir Goerck. In 1794, the City hired Goerck to plat the land owned by the city. Notice how the blocks look a lot like the blocks later created by the 1811 Grid Plan.

The Mangin Plan

In 1797, the City took another step toward planning—this time, surveying and mapping the city itself. The Common Council hired a French émigré named Joseph Mangin to create New York’s first official map since the Revolution. Magnin teamed up with Goerck for the effort.

Together, as grid plan historian Gerard Koeppel writes, “[T]he Mangin-Goerck map would offer greater breadth and depth than any previous map of the city and its outlying regions.” In 1798, Goerck succumbed to Yellow Fever, likely from a mosquito bite while out surveying. Mangin proceeded alone and began to alter the plan to his liking, providing not a map of the city as it was but a plan of what he thought it should be.

Is versus “Should.” Left: Manhattan as it was ca. 1800. Right: The 1803 Joseph Mangin proposal for a street plan, never adopted.

Mangin’s plan of 1803, Koeppel finds,

was remarkable in two ways. Mangin had idealized the city proper, in particular by enlarging the island’s tip and smoothing the irregular waterfront with blocks of river landfill and new streets….Bolder still was Mangin’s vision for the island beyond the settled city limits….Here, where there were only farms, homesteads, and undeveloped land, he mapped out numerous segments of the rectilinear grid….In the irregular meeting of the various grid segments were countless opportunities for small parks, prominent buildings, or other urban display or public space. Linking everything were numerous north-south roads…It was a layered picture of order and ornament, urban function and natural form: the complexity and grade of a European capital adapted to the limits of a narrow island.

As brash and bold was his vision, it was not his time. Mangin’s plan ran into opposition in the Common Council, and it was scrapped. Though, like Casimer Goerck’s plan for the Common Lands, it would hover in ether.

The Future to Come

However, a few things were evident at the dawn of the 19^th century. The small city at the tip of Manhattan had gnarly, twisted streets that made the smooth functioning daily life difficult. And, to the north, as populations grew, landholders were subdividing their lots based on their own interests and prerogatives. Though much more grid-like and rational than the city to the south, there was little coordination.

Since the city’s growth was assured, the time was ripe for a greater, bolder vision that allowed the municipal government to take control of the situation and map out avenues, streets, and blocks to create a property city. It would need a street plan for real.

And to this history, we will turn next in Part II of the blog post series.

November 27, 2023 by Jason Barr Leave a Comment

How Deadly Were Gotham’s Tenements? Infectious Disease in the 19th Century (Part II)

Troy Tassier and Jason M. Barr November 27, 2023

Prominent in the list of dangerous and aggressive nuisances are the tenement houses of the city….We thus speak of the inhabitants of the tenant-houses as constituting a class, and as being allied with the cause of sickness, pauperism, and crime. New York Times, June 12, 1865.

Throughout the 19^th century, New York City tenements garnered a reputation for vice, immorality, and, above all else, disease. As the above quote makes clear, most residents of tenement neighborhoods were lumped together and considered of equal nuisance. However, our previous blog post examined the risk of infectious disease mortality across Gotham’s wards during the height of tenement expansion from 1868-1910. We found something peculiar: some tenement neighborhoods had much lower infectious disease mortality rates than the citywide averages.

Density across Manhattan in 1895. Source NYPL Digital Collection.

In particular, the Lower East Side tenement wards were some of the safest in the city. On the other hand, more central and west-side tenement areas in lower Manhattan were among the most dangerous in terms of infectious disease mortality (see Figure 3 in Blog Post I). These differences beg the question: Why were some tenement areas relatively safe and others less so?

To begin the investigation, we plotted the rates of infectious disease mortality in the safe (Lower East Side) and less safe (risky) wards (Greenwich Village, Five Points, and the First and Fourth Wards) over time. The significant difference in risk began in the late 1880s. The decade from 1868-1878 saw minimal differences between these two regions. What was the same, and what was different about these wards? The short answer: it’s complicated!

Death Rates from Infectious Disease in Safer Tenement Wards vs. Riskier Wards. Note: The red line is the long-term city average (0.95%) from 1868-1910. Safe wards: 7, 10, 11, 13, 17. Risky wards: 1, 4, 6, 14. Source: here. For ward map see here.

Which of these things is not like the other?

Let’s review the possible hypotheses and see what the data suggest.

Tenement Concentration

At the beginning of our period, the 1870 census reveals that each group had about the same share of tenement homes, around 65 percent. Thus, each contained about 20 percent more tenements than the city-wide average. By 1900, New York’s explosive population growth led to a skyrocketing share of tenement dependence, with approximately 75 percent of all Manhattan residential units in tenements. (Data sources and analyses are here).

The safer wards closely matched this average, while the risky wards had a slightly higher share than the citywide average. Given that tenements were used citywide to house most residents, the presence of tenements in and of itself did not make one area riskier than another.

Density

Differing population density provides another possibility for the differences in mortality. Concentrating people increases the chances that an outbreak will spread quickly. However, density doesn’t fully explain the observed mortality difference. The safer wards were far denser than the risky wards. We can see the hyper-density of the Lower East Side (LES) tenements in the above map from the 1895 Tenement-House Committee.

In particular, the Tenth Ward had over 650 people per acre in 1900. All the wards in the safe grouping had at least 430 people per acre. On the other hand, the densest risky ward, the Fourteenth, had only 315 people per acre. All the other risky wards had under 235 people per acre. In short, the difference in mortality was not due to density.

Average Wealth

Wealth provides another potential reason for the difference in risk. Historically, more impoverished areas tended to be harmed the most during epidemic outbreaks. Other than the First Ward (which was wealthier per capita), the riskier wards had personal property per capita near the city median of $82 and real property per capita lower than or near the city median of $947 per capita. These wards were far from wealthy. However, the safer wards were even less affluent, on average. The LES Tenth, Eleventh, and Thirteenth Wards were the most impoverished of the city in terms of median wealth per capita—yet they had much lower infectious disease mortality.

Dampness and Poor Ecology

Could ecology and topography provide an answer? Damp areas and former marshes pre-European settlement might provide more fertile ground for disease than higher ground with better drainage, particularly for cholera and other waterborne diseases. We considered various possibilities, such as former marshlands, the presence of streams and other water sources, and the presence of Oak Tulip trees that grew on hillsides, where drainage was good. Again, none of these lead to a clear difference. In some areas, land conducive to the spread of infectious disease is associated with minimal mortality. Other sites that had a favorable environment had high rates of mortality.

In summary, most of the things that we associate as potential and obvious risk factors for infectious disease do not, in fact, correlate well with the different levels of infectious disease mortality. However, other differences stand out and begin to reveal the story of what was determining tenement health.

So, What’s the Answer?

To begin, we must step back and examine the bigger picture of change in the city. Manhattan’s population grew rapidly during this time. Between 1870 and 1910, the population increased by nearly 250 percent, from 942,000 to 2,330,000. Part of this increase occurred in the northern wards that were previously underdeveloped. The population of the Twelfth Ward (the northernmost and largest ward in terms of land area) grew by an astounding factor of 28. This was partly due to its minuscule population as of 1870 and its sheer size.

The city’s median ward saw its population increase by 26%. However, growth was very uneven across the island. Several southern wards, including three tenement wards in the risky group, saw population declines.

These three tenement wards stood in stark contrast to the safer tenement wards, each with a population that doubled (or more) between 1870 and 1910. This growth led to a sharp difference in density in this area compared to the other neighborhoods. This sharp rise in population and density would be expected to lead to more disease and not less. So, what happened? The explosive growth led to new construction in the area. These newly erected tenements met requirements that reformers put in place to keep the population safer from disease..

Enter Tenement Laws

As the population of Manhattan exploded, reformers worried about dangers of tenements. By all accounts, some dwellings were beyond horrible. The New York Times wrote of basements and backyards filled with sewage that drained into first-floor apartments. Interior rooms and entire apartments had no light or windows. Households with seven or more people lived in 6-foot by 7-foot rooms without space for everyone to sleep at once. Because of these poor living conditions, reformers called for action. As chronicled in the New York Times in 1865:

The fact is that the population of the city has become alarmingly great, and unless some attention is paid to its sanitary condition we shall be forced by the grim monster itself to bow down in dust and ashes of bereavement….

Is there a responsibility nowhere? Cannot something be done by the people, which will compel authorities to root out such abominations, remove such nuisances, and thus do much toward redeeming the children from lives of infamy, misery, and pollution?

In response, New York City passed a series of reforms to improve the safety of tenement buildings. The First Tenement Act of 1867 required a fire escape for each dwelling and a window for every room. The windows were intended to provide fresh air, ventilation, and light. However, many newly built apartments were compliant simply by installing a window to an interior hallway, which did little to improve ventilation.

Left: A Rooftop View of Two Dumbbell Tenement Shafts. Right: The Bottom of a Shaft. Sources: Left: Wikipedia. Right: Report of the Tenement House Department of the City of New York 1902/1903.

The Dumbbell

A series of additional acts improved conditions further and closed many loopholes. In 1879, windows were required to face a source of fresh air and light—not a hallway. Yet this, too, was met by developers with minimal compliance. Many newly built tenements simply added a narrow gap between buildings. This new building style became known as the dumbbell tenement after an 1879 competition meant to generate fresh ideas for tenement designs.

Developers typically erected this style of tenement stacked next to each other with only the narrow air shaft closed on each end, separating them as seen in the picture above. While this improved ventilation somewhat, later laws created more improvements. However, there was a problem with the dumbbell. Many buildings were not yet connected to sewers, and tenants could dump human waste and other garbage out of apartment windows into the narrow gap between buildings, creating new health problems. This was partly corrected in 1887 when each building was required to have an interior privy.

Two Tenement Plans. Left: A tenement that met the ventilation requirements of the pre-1901 laws. Right: A “new law” (1901) tenement plan that met the courtyard ventilation requirement. Source: Report of The Tenement House Department of the City of New York 1902/1903.

The New Law

Finally, in 1901, stricter and more comprehensive standards were established. New requirements ensured better lighting in hallways. Most importantly, indoor bathrooms were mandatory, and each tenement needed a large courtyard. The last requirement ensured ventilation because each room now had a window that opened onto the courtyard, a street, or the backyard. Most of these “new law” tenements were built in areas with the largest growth. These were the areas with the lowest infectious disease mortality in the city.

Safety with Growth

Data on new buildings and compliance with tenement laws is less available than data on infectious diseases. However, from the available data, the safer wards, which had higher rates of growth, were constructing more new tenements as the laws evolved to ensure more safety. This is also the time during which we observe the difference in infectious disease mortality in the two ward groupings.

For example, from an 1891 New York City Department of Health report, we found that the safe wards had 144 instances where building plans were filed for plumbing and drainage that year. The risky wards only had 16. A similar report in 1891 documents filings concerning light and ventilation. There were 152 filings for new building plans in the safe wards and 25 in the risky wards. From these data, it appears that by the 1890s, more new tenements were being constructed in the safer wards. This period falls shortly after the second generation of tenement laws were enacted.

We also can get a sense of the rate of new construction by looking at the total number of existing tenements in each ward in years where this data is available. In 1896, the safer wards contained 193 more tenements than in 1892. The number of tenements in the riskier wards increased by only 67 in these four years. Though we can’t directly ascertain building ages or compliance with the laws, certainly some buildings were torn down and replaced with improved and safer structures. The data gives us a sense that the safer group of wards had newer building stock that met the safer building codes of various tenement acts. Compliance with these more recent reforms likely made the Lower East Side Wards safer.

Additional evidence comes from reports of new tenement construction in tenement districts after 1901. The report’s maps show that far more new tenements were built in the safer wards.

New law Tenements Erected between January 1902 and July 1903. Dots represent 1902 construction and triangles represent 1903 construction. The majority of new tenements during this time period were built in the safer wards. Source: Report of The Tenement House Department of the City of New York 1902/1903.

Rear Tenements

The 1900 tenement house census gives us another glimpse of the age and quality of the building stock by counting the number of rear tenements in each ward. Rear tenements were additions located in the back alleys of tenement neighborhoods. Many were ramshackle dwellings that were even more spartan than the typical tenement buildings you see in movies or on a tour at the New York City Tenement Museum.

In most cases, rear tenements were the lowest form of shelter in the city. Sometimes, they were built purposely as residences. Other times, they were converted sheds or sometimes even old outhouses. Generally speaking, they were not the four- or five-story stone and brick structures that most envision when considering New York City tenement houses. The number of rear tenements in the risky Fourth and Sixth Wards was far higher than in any other ward of the city—nearly one in four. Again, this leads one to believe that the building stock in the risky wards was older than in the safer wards.

From whence They Came

The final significant distinction between these two groups of tenement wards concerns the place of origin of the respective tenement populations. As of 1900, each risky ward contained between 61% (1^st Ward) and 78% (4^th Ward) Irish or Italian immigrants. The Irish fleeing famine in the mid-19th century likely had little of monetary value upon arrival. While many immigrants from other locations certainly lacked wealth, they presumably were not as destitute on arrival as the Irish famine refugees.

On the other hand, the safer ward groupings contained populations overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. Each of these wards had at least 75% of its population originating from Russia, Poland, Germany, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many immigrants were Jews escaping discrimination and persecution. While they may not have been wealthy upon arrival, many were likely not as poor as those who settled in places like Five Points.

Two Photos of Rear Tenements in late 19^th Century Manhattan. Note the traditional tenement buildings sit in the background of each photo. Source: Jacob Riis’s 1890 book, *How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York.* Images from here.

Reform for the Win

Putting all of these factors together, a picture begins to emerge. The riskier wards likely had older, less sanitary, and less safe dwellings concerning infectious disease risk. Because of their earlier reputation as bastions of infectious disease, they were likely avoided by all with the financial means to do so.

At the same time, other Irish and Italian neighborhoods emerged farther north in the city. The Fifteenth Ward, discussed in the previous post, contained just over 50 percent of residents with Irish or Italian heritage. So did the 21^st Ward just to the south of present-day Grand Central Terminal. Other areas throughout the city had significant Irish and Italian immigrant populations where people with relatively higher incomes could settle. The fact that some people remained in the most disease-ridden area of the city in older, decrepit housing likely indicates that these people didn’t have the financial means to escape to anywhere better.

On the other hand, the safer Lower East Side tenements likely contained newer buildings that were more sanitary and included more ventilation and light. It wasn’t that these areas were wealthy–far from it–but the living conditions and newer building stock likely allowed the people who settled there to avoid at least some risk from infectious disease mortality.^[1]

Reevaluating Death and Disease in the Tenements

While New York City’s 19^th-century tenement neighborhoods received a bad reputation for high infectious disease rates, there is far more nuance than the folklore suggests. Disease was part and parcel citywide in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. No area, rich or poor, tenement or not, was spared from infectious disease risk. Yes, some tenement areas were particularly dangerous, but not all. Likely, the evolving tenement reforms of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries created safer conditions in the tenement districts that saw the most population growth and new construction of safer buildings.

You can read Part I of the blog post series here.

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us During Outbreaks. He also writes the At the Margin Substack newsletter.

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^[1] One can also understand how these wards might have earned an undeserved reputation simply because of their density. With so many people living in these areas, even an average level of infectious disease would stand out in absolute numbers. If two wards each had one percent of their population die during an infectious disease outbreak but one of the wards contained five times the density compared to the other, the denser ward would have five times the number of deaths. Thus, if newspapers and other sources of information simply report stories about the number of casualties, the denser areas will garner a more dangerous reputation that they don’t deserve simply because of the sheer number of deaths.

November 6, 2023 by Jason Barr Leave a Comment

How Deadly Were Gotham’s Tenements? Infectious Disease in the 19th Century (Part I)

Troy Tassier and Jason M. Barr November 6, 2023

Those sickened must be cured or die off, & being cheifly [sic] of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] despatch [sic] the sooner the malady will cease.

John Pintard, a founder of the New York Historical Society and a former secretary of the New York Chamber of Commerce wrote these words to his daughter on July 13, 1832. New York City’s first great cholera epidemic had begun just two weeks earlier. The outbreak continued through September and 3,500 cholera deaths were officially recorded within the city. In just three months, 1.5 percent of New York City’s population died from the disease.

Pintard’s crass words matched the feelings of many 19th-century upper-class New Yorkers. For Pintard and others like him, illness from infection, particularly cholera, was a sign of moral turpitude. Those with an upright character were protected from ghastly contagions. In another letter to his daughter, Pintard stated these feelings explicitly: “At present [cholera] is almost exclusively confined to the lower classes of intemperate dissolute & filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations.”

Location of Officially Recorded Cholera Deaths in 1832. Source: Pulitzer Center.

In part, people of Pintard’s ilk were correct in their belief of the concentration of cholera. The Sixth Ward, the location of the infamous Five Points neighborhood, contained the most severe concentration of cases and deaths as the following map of 1832 cholera deaths reveals. The large red blotch in the middle is in Five Points. Although not known at the time, cholera was a waterborne disease and spread more easily in Five Points because the neighborhood was constructed over the filled-in Collect Pond, creating poor drainage before New York fully built out its water and sewer system. That the poor immigrants were “forced” to live over former swamps and lakes was, certainly, due little to their supposed immorality or “dissolution.” It was simple finance–those in Five Points couldn’t afford to live elsewhere.

The Safety Dance

As a prophylactic, many wealthy, on the other hand, simply fled to safer and more spacious environments. As historian Charles Rosenberg writes,

A hyperbolic and sarcastic observer remarked . . . ‘fifty thousand stout-hearted. . . New Yorkers scampered away in steamboats, stages, carts, and wheel barrows.’ Farmhouses and country homes within a thirty-mile radius of the city were filled. Yet the exodus continued . . ..

However, only the wealthy could afford to escape. Rosenberg further laments, “The poor having no choice, remained.”

The 1832 cholera epidemic wasn’t the first or the last outbreak to roil New York society. Smallpox and yellow fever were persistent concerns throughout the early decades of New York’s growth. Cholera, measles, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, and other infectious diseases would continue to devastate families throughout the 19^th century.

Poverty as Vice

In the popular consciousness, Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements became synonymous with filth, poverty, density, and disease. In 1842, Charles Dickens described one dilapidated tenement in his American Notes for General Circulation:

What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps . . . A miserable room lighted by one dim candle and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it sits a man: his elbows on his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. ‘What ails that man?’ . . . ‘Fever’ he sullenly replies without looking up.

Jacob Riis provided the most famous descriptions of life in the tenements in his 1890 classic, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Like Dickens, poverty, density, disrepair, and disease are inexorably intertwined in many of his descriptions. He describes one tenement apartment,

The family’s condition was most deplorable. The man, his wife, and three small children shivering in one room through the roof of which the pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was almost barren of furniture; the parents slept on the floor, the children in boxes, and the baby was swung in an old shawl attached to the rafters by cords . . . The father, a seaman, had been obliged to give up that calling because he was in consumption, and was unable to provide either bread or fire for his little ones.

“Consumption,” at the time, was the term for tuberculosis.

Blaming the poor, for citywide epidemics, Riis wrote, “In the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to the rich and poor alike.”

Density and Disease: A Deeper Analysis

These quotes and others like them, give a sense that some lower class neighborhoods were continually beset with disease, while the ones housing the prudent and “upright” upper class were disease-free. Yet, the 1832 cholera map displayed above shows that there was clearly disease and suffering throughout the city. So, we thus need to return to the question, were the tenements really that much worse than other districts in terms of infectious disease mortality? Are the conclusions of the rich and the reformers as grim and conclusive as they suggested?

To investigate this question, we compiled data from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Historical Urban Ecological data set. The data set contains information on a variety of 19^th– and early 20th-century demographic and health-related data, including deaths from various infectious diseases from 1868 through 1927. The data set does not include all years—in particular data from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is missing, as well as infectious disease data for the years 1880-1888—but it does allow for us to study broader trends across time and space.

We focus our analysis during the height of tenement growth from 1868-1910. The data is organized at the level of New York City wards, which were neighborhood demarcations used for elections of various municipal offices, such as aldermen (analogous to today’s city council members). Across Manhattan, there were 22 wards. While they are numbered in a somewhat haphazard fashion (shown on a map below), in general, the lower-numbered wards were closer to the southern tip of the island.

Death Rates

During this period, the data reveal that, on average, about 0.95% of New Yorkers died per year from infectious diseases. Although rates of death certainly varied by age (with the youngest children particularly susceptible), we can think of this as a baseline risk that each person living in the city faced. In other words, unadjusted for age, location, or time period, an individual had just under a 1 in 100 chance of dying from an infectious disease each year. However, from the historical descriptions, we would expect that certain areas had higher risk than others.

To identify these differences, we run statistical tests (regressions) aimed at identifying the New York City wards with the most risk while controlling for yearly trends (mortality was falling over the second half of the 19^th century). (Data sources and results are given here.) The map below shows each ward’s death rate relative to—that is, above or below—the citywide average. The results suggest that the reformers and the wealthy scoffers did not quite have their stories right.

Blue indicates the ward had, on average, a lower death rate than the city average. Red indicates above the city average. White is about the same as the city average. Death Rate = total deaths from infectious disease / population. Source: here.

Across Wards

To focus on the heart of the matter, we have created a “matrix” of topologies by dividing the wards into those that contained relatively high or low density, respectively, and those that were “safe”/low-risk or “unsafe”/high-risk based on their death rates compared to the city average.

Low Density-High Risk: The First Ward

The First Ward sits at the southern tip of Manhattan. While it didn’t have the notoriety of the tenement wards for infectious disease it had the highest rate of infectious disease deaths anywhere in the city over our time of study. In the late 19^th century, before the opening of Ellis Island in 1892, this ward was the literal gateway for the majority of immigrants entering the United States through New York City. It is estimated that eight to twelve million immigrants passed through the Emigrant Landing Depot, known as Castle Garden, during its time of operation from 1855 to 1892.^[1]

Many of the immigrants arrived nearly penniless, and given their lack of funds they could not venture far from the landing when they first entered America. Often, they settled briefly in almshouses and boarding houses nearby as they searched for employment and more permanent housing. Unfortunately for these immigrants, our analysis suggests that the First Ward was the easiest place for contagions to multiply. Here deaths from infectious disease were 52% greater than the citywide average.

Although the First Ward receives far less attention than the Lower East Side tenements, elevated disease risk should not be surprising. During this time, the experience of most immigrants was tortuous. They were stuffed in the cavernous underbelly of a ship without ventilation and, in some instances, even light. It was not uncommon for some of these steerage passengers to die from disease or starvation en route to America. Although many were inspected for disease upon arrival, some infected passengers certainly passed through the port and into the First Ward undetected. Various diseases were thus let loose to fester in the First Ward where many immigrants made their first night’s sleep.

A photograph of New York Harbor, Governor’s Island, Staten Island, and Castle Garden Aquarium, 1894. J.S. Johnston photograph collection, 1890-1899. Source: nyhistory.org.

Low Density–Low Risk

In contrast to the First Ward, the adjacent Second Ward was one of the safest in the city. It sits between the southern port and the notorious tenement districts. John Pintard, whose quote began this post, was elected an Assistant Alderman of the East Ward (which became the Second Ward at a later date). This area was the original seat of affluence in Manhattan and home to many who made their fortunes as Manhattan’s first merchants and bankers.

However, after the Civil War, this district was given over nearly entirely to industry and commerce and had few residents of any stripe. Similarly, the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Wards also contained far lower infectious disease mortality. Each of the Second, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Wards had infectious disease mortality 16% lower than the citywide average.

Late in the 19^th century, the northern wards of the city were at the heart of a great migration. As the lower wards became overcrowded, transportation options (such as the horse-drawn streetcars and later the elevated railways and the subway) allowed for faster and easier commutes from homes to places of work. Much of New York’s middle-class population moved north. As they did so they skipped over the dense tenement and manufacturing districts that populated Lower Manhattan above the Second and Third Wards.

Many of the affluent landed in places like the 15^th and 16^th Wards, along Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and around such parks as Washington Square and Madison Square. Throughout this period the northern wards had relatively low density and infectious disease mortality was near average or slightly below. Even the 22^nd Ward, home to Hell’s Kitchen, with shanty towns along the Hudson River docks, had infectious disease risk lower than the city average.

The High-Density Neighborhoods

Focusing now on the high-density neighborhoods, we see something that is not, in fact, obvious. Some of the densest wards had infectious disease death rates that were far lower than the city average. In fact, some of the most-dense tenement districts had the lowest infectious disease mortality in the entire city. This certainly suggests that density, in and of itself, was not the great evil that reformers portrayed it to be, at least in terms of infectious disease risk.

In particular, the tenement neighborhoods of the Lower East Side had two clusters—a higher-risk zone and a lower-risk one. The higher-risk zone was located in the central wards of Lower Manhattan that included Five Points, Little Italy, and Greenwich Village. The lower-risk zone, on the other hand, was located on the east side, and included dense Jewish and German neighborhoods. In fact, in 1900, the Tenth Ward, home to many Jewish immigrants, was arguably the densest neighborhood on the planet, with some blocks having densities as high as 1,000 people per acre. Yet, the Tenth Ward had infectious disease mortality 19% lower than the city average.

The Infection Puzzle

This variance in rates of infectious disease mortality across the tenement districts offers up a puzzle. Density and poverty were not uniform predictors of disease mortality. What was going on? Why did the reformers seem to overgeneralize and misunderstand what was happening in the 19^th century? We will provide the answers in Part II of this blog post, coming soon.

Continue reading Part II of the post here.

—

^[1]Unfortunately, a fire at Ellis Island destroyed most of the Castle Garden immigration records in 1897 so precise counts and much history of entry through Castle Garden are lost.

June 12, 2023 by Jason Barr 2 Comments

Long Live the Skyscraper

Jason M. Barr June 12, 2023

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 20^th 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.

More broadly, there’s an extensive literature in economics demonstrating one simple fact: If you put draconian restrictions on what a city can build, the outcome is more sprawl and traffic congestion, and higher housing prices. Similarly for GHG emissions, Manhattan has far lower carbon footprints per household than its suburbs.

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 4^th, and by 2020, it was bumped down to 8^th, 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 21^st 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.