4. High-rises are vertical sprawl
How could high-rises possibly be sprawl as they take up so little actual land? Sprawl is when something is built inefficiently and takes up too much space. With high-rises, they take up too much vertical space for something (in this case dense housing) that could be achieved with much less height.
Think of the South Waterfront in Portland, a sea of speculative high-rises that largely remain empty. Not unlike suburban sprawl that promotes isolation and is often devoid of people on the streets, high-rises offer up the same problems, but just from a vertical perspective. Plus, not unlike the vast swaths of
suburban tract homes that are built during an economic bubble that often end up empty, high-rise bubbles can be just as unrealistic.
5. High-rises=gentrification and inequality; Low/Mid-rises=resiliency and affordability
According to Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard, co-founder and director of the
Making Cities Livable International Council, "the construction industry is a powerful engine for fueling economic development. Tall buildings offer increased profits for developers. However, the higher a building rises, the more expensive is the construction. Thus, the tallest buildings tend to be luxury units, often for global investors. Tall buildings inflate the price of adjacent land, thus making the protection of historic buildings and affordable housing less achievable. In this way, they increase inequality."
On the other hand, says Making Cities Livable, "small footprint shops and apartments in a fine textured urban fabric yield smaller profits, spread out among many individuals and businesses in the community. Over centuries, this human scale urban fabric has proved to be adaptable to changing political and economic times, making the community resilient, and durable. The City of Paris, with buildings no taller than 100', supports continuous retail along the street, making every neighborhood
walkable."
6. Are High Rises Even Green?
Contrary to public opinion, which thinks high-rises must be sustainable because they allow for so much density,
Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia says that high-rise buildings are not green at all. He says, "high-rise buildings are subject to the effects of too much sun and too much wind on their all-glass skins. And all-glass skins are, despite many improvements to the technology, inherently inefficient. Glass is simply not very good at keeping excessive heat out, or desirable heat in. Our high-rises, according to BC Hydro (the province of British Columbia's main electric utility) data, use almost twice as much energy per square metre as mid-rise structures."
Moreover, Condon says that high-rise buildings are less adaptable than mid-rise structures, and therefore are inherently less sustainable. Furthermore, he says, high-rise buildings are built largely of steel and concrete and are less sustainable than low rise and mid-rise buildings built largely of wood; steel and concrete produce a lot of GHG. Wood traps it. Concrete is 10 times more GHG-intensive than wood.
7. High Rises are not good for your health
This assertion may sound laughable to some, but the effects of the high-rise on mental health have been researched and documented. Psychologist
Daniel Cappon writes in the Canadian Journal of Public Health that high-rises keep children and the elderly from getting the exercise the extra effort it takes to get outside encourages them to stay at home and flip on the TV. High-rises, he says, also deprive people and especially children of "neighborhood peers and activities." And he believes that the level of alienation and isolation, things that have been proven to negatively impact health and even shorten people's lives, increase with the height of the building.
In conclusion, I'll quote Cappon at length:
"What is there to say? We must have the incontrovertible evidence and the mechanism whereby the high-rise leads to the low fall of urban humanity. Meanwhile, we must not go on blindly building these vertical coffins for the premature death of our civilization.
What shall we do instead while we are wanting to learn the ultimate facts? We can satisfy the economy needs for high density per land acre, which of itself is not likely to produce ill health, while restricting heigh and redistributing spaces in terraced, human-scale fashion, supporting social confluence and relationships or, at least, not impeding the nurturing of precious human resources."
..END
