Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
Yeah because household sizes were high and housing was woefully overcrowded. I don't think those tenement conditions are tolerable to Americans in 2024, nor should they be.
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Correct, but that's why tenements need to be replaced by bigger buildings, which has been happening, but must be accelerated.
The big issue is that most of prime NYC is either landmarked, downzoned or special-districted. You prolly won't be able to de-landmark areas anytime soon (many were just landmarked bc they were rich and NIMBY, not bc of historical or architectural merit), but you can upzone the areas that were downzoned in the postwar era.
It doesn't make sense to have all the transit and infrastructure sitting in a geography that just gets richer, with no buildings replaced, and the units getting bigger and bigger. Units are constantly being combined, so you have 20 floor buildings now with 12 units, when the same building had 50 units two generations ago.
Or you have big subway hubs, where practically nothing has been built nearby for 80 years. That makes no sense.