Quote:
Originally Posted by AZ71
I talked to the city planner about it and the general rule is 300' that was put in place on the books...but since all of downtown is in an overlay district they can go higher. Thats why ONE SOUTH CHURCH was able to go to 330'. And the antenna on the Bank of America tower goes to 360'. So it doesn't have anything to do with flight paths. Neither DM or TIA line up directly with downtown. Plus if you've ever flown into San Diego you zoom right beside taller buildings.
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The reason Tucson isn't getting a taller building is because there isn't an economic reason for a developer to build taller than necessary. Typically in most high rise buildings, the cost of adding a floor is not linear meaning that it costs each floor costs more to build than the floor prior to it. So, for example if we take a 20 story tower and want to make it a 40 story tower the new cost for the tower isn't just the original cost multiplied by 2. Additionally, if you add new floors, you will lose usable area on the lower levels to accommodate for the increased loads, and/or increased required elevators and stairwells and eventually you won't net enough square footage of usable surface area from each floor you add to really make pursuing building higher to be necessary.
What developers look for when determining how tall a building should be (aside from building codes, neighborhood requirements, airports, and such) is a sort of goldilocks zone. They don't want to build too tall and have to charge rents for residential/office units that are too high for the region they're in but they don't want to build so short that they aren't going to maximize their profits for the land that they bought.
In Shanghai, the city's Shanghai Tower is a tower that was conceived for the sole purpose of being the nation's tallest. Market demand didn't determine the tower's height. As a result it's struggled greatly. A very high percentage of the tower's budget went to making it tall - to give it the strength to be such a massive building. That caused the building to need to charge rents higher than the market was willing to pay in the city and it's since suffered from low occupancy rates.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Billionaires' Row in Manhattan. Those towers are engineering marvels since they're so tall and narrow. They have huge unusable swaths of their floors that are completely unusable because they're filled with things necessary to support the towers' immense height and their usable floorspaces are tiny, relative to other skyscrapers. However, the heights of the towers are still market driven since wealthy clients were completely willing to pay for the penthouse suites to get the best view of the city & park.
Unlike New York, lots in Downtown Tucson aren't astronomical so the amount of revenue your proposed building needs to make doesn't require you to build a 40 story building to break even and even if you did, the rents you can charge in this city, even for a luxury apartment with city views are going to be miniscule compared to other American cities and won't maximize profits. As buildable lots downtown continue to fill up, it's likely the remaining ones will become more expensive and developers will want to build taller to make up the overhead costs but as for now it seems that Tucson's market isn't asking for a 300+ foot tall building.
However, Downtown Tucson is still doing phenomenal! 15 years ago we were basically building nothing downtown and had been for decades. Then in the beginning of the 2010's we got a few 4-6 story buildings and now we're wrapping up construction of apartments and hotels that are no shorter than 6 stories and it seems that this new Broadway tower and the 4th Ave. Apartments are shooting for 18 and 13 stories respectively. Outside of the core of downtown, we're still seeing fairly dense housing coming up (5 points area). Like other American cities, there just isn't demand for vertical office space like there once was and that's likely to remain true. The tallest buildings being built in cities across the nation are typically mixed use residential/hotel/office buildings or just straight up residential towers and Tucson is no exception. Height is vain and isn't a great metric to measure the success of a downtown area. Tucson's downtown went from a ghost town to a boom town in a very short amount of time. We went from having barely any apartments to opening up hundreds a year. The streets have night life, there is a diverse mix of residents, workers, and suburban residents drawn to attractions like Roadrunner games. Thousands of apartments have been built in the last decade and demand is strong (and not just by students). The population of full time residents is the highest it's ever been, the streetcar made the west side Mercado District a beautiful and viable region to downtown with great local businesses. The city is also blowing its similarly sized Southwestern peers out of the water. While Albuquerque and El Paso have been struggling to grow, our population growth stopped stagnating in about 2015 and has been up since while the other two metros are growing at snail speeds and we've been attracting better jobs and more workers since. The city is defining itself as its own entity from Phoenix as city that is culturally rich and environmentally friendly. Downtown Tucson's mix of residential, retail, and office space make it a better experience in my opinion than a place like Downtown Phoenix that has a bunch of office towers but no life on the street. Downtown is alive again for the first time since the urban renewal project of the 70's wiped the old barrio off the map to build the courthouse, the TCC, and the big empty lot between the TCC and I-10. Sure, the new tower would objectively be cooler if it was taller but I'm not going to cry that it's not. Downtown Tucson isn't a glass half full, half empty kind of thing. This glass is 100% full.
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