Economics of building narrow towers in Sao Paulo vs North America

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Not sure whether those laws encouraged the construction of narrow towers. I just meant they were not result of lax zoning laws as this period had very strict (and bad) ones.

Perhaps it was not the intended outcome, but given that regulation it does help to explain in part why there are so many skinny high-rises.

Originally Posted by sbarn

Skinny highrise projects are fairly typical in Manhattan:

Infill examples:

Makes sense that there'd be a lot in New York. Going back to my earlier points about those skinny towers in Toronto, New York is filled with properties that fit those three criteria - there are many constrained lots, precedence of existing high-rises/favourable zoning, and an expensive/high-income market that can bear the higher costs associated with building these.

[SIGSEGV]

This is my favorite narrowish (not sure if it's narrow enough by the criteria here) residential tower in Chicago: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7975...7i16384!8i8192 because it's so out of place with with its surroundings. Too bad things like this cannot happen nowadays.

[C.]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

This is my favorite narrowish (not sure if it's narrow enough by the criteria here) residential tower in Chicago: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7975...7i16384!8i8192 because it's so out of place with with its surroundings. Too bad things like this cannot happen nowadays.

I like it too except for the blank wall. Too bad it's not setback slightly above the 5th floor to allow for windows.

[memph]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Yes, US$ 9,000. As São Paulo GDP per capita is 2.5 lower than Canadian metro areas, it seems labour costs are relatively lower in SP. As Brazil is still recovering from the 2014-2016 crisis, salaries are still depressed.

When it comes to apartment prices then São Paulo is considerably more expensive than Toronto and alligned with Vancouver, again, relatively speaking.

There are many pockets of low rise only areas as you can see clearly on Google Earth 3D, where buildings suddenly stop. Regulations affect mostly the total floor area vs size of the plot, which increases costs, induces land wasting which makes no sense in a 21 million people urban area.

In fact, those regulations impacted the entire urban area, causing crazy traffic jams and crowded public transit. The low rise residential districts on the far east parts of the city have densities up to 15,000 inh./sq km while more central districts where virtually all the jobs are could manage much higher densities without the regulations. For instance, Paris houses 2.2 million people in 120 sq km, same for Manhattan plus adjacents parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx while São Paulo has “only” 1.4 million people in its most central 120 sq km.

ok that makes sense. The small footprint towers in Sao Paulo are different from the ones that have been posted so far from Toronto, New York and Chicago in that they're in a more lowrise setting.

Some of those North American examples actually don't have that small footprints, since even though they're narrow, they extend quite deep into the lot. Or they have a skinny width to height ratio but they're also much taller so they floorplates are actually not that small. But even the ones that do have small floorplates are usually in a "wall to wall" environment, surrounded by a lot of 3-10 storey buildings.

In Sao Paulo they're often built in semi-suburban areas, or at least areas that are not "wall to wall".

If the cost of construction labor, relative to housing costs or relative to upper-middle class incomes, is lower in Sao Paulo, then that could explain how they're able to compensate for some of the inefficiencies of small footprint buildings.

And Sao Paulo is building primarily in existing neighbourhoods, rather than on brownfield sites or vacant land like a lot of North American cities. That would explain why they often have to work with smaller sites, and if there's zoning that limits ground coverage, then that obviously leaves you with small building footprints.

[CaliNative]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Why are we singling out Sao Paulo, when this is a standard South American typology?

And why are we comparing to NA, where middle and upper class people rarely live in urban towers (yes there are a few regional exceptions).

In NYC, the NIMBYs made it much harder to build "silver" towers in the 1980's. There was a huge wave of slivers in the early 1980's, and then the rules were tightened up, so it is almost impossible to build true residential slivers in residential areas.

Wasn't there a fairly bad creepy/scary movie made a couple of decades ago called "Sliver"? Maybe that gave a bad name to the slivers. There are many benefits to having good neighbors. Being the only occupant on a small sliver floor might be sort of lonely/scary. Maybe that movie scared away potential sliver unit buyers.

[Trantor]

Originally Posted by memph

That's R$ 3,000 per month right? So US$ 9000 per year?

the BENEFITS he is talking about are the same 100% of the salary, in average, deposited directly on the workers Public Account and managed by the government. Several mandatory taxes and stuff that employee must deposit and give the worker not only unemployment insurance but also the FGTS, Insurance Pension for Service Time, completely unrelated to retirement funds (also automatically deposited by the employee)

Plus there is 13th Salary, also mandatory.

So unless Yury was already counting those, the real salary is R$6000 per month (at least for the employee), or U$19500 dollars per year.

[Trantor]

Originally Posted by memph

One of the things I've noticed about Sao Paulo after checking out the city on streetview/google maps is that they have a lot of narrow highrises, usually 10-30 storeys tall. By narrow, I mean 2000-4000 sf floor plates, and only a small percentage of highrises with floor plates of over 6000 sf. By comparison, Vancouver highrises seem to have mostly 6000-8000 sf floor plates and Toronto highrises are mostly 8000-12000 sf floor plates for point towers, and up to 20000 sf for slab towers.

People often say that smaller buildings and buildings with smaller floor plates are not profitable enough to build in the North American context, but Sao Paulo seems to have plenty of those. They're quite common in other Brazilian cities too. Sao Paulo does not have the extreme wealth of Manhattan, nor those it have the extreme land constraints that can explain Hong Kong's "pencil towers". Although most of the Sao Paulo highrises are probably not geared towards its low income population, they're still common enough that I'd expect its residents to be broad middle or upper-middle class, similar to how it is with the residents of highrises in North American cities.

So what's different about Sao Paulo/Brazil that makes these kinds of buildings more economically feasible? Why does Sao Paulo build so few large (8000sf+) floorplate buildings and why do North American cities build so few small (<5000sf) floorplate buildings?

I could answer this thread, but I got lost on your area measuring units.

[Trantor]

Originally Posted by Citylover94

Boston doesn't have a ton but there are a few examples of buildings with small floor plates in that height range. They can be profitable but often there lots available for development are larger than that and it take either relatively short buildings or very high costs to make up for the loss in rentable square footage.

maybe that already helps a little on the answer??

Brazil is made of condominium apartment buildings. People buy the apartments for themselves (in the condominium system) OR they invest by buying apartments while still a project, either for rent or for re-selling (after the building is done) for higher prices.

buildings that have single tenants and where apartments are all rentable are RARE, RARE!

[Trantor]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Ahh, makes sense. That definitely explains the skinny towers then!

A number of other Brazilian cities seem to have a lot of skinny towers as well though - did they have similar regulations, or did perhaps the style of building in Sao Paulo influence other places or something?

or Porto Alegre? Notice that several buildings are wider, but are more like two skinny towers connected by a central hub (with elevators, emergency stairs, corridors)

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or the city I live in, Novo Hamburgo
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or a beach city in my state, Capão da Canoa
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but NO CITY IN BRAZIL surpasses Camboriu in terms of skinny towers.
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here, a new slim tower


and this video shows it under construction, and thus, it's floorplan
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[SFBruin]

I bet that a lot of this has to do with parking. Parking podiums or garages have to be wide, and so cities that require them cannot build skinny towers.

Does Chicago have parking minimums? There were some skinny towers there, iirc, but pretty much everything I saw that was under construction looked like normal, full-width residential construction.

[Trantor]

But in Brazil, parking podiums and garages ARE required!

[wwmiv]

Do Brazilian cities use FAR in their zoning? If not, that could explain the discrepancy between Brazilian cities and North American ones in their propensities to build narrow towers.

[Trantor]

That depends on the Director Plan of each municipality.

But yeah, most municipalities have zoning with different Coeficiente de Aproveitamento (roughly usability radio, which would be the English FAR) as well as OCCUPATION TAX, which defines a maximum % of the horizontal area of the terrain that can be occupied by the building, regardless of the height.

The two are independent, so you can have one but not the other, none or both.