I had the very good fortune to spend the long weekend in Florida visiting family. Things tend to fold up early when you’re of a “moving to Florida” age, which doesn’t jive with my own rhythms; this is how I found myself catching a late showing of the fourth Mission: Impossible movie. Not my proudest moment, to be sure. But to be honest, it was actually somewhat enjoyable viewing.
If you follow Yglesias, one of the things he periodically hits on is the idiocy of having relatively short building height restrictions in the interstitial portions of Manhattan, between Wall Street and Midtown. One of the rejoinders you constantly get to this is that, supposedly, the bedrock underlying Manhattan doesn’t support skyscrapers between Houston and the low 30′s. It’s all over the comments on this Slate piece, for instance. Yglesias himself has tried to dispel the myth, linking to a paper that finds that “bedrock depths had very little influence on the skyline,” that it was mostly about trains and other things.
But I think there’s a much, much simpler response to this argument.
THE WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING IS BUILT ON SAND
I think it’s a given, then, that someone would stick an 80-story building on Union Square, especially if it was an “as of right” structure that didn’t require variances. The latter makes it safer for the developer to buy parcels quietly, using multiple single-purpose entities to avoid the speculative land value jump that comes from being in the path of a proposed megaproject. (This is the method used by Disney to assemble the land for what would become Disney World / Epcot.)
keephoustonhouston
