![]() ![]() ![]() It's an information-dense essay that will take time to digest, but I highly recommend giving it a read. Lately, many of our cities in America have been moving very quickly in the wrong direction. To be healthy, our cities must provide diverse habitats for a diverse population, not just those with high-paying jobs. What happens when humanity destroys the habitat of a keystone species in an ecosystem? Ecological collapse. If the price of housing in a city rises so much that a majority of its teachers can't afford to live within it but must make long daily commutes from the suburbs, how does that affect the city's school system? You can ask the same question for police officers, fire fighters, municipal government employees, custodial service workers, community organization employees, small business workers, and all the other people that, while still fulfilling roles vital to society, might not get paid as much as the the people working for the major tech, engineering, and financial services companies that fill the city's skyscrapers and office towers.Ī city is a massive collection of interconnected economic and social systems, highly analogous to ecosystems found in nature, that require balance for health. The part quoted above makes a particularly important point about the complementarity of skills within a professionally diverse population. I read this essay this week, and it really got me thinking about the far-reaching ripple effects of unaffordable housing. This happens in people’s private lives too: people often spend hours trying to fix their leaky pipes instead of just calling in a plumber, because the prices of plumbers near them have risen to cover the costs for plumbers to live there." As a result, many businesses end up leaving highly skilled staff without assistance, spending their time on work that could be done by others, lowering the time they can spend on the tasks they’re best at. ![]() "That means people who do get to live in these high-productivity places are less productive than they could be, because they are less able to combine their skills with the complementary skills of the people who have been priced out. I certainly hope the design issues 432 Park Avenue has can be resolved, otherwise it will become nothing more than a monument to how poor QA/QC can turn any ambitious project into a gigantic waste of time and resources. Now the foremost reason the tower was built, to sell multimillion dollar condos to ultrawealthy buyers for profit, is seemingly defeated by shoddy construction work rendering it unpleasant to live in. But the technology that enabled this tower to be built is still nascent, and as the residents in this article indicate, that can come with challenges that tend to scale with the magnitude of the project. From its uppermost apartments, nearly all of New York's urban core can be seen, all the way to Yonkers and past Staten Island. It stands as a monument to both technological innovations and its occupants' immense wealth. 432 Park Avenue has become a new landmark in New York, not for an iconic and nearly universally recognized design-like the Chrysler Building has-but for its extreme slenderness. ![]()
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