It's counterintuitive, but the idea seems full-baked to me! True luxury apartment buildings—not just the ones where they slap some marble on a countertop—seem to be built to a higher aesthetic standard than those aimed at the mass market. When we reach (and sustain) abundance, the ugly stuff may serve as long-term reminders of the consequences of not building, and old urbanists can dodder around with their grandchildren pointing and yelling, "See what happens to us???"
Indeed. It's significantly based on my own development experience, where we can build much nicer than the rest of the market--and we still make money--but the other developers look at us and say "why'd you go through so much trouble, we just did this (crappy thing), and made a lot of money!" Maybe if there was real vacancy, we'd all have to sharpen our pencils.
I suspect there will always be folks who take the easy way out, and those who see what they're doing as more of a calling to do better—but housing abundance would surely raise the stakes of competition.
I mean, we could have housing shortages with crap architecture or housing abundance with crap architecture. Seems like the latter still wins
It's counterintuitive, but the idea seems full-baked to me! True luxury apartment buildings—not just the ones where they slap some marble on a countertop—seem to be built to a higher aesthetic standard than those aimed at the mass market. When we reach (and sustain) abundance, the ugly stuff may serve as long-term reminders of the consequences of not building, and old urbanists can dodder around with their grandchildren pointing and yelling, "See what happens to us???"
Haha,
Indeed. It's significantly based on my own development experience, where we can build much nicer than the rest of the market--and we still make money--but the other developers look at us and say "why'd you go through so much trouble, we just did this (crappy thing), and made a lot of money!" Maybe if there was real vacancy, we'd all have to sharpen our pencils.
I suspect there will always be folks who take the easy way out, and those who see what they're doing as more of a calling to do better—but housing abundance would surely raise the stakes of competition.
Indeed!