The Changing New York Skyline

                                          

To get to the Met I take the N train from Penn Station up to Fifth Avenue and 59th street.  When I stepped out into the daylight from underground I saw this scene and thought about how the skyline of Manhattan has changed, with the advent of very tall, very thin new buildings.  They have been nicknamed "pencil towers."  There are three of them visible here.  Why are they being built?  Because there is money to be made.  In New York, which is arguably the city that has seen the most dramatic increase in pencil towers over the past decade, the causes are for one, the maximum height of a building depends on floor area ratio, FAR, of the building within its own plot. Essentially the smaller you build within the plot, not using up the entire base area, the higher you’re allowed to build upwards. Developers in New York can also buy so-called ‘air rights’ from surrounding properties. In simple terms, every building in the city is given a certain amount of air above it. However, neighboring buildings can buy that air off them if it isn’t being fully used, allowing them to build even higher. Combined, the FAR and ‘air rights’ rules actively encourage the building of super-tall structures on tiny areas of land.No matter the direct cause of pencil towers, however, there’s one commonality behind the vast majority of them. They’re usually glamorous, expensive statements intended solely for the super-rich. Does anyone need to build that tall? Of course not. It’s simply developers looking to cash in on absurdly high property prices.