Because centuries of building sciences, psychology, and history tells us that it is an absolutely terrible idea that will kill people in the long run. We don’t let the rich kill college kids for sport yet.
Density is great. I say this as someone who made a custom print of a diagram of Kowloon Walled City as one of the pieces for my library. This isn’t a good way to provide density. The windowless deathtrap is almost a half mile away from the bulk of the campus, including crossing large parking lots or a bunch of athletic facilities. Simply reducing the size of lot 30 would allow the students to actual have pesky little things like windows and bathrooms. Removing a soccer field would do the same. This is the classic tower in the park approach to density that has almost always failed, just with fewer basic human sustaining amenities.
That’s a great idea for things like aesthetics, not for things that make a building unsustainable in a power outage or risks mass avoidable death in a fire. I’ve stood at the mass grave site for a bunch of kids who died in a fire in a building with insufficient egress and it is a stark reminder that safety codes are written in blood.
Then fix that. Right now Santa Barbara has parking restrictions that require roughly a parking space per bedroom of legally obligated car storage. Their commercial requirements for some uses, fast food included are worse than 1-1. A small zoning change could free up around 10% of land area.
In theory, no. In practice any sufficiently large entity with the will to do so can find the existing flexibility in the codes or get a special exemption.
Sort of. The spot density looks higher, but it is surrounded by parking lots and athletic fields instead of urban Hong Kong. You get all of the downsides of density, but not the upsides.
Hi I’m an urban planner. This doesn’t do that. There’s only one nominally as dense census tract in the US, near West Catlapa West Balmoral and Lakeshore drive and mostly consisting of the Park Towers condos. It is also substantially less walkable than a lot of other parts of the city. The walk score is 84, not bad, but that is almost the same walk score as central Lakewood Ohio or other streetcar suburbs. Even other parts of the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago average 91. When you build a giant people brick, it is rarely the source of density that the first glance at the numbers would suggest, because it lacks integration with the surrounding area. This is no exception.
Generators are great, but you don’t want the livability of a space to be dependent on them. My Master’s capstone was on a project to reduce generator dependence in a relatively small area. I surveyed and talked to a bunch of the holders of EPA permits for larger generators in Cleveland (if you ever want a frosty phone call, call up a nuclear defense contractor and ask probing questions about their electrical system). A sufficiently large generator has some major issues for this. They require tremendous maintenance. The ventilation process is a nightmare. Fail over is problematic without frequent testing. Fuel goes bad. These problems are large enough that almost every business surveyed was willing to pay a substantial premium on their power to not have to deal with that. The only businesses unwilling to do so were life critical ones, which this would become.
There are more than 2, but a lot of them aren’t good for mass movement of people. If you have to go through kitchens or the mech room, they aren’t great.
