Serious question for #YIMBYTwitter: where height restrictions per se are the issue, why haven’t developers started building vertically but *down*, underground?
I mean windowless apartments don’t sound ideal, but probably less bad than unaffordability and homelessness
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Is it just too expensive? Even with median rents $4k+ in some places?
Is it illegal for some other reason?
Are there just random pipes everywhere?
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Idk I can imagine some pretty cool, hypermodern underground apartments
Pic above from this article about rich people building bunkers
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Since this is getting some attention, gonna shamelessly plug an excellent giving opportunity if you care about animal suffering🐠
The Fish Welfare Initiative has a $180k funding gap - super high altruistic return IMO!
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Guys the comments are closing in on the likes - dont let me get ratiooood😭😭😭
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To clarify:
1) I don't think we should make poor/homeless people live underground
2) A project like this would be so expensive that it would only be profitable if the units could then be sold for a fortune! The economic incentives point completely in the opposite direction!
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A more extreme, comical version of the same thing would be, like, having residential 747s circle around Manhattan. IRL this isn't profitable, ofc.
But if it *was*, that would have to be because some people were willing to pay a lot of money for space onboard!
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Civil engineer here! There are some problems that emerge when we excavate deep underground, that increase costs significantly. I'll explain a couple of these in the thread below!
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Not everything comes to your mind worth tweeting about it,, the deeper you go the bigger you need to excavate from top to have enough void so you can design big enough walls to retain the gigantic earth pressure, you will end up taking the whole city to build one down rise
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