Saturday, October 3, 2009

Why We Don't Have Skyscrapers

Since this piece of property is so close to a metro station, you can take this strip mall and turn it into a 20 floor tower. Want to stand out? OK, you can build up to 300 feet. The ultimate plan is to create a real city environment for a suburban county. Walkable, intriguing.

Why not taller? Inflating real estate prices= more lateral development= quicker means to a citylike environment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031803521.html

Addendum: "We built this place up from scratch with the help of greedy developers". Well, there was a historic downtown Rockville, much like Leesburg, VA or Frederick, MD. It was torn down for the lovely brutalist towers, most notably 51 Monroe, as an early "Transit-oriented development" (It's connected by skywalk to Metro Rockville).

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