I’m seeing you fall into a common fallacy when discussing buildings. “Two buildings are cheaper than one” - sure, if you ignore the land, and all the processes of zoning, permitting, and construction management. If you want to understand all this better, start learning about those!
First I explicitly excluded the ground price so it should be obvious that I'm well aware of it.
Second if zoning and permitting make it more economical to build buildings which on itself are fundamentally problematic than maybe zoning and permitting needs to be changed.
Besides that the cost of construction management for one large building compared to multiple smaller buildings(1) should be larger because of additional requirements for material verification etc. due to having stricter requirements to materials and material quality which you simply don't have on smaller buildings. And sure as we can see from quite a bunch of (often by now older) sky scrapers the additional requirements where sometimes just ignored now leading to problems left and right.
EDIT: Just to be clear if you make it multiple projects instead of one it can very well be more expensive. But building multiple smaller (but not small) houses as one project using mostly the same
blueprints for all of them, using the same contractors, same workers etc. is altogether a different matter.
EDIT2: The main drawback besides things like ground cost is the cost of creating a multiple fundaments. In turn simpler fundaments can normally be build but the cost can largely vary depending on the ground you are building on (like stability of the ground, ground water level etc.).
I get where you’re coming from, but the things you are hand waving away don’t just disappear. Two permitting processes really do cost twice as much to administer as one.
And I’m not even dealing with the fact that you need twice as much road, twice as much water and sewer pipe, your city becomes slightly lower density meaning walking and driving distances are longer, etc. etc.
At the end of the day, higher density is significantly more efficient, which is why cities get dense.
> significantly more efficient, which is why cities get dense.
But it's not.
Look at most cities in the world besides a few which are well know to have a broken/unhealthy local economic...
Do most of them have sky scrapers all over the place?
Or do they mostly have 5-10 Story buildings with a view ~80m buildings, even less 80-150m buildings, and hardly any building larger then that?
Then look at all the large 200+m sky scrapers, how many of them do have unused space? How many are all office space and only profitable due to broken tax regulations? And how many stopped being profitable when they became older? Also look at the cost of tearing down (replacing) or reconstructing a sky scraper compared to a regular building and look into how often the company which build the sky scraper did carry the cost?
Also look at all the super high sky scrapers and consider how many where purely build to show power?
I don't have anything against sky scrapers, but there is a point at which they stop making sense and as far as I can tell it should be somewhat but not much above 150m, or maybe even lower.
And yes without question there are cities in which huge sky scrapers are always economical the best choice, but I believe most of such cities have a broken/unhealthy.
Sure, even for this there are exceptions. Like in countries where (flat, accessible) land is generally a sparse resource, like Singapore.
