Highrises Undesirable

Having just read the latest Thompson Report “Do We Have Land Problems?” and the comments of Rick Baker of Remax regarding the need for Lawson Landing and more highrise buildings, I would respond by saying what else would you expect from a greedy real estate agent who values money above everything and is willing to sacrifice the valued aspects of our wonderful community in order to stoke the fires of growth.

The truth of the matter is that highrise construction is undesirable for seven basic reasons: 1) Highrises are an affront to natural beauty by obscuring landscapes and blocking views. 2) Highrises are big energy wasters. CMHC has identified that highrises consume three times the energy used by a single-family house per square foot of floor space. 3) Highrises are alienating in that these towers in the sky distance man from nature and man from community and are the breeding ground for social pathologies that arise from human isolation. 4) Highrises increase traffic congestion as they overburden road networks with their large number of inhabitants 90% of whom still end up travelling by car. 5) Allowing a few highrises to be built significantly increases nearby land prices by encouraging speculation that more highrises will be built and encouraging the proliferation of even more highrises. 6) Highrises create large shadow zones which eliminate much direct sunlight to ground level thus precluding plant life, light patterns, and much visual perception. 7) Highrises cost the community more in terms of the sum total of services that must be provided to their inhabitants than they contribute in taxes.

The notion that the opposition to highrises is “the thought processes from fifty years ago” is the opinion of someone who obviously isn’t up on the New Urbanism which has been developed largely within the last decade and is endorsed by Citizens for Responsible Community Planning.
Proponents of the New Urbanism such as Leon Krier, James Howard Kunstler, Nikos Salingaros and Yale professor emeritus Vincent Scully reject highrises as an acceptable architectural form. For more information on the New Urbanism please visit our website at http://saveparadise.tripod.com and click on the Links page where you will find articles by these and other visionary thinkers who, incidentally, don’t sell real estate.

John Zeger
Citizens for Responsible Community Planning