In Manhattan the low zones are due to the soil not being good for higher construction. Lower Manhattan and midtown are made of basalt stone that is extremely strong and apt for skyscrapers.

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ch4s3 an hour ago | parent [-]

Bedrock is only a little lower in the "Midtown Gap", and in any case a lot of those 4 story buildings could be 8-10.

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bobthepanda 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

the real reason midtown is where it is, is because that is where the train stations are due to the city banning surface running railways south of 42nd St. (The remaining surface railways north of that point have been covered up.)

As a result, Midtown is now one of the few places in New York's metropolitan that can reach the millions of people in the five boroughs and the suburbs all at once, which means the labor market is substantially larger than what it is in Lower Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn, and makes it massively more attractive for employers.

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organsnyder an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm guessing it would be tough to make the numbers work demolishing a 4-story building and building one that's only 2-2.5x the square footage, especially with today's interest rates.

	▲	ch4s3 32 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's pretty hard to say in a blanket way, I wouldn't want to speculate. But there's never a bad time to fix zoning.
	▲	cucumber3732842 31 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You'll lose a ton of square footage to compliance. Those wide doorways with non conflicting doors, wide staircases, required clearances around everything, all the other stuff that's been done to old apartments that isn't compatible with modern codes. So that 2.5x square footage is more like 1.5x when it comes to the number of units of like quality/liveability you can pack in.