AHC: Densify New York City

The borough of Manhattan seems to be prominent in skyscrapers and towers that seemed to endlessly reach out for the heavens. However, the lesser boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island seemed to not be as densely populated and skyscraper-filled as Manhattan. Staten Island, in particular, seems underwhelming.

How can the lesser boroughs become more densely populated ? How can Brooklyn and Staten Island increase its skyline ?
 

jocay

Banned
Delay the consolidation of New York City by another three or four decades. Each of the boroughs would be treated as independent cities and have their own downtown districts analogous to Wall Street, albeit much smaller in scale. The Bronx's downtown district (already is to some extent) would be the Hub. Downtown Brooklyn as it is developed as it did IOTL due to its proximity to Manhattan but that same logic also applies to Hoboken and Jersey City across the Hudson River. Queens' downtown district would also be somewhere close to the Hudson, Long Island City. Staten Island, or Richmond as it was it called until recently, would likely densify in St. George near the ferry terminal.
 
Staten Island is denser than most big cities, including Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Seattle. (It is hardly necessary to add that it is much denser than such famously sprawling cities as Atlanta and Houston.) Indeed, given its "suburb in a city" reputation, the surprising thing is how dense it is.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
First thought. Add a Green Zone (Farming area) around NYC before the end of WW2. It largely stays around like rent controls. So if say Long Island east of NYC is zoned agriculture, we push up a good bit the density.

Second thought. Put some type of military base on Long Island between 1890 and 1945. Might need some war scare, but much like the 10th Mountain Division still sits on a good invasion route for attacking Canada, we station the 2nd Marine Division stationed on it Long Island training ground.

Third thought, but this does it through the USA. Nerf the auto some. Maybe Ike is not POTUS and some other POTUS does major RR project not interstate highway.
 
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First thought. Add a Green Zone (Farming area) around NYC before the end of WW2. It largely stays around like rent controls. So if say Long Island east of NYC is zoned agriculture, we push up a good bit the density.

Second thought. Put some type of military base on Long Island between 1890 and 1945. Might need some war scare, but much like the 10th Mountain Division still sits on a good invasion route for attacking Canada, we the 2nd Marine Division stationed on it Long Island training ground.

Third thought, but this does it through the USA. Nerf the auto some. Maybe Ike is not POTUS and some other POTUS does major RR project not interstate highway.

Perhaps Robert Moses dies early for the third one ?
 
Like in all these things, the parts of the outer boroughs were that were developed before World War 2 tend to be as dense as Manhattan, while the parts developed after World War 2, while still more densely populated than normal suburbs, you get the long streets of detached single houses and shopping malls characteristic of suburbs. The subway network also doesn't cover the post-World War 2 stuff, all but a few of the lines were finished beforehand.

Americans after World War 2 did all their urban development suburban style. The USA was the world's leading oil producer and dispersion of the population was thought to be a good thing in the event of nuclear war. Plus lots of cheap houses on cheap land to alleviate the postwar housing shortage and the infrastructure could catch up later.

The alternative was to handle the population increase by just expanding the existing urban grid, as well as small towns, block by block and not only keeping existing streetcar lines but extending them as needed. This applies in other places than New York. I'm pretty sure this alternative was never seriously considered by anyone. Maybe having Tom Dewey win the 1948 presidential election and the Republicans keeping control of Congress could induce some butterflies.

Also getting Manhattan style density on Staten Island is very difficult since the island is really geographically (and also culturally) part of the Jersey Shore. Its easier to get an alternative timeline where its not developed much at all.
 
Also getting Manhattan style density on Staten Island is very difficult since the island is really geographically (and also culturally) part of the Jersey Shore. Its easier to get an alternative timeline where its not developed much at all.

Wouldn't geography and culture really matter if you can somehow induce housing demand, loosen some zoning laws, and allow developers to induce densification on the island? I'm not really too sure if Staten Island can induce demand but a post-1900 POD means there's 100 years to work with
 
Re Staten Island, look up the island on Google Maps and see the distances to even Lower Manhattan compared to that for the other boroughs or even much of New Jersey.

You can also play around with the estimated travel times using Google (I think they consistently shortchange the actual times) and again compare it to other areas.

Its unclear why the British grouped the island into their New York instead of their New Jersey colony in the first place.

So pretty much the city and state of New York would have to be really determined to boost Staten Island's population beyond OTL for no conceivable reason, which also means spending lots of money extending the subway network there -and it would have to be an express line. Something could maybe be done with faster and more frequent ferries. Note there is a subway line that goes to the Rockaways and their density is about the same as SI. Its just too far away.
 
Manhattan is built on a bed of granite. I imagine skyscrapers would be less feasible in other areas. Also bound to be different building codes for different parts of the city.to get a denser population in other areas you might, ironically, need to start off with dinner populatoins in other areas. There needs to be the population base demanding extra services. Anyone know about what part are of the HUdson Sound used to be unusable as good docks? If we can move docks away from Manhattan things might help. I don't see any of the financial institutes moving, as the Stock Exchange is in a set place and it used to be you had to be nearby there to really use their services. Actually, maybe early on a lot of people donate large amounts of land to be parks? I imagine Tammany Hall or some later group controlling City Hall would sell it to their supporters, but enough of them and they should displace more than a couple blocks worth of buildings, meaning less space for tens of thousand. Just a drop in the bucket, of course,.
 
A POD where the Dutch built their settlement on the west bank of the Hudson is somewhat OT but would be interesting and I will probably post it later if no one else does.

Eastern Queens, most of Staten Island, and a few parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx can best be described as high density suburban. The subway network never extended to these areas. Pretty much detached single family houses like in adjacent parts of Union and Nassau counties. The westernmost neighborhoods in San Francisco, a long Muni ride to the center of the city, have sort of a suburban feel. We really need a more complex terminology to describe settlement patterns.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Re Staten Island, look up the island on Google Maps and see the distances to even Lower Manhattan compared to that for the other boroughs or even much of New Jersey.

You can also play around with the estimated travel times using Google (I think they consistently shortchange the actual times) and again compare it to other areas.

Its unclear why the British grouped the island into their New York instead of their New Jersey colony in the first place.

So pretty much the city and state of New York would have to be really determined to boost Staten Island's population beyond OTL for no conceivable reason, which also means spending lots of money extending the subway network there -and it would have to be an express line. Something could maybe be done with faster and more frequent ferries. Note there is a subway line that goes to the Rockaways and their density is about the same as SI. Its just too far away.

Think in terms of water travel, not travel by land or tunnel. Makes sense then.
 
... which also means spending lots of money extending the subway network there - and it would have to be an express line.
IIRC there were a couple of plans in the early 1910s and 1920s to link the Staten Island to Brooklyn via subway tunnel, even digging a couple of hundred feet of one and converting the island's trains from steam to electric before outside factors killed both of them off.
 
Make the zoning laws less restrictive.

Long Island City in Queens was recently upzoned and the place blew up overnight.

Williamsburg isn't that much less built up than corresponding areas in Manhattan.

Given the intense amount of demand for property in NYC, if you actually *let* people build it up more people will do just that.


IIRC there were a couple of plans in the early 1910s and 1920s to link the Staten Island to Brooklyn via subway tunnel, even digging a couple of hundred feet of one and converting the island's trains from steam to electric before outside factors killed both of them off.

That would certainly help things as well.
 
The borough of Manhattan seems to be prominent in skyscrapers and towers that seemed to endlessly reach out for the heavens. However, the lesser boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island seemed to not be as densely populated and skyscraper-filled as Manhattan. Staten Island, in particular, seems underwhelming.

How can the lesser boroughs become more densely populated ? How can Brooklyn and Staten Island increase its skyline ?
Kill the interstate system. There will be "White Flight," but it won't be to Westchester and Putnam County if they cannot easily travel there. The neighborhoods would just get more gentrified.

Also, you need to kill rent control, so that the landlords could make money having housing and not let it all burn down, or like my grandfather did with property in Soho (!) as well as the Bronx, just stop paying taxes on it and abandon it.

Also, if NYC bucks the trend of industrial cities and does not tax everyone to death, you can keep more of the urban workbase (though not indefinitely obviously, but long enough to change the demographics of NY.)

Also, kill the Warren supreme court and get rid of bussing, so that schools will accurately represent the socieoeconmic make up of their neighborhoods, which will keep much of the NYC population from moving into Long Island, Jersey, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, etc.

If all of these things happen (which may require a pre-ww2 POD, like a communist Hitler or something to change NY politics) then NYC will be way more dense.

I grew up in a suburb where EVERYONE is from the Bronx. I have only found out as an adult that the way I talk is a Bronx accent (I was always under the impression that all NYers spoke that way as the suburbs are all Bronx transplants north of NYC.) All the stuff I listed was the reason why EVERYONE left the old neighborhood. And, we are talking about a bunch of Italians and Irish...they LIKED the old neighborhood until it was not THEIRS anymore.

So, the cost of making NYC more dense is to set back race relations a few decades, sorry to say.

Do not take this post as an endorsement of any policy of making NYC more dense.
 
The borough of Manhattan seems to be prominent in skyscrapers and towers that seemed to endlessly reach out for the heavens. However, the lesser boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island seemed to not be as densely populated and skyscraper-filled as Manhattan. Staten Island, in particular, seems underwhelming.

How can the lesser boroughs become more densely populated ? How can Brooklyn and Staten Island increase its skyline ?

As a Brooklynite I can explain something. During the 1920's Brooklyn's skyline had several high rises but it ended with the Great Depression, currently, thanks to gentrification there are all sorts of high rises in Brooklyn now, from Metrotech to the yuppie condos going up everywhere. As for Staten Island, its pretty much impossible, since Staten Island is essentially a suburb. The only part that seems to have dense population is around the ferry port. Also, Brooklyn has 3 million, thats pretty densely populated.
 
-Don’t end open European immigration until parts of Latin America did in the 50s and 60s.

-Higher immigration post 1960

-Far less restrictive zoning
 
Re Staten Island, look up the island on Google Maps and see the distances to even Lower Manhattan compared to that for the other boroughs or even much of New Jersey.

You can also play around with the estimated travel times using Google (I think they consistently shortchange the actual times) and again compare it to other areas.

Its unclear why the British grouped the island into their New York instead of their New Jersey colony in the first place.

So pretty much the city and state of New York would have to be really determined to boost Staten Island's population beyond OTL for no conceivable reason, which also means spending lots of money extending the subway network there -and it would have to be an express line. Something could maybe be done with faster and more frequent ferries. Note there is a subway line that goes to the Rockaways and their density is about the same as SI. Its just too far away.

Well I do know for the fact that there's a huge housing demand for New York City. So many people want to live there yet the market seems to be heavily restrictive, especially since suburb-esque local ordinances desire single-family homes rather than say multi-storey public/private housing buildings to accomodate for demand. Perhaps Staten Island, the less dense parts of Brooklyn and Queens, etc can be less restrictive in their townhouse-esque or suburban-esque zoning laws and allow for mixed-used larger towers to accomodate for the housing demand.

There's a lot of people wanting to live in New York and lot of families wanting to be close to the heart of the city. There is demand to live in New York but these small surbuban, town-house-esque zoning policies seem to restrict development and construction of further vertical towers (public housing or private development) to accomodate demand.
 
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