Tall buildings and the social order

To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology.  The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence.  It is not all that expensive.  Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable.  It is simply difficult to do, requires able people working together, both initially to build the systems, and subsequently to keep them going.

It is habitable floors that are hard to do, and habitable floors are what generates the rental income.  So, to assess a society’s technological level, count habitable floors.

By and large, the taller the building, the more the profit.  Doubtless there is a limit, but in the center of most major cities, most tall buildings are below that limit.  If people could build taller, they would.  At our present technological level, settling space seems likely to be fatally unprofitable, but building upwards, building the city of tomorrow, is highly profitable.

In South Africa the upper parts of tall buildings built by whites have become uninhabitable.  That the upper part of the skyline has gone dark is the most visible symptom of social decay.

Mark Steyn makes fun of the South African government’s incapacity to govern, for which National Review will surely purge him, if it has not done so already.

Thamsanqa Jantjie, the lovable laugh-a-minute sign-language fraud who stood alongside President Obama gesticulating meaninglessly to the delight of all, was exposed in the days that followed as a far darker character. A violent schizophrenic charged over the years with burglary, rape, kidnapping, and murder, he was also a member of a “necklacing” gang — necklacing being the practice of placing a gasoline-filled tire over the head of the victim and setting it alight.

… a lot of things in South Africa simply don’t function anymore. As revealing as Mr. Jantjie’s extensive and violent criminal background is the fact that the National Prosecuting Authority cannot reliably state which offenses he has been convicted of, and, for the one crime for which he seems definitively to have been sentenced, whether in fact he served the sentence.

The twin towers had one hundred and ten habitable stories.

The top habitable floor of Freedom Tower, the replacement to the Twin Towers is labeled floor 104, but that is fraud, to disguise the fact that we cannot do this thing any more.  It is actually the ninety fourth habitable floor.

A slower pace of decay than South Africa, but decay nonetheless. Seems to me that the pace of decay has accelerated lately, but to draw definitive conclusions, will need a few more years.

The Soviet Union fell in part because they could not keep the lights on, and the elite got sick of the darkness.

I expect that by the second term of Bill de Blasio, the New York night skyline will be showing some dark spots, like the missing teeth of an aging homeless alcoholic.  This will be proudly depicted as huge progress in reducing carbon emissions.