Skyscrapers are the natural result of extremely high permitting costs, which don't scale well with building size. Your average real estate developer is just trying to get a return of investment, and a 7 story building is set up to be less profitable than the skyscraper or a subdivision.
A non-trivial part of the problem is the requirement of having access to two stairwells for each apartment. This is theoretically helping with fire safety, back in a world without sprinklers, but it also leads to far more space dedicated to hallways. Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US, and adding that second staircase, in a different fire-proof structure, would have cut the number of units by 25%. The two stairwells only start becoming cost effective when your building has a very large floor plan, at which point, you might as well have skyscraper.
Way too many things that people consider just the natural way of doing things just come down to regulatory regimes that don't quite ban alternatives, but make them uneconomical. Even when we assume every bit of regulation was added for good reasons, ultimately we shouldn't judge said regulation by what it intended to do, but by what it causes.
Make building the 8 story block less difficult and more profitable than the alternatives, and it'll get built without having to actually force anyone into building them.
> Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US
I'm curious if this bears out in how much property and casualty damage is there from multifamily dwelling fires between Spain and the US? In any case, it's a good example of why we should keep in mind that every safety regulation is necessarily a tradeoff against cost and efficiency.
A non-trivial part of the problem is the requirement of having access to two stairwells for each apartment. This is theoretically helping with fire safety, back in a world without sprinklers, but it also leads to far more space dedicated to hallways. Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US, and adding that second staircase, in a different fire-proof structure, would have cut the number of units by 25%. The two stairwells only start becoming cost effective when your building has a very large floor plan, at which point, you might as well have skyscraper.
Way too many things that people consider just the natural way of doing things just come down to regulatory regimes that don't quite ban alternatives, but make them uneconomical. Even when we assume every bit of regulation was added for good reasons, ultimately we shouldn't judge said regulation by what it intended to do, but by what it causes.
Make building the 8 story block less difficult and more profitable than the alternatives, and it'll get built without having to actually force anyone into building them.