PanethosMay 18

USA cities whose tallest building is residential

Identified below at American cities whose tallest building is a residential structure. The list provided below does not include mixed use towers such as hotel/residential or office/residential. A minimum height of 175 feet was required for inclusion. States most represented on the list include the following (listed by number cities vs. towers):

  • Florida = 16 cities
  • New Jersey = 7 cities
  • Illinois = 6 cities
  • Michigan = 5 cities
  • New York = 4 cities or boroughs

The tallest residential structures on the list range in location from traditional downtowns, midtowns, first-ring suburbs, outer suburbs, college towns, and vacation/retirements cities. Some of the cities fall into multiple categories like Ann Arbor which falls into three classifications as a college town with a traditional downtown and a distant Detroit suburb.

99 Hudson Street in Jersey City – Source: 99hudsonliving com

It is also interesting to note that there was quite a gap between development boom times for such buildings in American cities. As the list shows, there were boomlets just before the Great Depression, during the Urban Renewal period of the 1960s/1970s, the early 2000s just before the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, and now during the 2020s. Hopefully, the current booklet will not end as disastrously as those three.

Peace!

  • Jersey City, New Jersey: 99 Hudson Street (2020) = 900 feet

    • 2. Queens Borough, New York: The Orchard (2026) = 811 feet

    3. Nashville, Tennessee: Paramount Tower (2028) = 750 feet

    Paramount Tower in Nashville (left center) – Source: archpaper.com

    4-5. Sunny Isles Beach, Florida: Estates at Acqualina North and South (2022/23) = 672 feet x 2 towers

    6-7. Miami Beach, Florida: Blue and Green Diamond Towers (2000) = 559 feet x 2 towers

    8-9. Hallandale Beach, Florida: Beach Club Towers 1 & 2 (2007) = 505 feet x 2 towers

    10. Fort Lauderdale, Florida: Veneto Las Olas (2023) = 499 feet

    11-12. Fort Lee, New Jersey: The Modern North & South (2014) = 498 feet x 2 towers

    13. Newark, New Jersey: Summit Tower (2028) = 489 feet

    14. Salt Lake City, Utah: Astra Tower (2024) = 449 feet

    15-16. Honolulu, Hawaii: The Central Ala Moana (2011) and New Rochelle, New York: Skyline (2007) = 435 feet

    17. Bronx Borough, New York: River Park Towers (1975) = 428 feet

    18. West Palm Beach, Florida: One West Palm Residential Tower (2027) = 426 feet

    19-20. Long Beach, California: Shoreline Gateway East Tower (2021) and Aventura, Florida: Hidden Bay 1 (2000) = 417 feet

    Shoreline Gateway in Long Beach – Source: apartments.com

    21-123. Guttenberg, New Jersey: Galaxy Towers (1976) = 415 feet x 3 towers

    24. Beverly Hills, California: One Beverly Hills (2028) = 410 feet

    25. Grand Rapids, Michigan: River House Condos (2008) = 406 feet

    26. South Padre Island, Texas: Sapphire Condos (2008) = 404 feet x 2

    27. Riviera Beach, Florida: Tiara Condominiums (2005) = 400 feet

    28. North Bergen, New Jersey: Stonehenge Apartments (1967) = 369 feet

    29. West New York, New Jersey: Riviera Towers (1965) = 359 feet

    30-31. North Miami Beach, Florida: Harbor Towers 1 & 2 (2018) = 358 feet x 2 towers

    32. Pompano Beach, Florida: 1380 S. Ocean Boulevard (prop) = 353 feet

    33. Stamford, Connecticut: Parc Stamford (2009) = 350 feet

    34. West Hollywood, California: Sierra Towers (1965) ~ 350 feet

    35. Tempe, Arizona: West Sixth II (2011) = 345 feet

    36. Rochester, Minnesota: Broadway Plaza (2004) = 342 feet

    37. Fort Myers, Florida: High Point Place I (2007) = 341 feet

    38. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: Margate Towers (2004) = 329 feet

    39. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Graduate Tower (2020) = 315 feet

    40. Naples, Florida: Enclave = 309 feet

    41-42. Peoria, Illinois: Twin Towers I & II (1984) = 309 feet x 2 towers

    43. Portsmouth, Virginia: Harbor Tower Apartments (1983) = 307 feet

    44-45. Lansing, Michigan: Tower on Grand (2028) and Boca Raton, Florida: Boca Raton Club Tower (1969) = 300 feet

    Tower on Grand in Lansing – Source: landing downtown.com

    46-47. Evanston, Illinois: 605 Davis Street (2028) and Bloomington-Normal, Illinois: Watterson Towers (1969) = 299 feet

    48. Somerville, Massachusetts: Prospect Union Square. (2023) = 297 feet

    49. Worcester, Massachusetts: The 6Hundred (1964) = 289 feet (tied with another building in the city)

    50. Ocean City, Maryland: Century 1 Condos (1975) ~280 feet

    51. Yonkers, New York: Seven Pines Tower (1975) = 278 feet

    52. Silver Spring, Maryland: Solaire 8200 Dixon (2022) = 276 feet

    53. Champaign, Illinois: 309 Green (2009) = 268 feet

    54. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Tower Plaza (1969) = 267 feet

    55. Aurora, Illinois: Leland Tower (1928) ~ 265 feet

    56. Gulf Shores, Alabama: Island Towers = 260 feet

    57. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Coliseum Tower Residences (2007) = 259 feet

    58. Asbury Park, New Jersey: Asbury Tower (1074) = 256 feet

    59. Bowling Green, Kentucky: Pearce-Ford Tower (1970) = 250 feet

    60. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Willow Valley Mosaic (2029) = 244 feet

    61. Pensacola Beach, Florida: Beach Club Towers = 243 feet x 2 towers

    62. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Skyrise Apartments (1982) = 230 feet

    63. Marco Island, Florida: Summit House Condos (1981) ~ 230 feet

    64. Destin, Florida: Jade East Towers = 229 feet

    65. Joliet, Illinois: Joshua Arms Apartments = 203 feet

    66. Huntington, West Virginia: West Virginia Building (1925) = 200 feet

    67-68. Newport News, Virginia: River Park Towers (1986) and Bryan-College Station, Texas: The REV Student Housing (2023) ~ 200 feet

    69. Owensboro, Kentucky: Roosevelt House (1973) = 195 feet

    70. Royal Oak, Michigan: The Fifth (2007) = 193 feet

    71. Rockford, Illinois: Faust Landmark (1939) = 186 feet

    72. Fort Myers Beach, Florida: Ocean Harbor Condos = 184 feet x 2 towers

    73. Longboat Key, Florida: Islands West (1972) = 183 feet

    74. Monroe, Louisiana: Frances Tower (1932) = 179 feet

    75. Richfield, Minnesota: City Bella (2004) = 177 feet

    SOURCES:

    #apartments #buildings #cities #CollegeTowns #condominiums #condos #design #downtown #highrises #housing #residences #resorts #skylines #skyscrapers #suburbs #towers
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    Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​Jun 8, 2023

    How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?

    -- pixl97 @ HN

    One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).

    There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).

    These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.

    As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:

    • Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education, or the UK's "Green Book": https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/greenbook.html

    • There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)

    • The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.

    • The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.

    • Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.

    Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.

    So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.

    I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.

    The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:

    • A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.

    • A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.

    • Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]

    • Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.

    • Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.

    • On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.

    • Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.

    And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.

    There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.

    (Adapted from an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249791.)

    Notes:

  • "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.

    • #OnlineCommunities #Community #IntentionalCommunity #KeepItFresh #KeepItSmall #Universities #CollegeTowns #Mastodon #TheFediverse #StScholasticaDayRiot #RedBrickUniversities #PlateGlassUniversities #CaliforniaMasterPlan #LandGrantUniversities #ResearchUniversities #Usenet #HackerNews #LongForm

    California Master Plan for Higher Education - Wikipedia