At a time of unprecedented speed of construction of tall buildings around the world, evidence-based evaluations of their drawbacks as well as claimed advantages are remarkably infrequent (Ng, 2017). Given the potential for long-term impacts of unknown magnitude, this situation seems to warrant urgent remedy. As a contribution to that goal, this research summary looks specifically at negative impacts, which we find are under-reported. Specifically, we find significant negative impacts in the following categories:
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Economic externalities. There is evidence that tall residential buildings with for-sale units are significantly more likely to fail economically over time. A hardly addressed but important issue is the built-in market failure in meeting the maintenance costs of towers – especially residential towers – with condominium type ownership. Contrary to intuition, the maintenance costs broadly rise with height, reaching prohibitive sums that many households will at some point not be able to afford. Towers are thus destined to faster deterioration, greater difficulties in upgrading to newly expected standards, and major, unaddressed economic and urban challenges when the time comes to replace these towers.There is also evidence that the higher cost of tall residential for-sale buildings can fuel gentrification and make surrounding housing less affordable (Lehrer and Wieditz 2009).
There is also some evidence that tall buildings tend to suppress small-scale entrepreneurial activity by replacing older, smaller, more affordable commercial spaces with larger more expensive ones.
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Social impacts. There is abundant cautionary research on the negative social impacts of residential tall buildings and their associated urban typologies, both for residentsand for adjacent communities. These include greater isolation and loneliness for some populations, greater rates of depression and even suicide, and suppression of street-based social interaction (particularly for tall buildings with garages for private automobiles).
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Impacts on the natural environment. There is evidence that tall buildings do not contribute significantly to urban sustainability, and that arguments to that end are often greatly exaggerated. Evidence shows that many tall buildings with claims to sustainability have performed poorly on environmental criteria in actual post-occupancy evaluations. Tall buildings also have higher embodied energy and resources than lower building typologies, greater exposure to energy heat and loss, and higher negative impacts on access to natural daylight and passive heating by adjacent buildings.
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Impacts on the human environment. There is ample research indicating that tall buildings have many negative impacts on the livability of their adjacent public and private spaces. These include shading effects, wind effects, loss of sky view, canyon effects (concentration of pollutants at street level), and aesthetic effects for larger numbers of residents, which, when judged by residents to be negative, affect more residents negatively for taller buildings. This problem is compounded by evidence of a significant divergence between what professionals and non-professionals judge to be a proper and pleasing building design, which becomes more consequential for more residents when buildings are taller, and thus more conspicuous. There is also an inherent cognitive bias in any profession, which in the case of architecture and development, can have negative ramifications for laypersons’ quality of life.