I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument. New York and Tokyo are easy examples to refer to but they are in scale and history completely different. What about other cities that build high and are on a smaller or average size scale? Good examples? And you couldn't double SF's size by building higher easily anyway. City and county is 800,000 people now, doubling would bring it to population of Manhattan. That's lots of floors in lots of buildings. Tokyo is 13 million: 16x the size of SF. Not a relevant comparison.
> I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument.
If you haven't read The New Geography of Jobs, I highly recommend it. It gives an excellent explanation of why having a higher density of knowledge workers increases their per-capita productivity and creativity.
The Skyscraper Index is a concept put forward in January 1999[1] by Andrew Lawrence, research director at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein,[2] which showed that the world's tallest buildings have risen on the eve of economic downturns.[3] Business cycles and skyscraper construction correlate[4] in such a way that investment in skyscrapers peaks when cyclical growth is exhausted and the economy is ready for recession.[5] Mark Thornton's Skyscraper Index Model successfully sent a signal of the Late-2000s financial crisis at the beginning of August 2007.[6][7]
