That seems right, and there's another compounding factor -- expectation of future economic growth. These beautiful historic buildings took enormous amounts of capital and enormously long times to build. If you don't expect much future growth, then that's logical--just build whatever is best, and it takes as long as it takes. But when you expect a lot of growth, then anything you build now will be much less good than what you could build in the future, and in the future will represent a poor use of scarce land. So you get in an equilibrium where it never makes sense to spend much now, because you can get more later and you'll want to knock down the present thing. Better to make the current thing cheap on the lower end of the market, or intentionally faddish on the high end.
Just think about the exemplars--the Church that built Stephansdom and is building Sagrada Familia expects to be around in much the same form in another thousand years, with a religious ritual that has very similar space requirements and still-meaningful symbols. Google does not think this about itself. Cities building modern public housing do not think this about residential housing. Exurbs building McMansions expect future waves of redevelopment.
That seems right, and there's another compounding factor -- expectation of future economic growth. These beautiful historic buildings took enormous amounts of capital and enormously long times to build. If you don't expect much future growth, then that's logical--just build whatever is best, and it takes as long as it takes. But when you expect a lot of growth, then anything you build now will be much less good than what you could build in the future, and in the future will represent a poor use of scarce land. So you get in an equilibrium where it never makes sense to spend much now, because you can get more later and you'll want to knock down the present thing. Better to make the current thing cheap on the lower end of the market, or intentionally faddish on the high end.
Just think about the exemplars--the Church that built Stephansdom and is building Sagrada Familia expects to be around in much the same form in another thousand years, with a religious ritual that has very similar space requirements and still-meaningful symbols. Google does not think this about itself. Cities building modern public housing do not think this about residential housing. Exurbs building McMansions expect future waves of redevelopment.