Suitability to location. - Proportion of cost of building to value of land. - Effects of skyscrapers. - Table of business buildings suitable for various locations. - Table of residences suitable for various locations. - Depreciation and life of buildings. - General effects of buildings. - Nuisances and restrictions.

Let us consider next the types of buildings erected for different utilities and their reflex effects on values. The most important consideration governing suitability to location is that of proportion of cost of building to value of land, the safe general rule being that the cost of the building should approximately equal the value of the land. In other words, the typical successful property, land and building, appears to earn double interest on the cost of the building, one-half of which capitalized as economic rent gives a value to the land equal to the cost of the building. While there are exceptions to this proportion it forms a median line of departure, applying most closely to business property, whether the building is a $5,000 one-story brick on a cheap lot or a $3,000,000 office building in the highest priced location. The chief destruction of capital comes from the erection of expensive buildings on cheap lots, while the erection of cheap buildings, known as tax payers, even on expensive land, should not lead to loss, although it may not lead to great profit. On a street whose traffic is increasing rapidly a business building costing several times the value of the land may profitably be erected, since within ten years the value of the land may overtake the cost of the building. If, however, the building runs at a low return for ten years, the investment may prove a poor one, and the compromise of erecting one or two-stories of sufficient strength to carry later five or six, is sometimes the best solution.

In the largest cities increasing demand for space in favored localities has steadily increased the height of buildings, the practical checks arising from time to time having been successively overcome by new inventions. While fifty years ago the average height of business buildings in New York was three or four stories, and in the best locations five or six stories, the general use of elevators after 1870 ran the height up to eight or nine stories, where it was checked by the expense of the heavy walls and by the waste of the. most valuable space on the ground floor taken up by the walls. Skeleton steel construction, developed since 1890, has saved the space on the ground floor, modified the cost of the highest buildings and run them up to twelve or sixteen stories, which express elevators have lifted to twenty-five and thirty stories. When skyscrapers were first erected it was the common opinion that buildings of this character in the midst of low buildings by cuttingoff their light and air robbed them of their rights, so that justice demanded a legal limit to the height of buildings. It was soon found out, however, that where a skyscraper was so built as to require light and air from the adjoining lot, it was the owner of the small lot who had the skyscraper at his mercy. The threat of replacing the low building with a high one, destroying the value of possibly a quarter to a third of the skyscraper, has quite uniformly compelled the owner of the skyscraper to buy or lease for a long term of years the adjoining property, as with the American Surety Building, Washington Life building, etc. Skyscrapers being naturally located on corners, the typical development of a small block would consist of four high buildings on the four corners and four low ones between them controlled by the. high ones. With long narrow blocks, as in New York, the development would be more irregular, the tendency being to alternate high and low buildings. Further variations occur where a skyscraper owns one or two lots in an adjoining tract in order to block the erection of another high building, as with the Park Row Realty Building, and the Broad Exchange Building, or the purchase of low buildings across narrow streets to insure light and air, as with some of the life insurance company buildings.