City ->1950 census -> 2007 estimate
[ul]
[li]Houston 596,163 -> 2,208,180[/li][li]Phoenix 106,818 -> 1,552,259 [/li][li]San Diego 333,865 -> 1,266,731 [/li][li]San Jose 95,280 -> 939,899 [/li][li]Las Vegas 24,624 -> 558,880[/li][/ul]
Here’s a list of some large cities today that weren’t so big in 1950 when the car first took over.
Zoning laws in most cities do limit skyscrapers to certain areas. It’s hard to believe today but virtually every city in the country had height limits on buildings that sometimes lasted until the 1950s. It was partially because downtown business associations didn’t want competition and partially because dense buildings areas create all the problems and costs of downtowns and cities didn’t want to have to deal with that.
But suburban areas may or may not have height restrictions. For the last couple of decades edge cities have sprung up outside every large city in America. Many of them have scores of skyscrapers, although none as tall as in center cities. They are also more geared to cars and not to pedestrians. You don’t walk around them the way you would a downtown. They come into being because land costs get as high in some suburbs as in downtown, higher in areas with failing centers.
If a downtown fails badly enough, free parking return to attract suburbanites who won’t come downtown any other way. But I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
Parking gets expensive whenever the density of people increases, including suburban edge cities. Just figure out the area needed to park even 1000 cars, let alone 10,000. The choices are few. Giant mall-like parking lots that cost huge amounts of land, are environmental nightmares and are seldom full. Parking garages that cost ten of thousands of dollars per space. Street parking that can only hold limited numbers of cars and force quick turnover. Or places that combine all the worst of the above, like stadium or convention center parking. Cars demand this logic.
I think parking sucks in downtown San Diego. I don’t like it in downtown San Jose. That said they do not suck like in San Francisco or New York.
I can’t work out what your point is here. All those cities would have been big enough in 1950 that the “downtown” area would already be well-defined, and built on. Subsequent expansion would be on the fringe - doesn’t change what the central core looks like (although the addition of extra people to the city creates more pressure on inner-core prices)
Exapno Mapcase’s cite looks more like what the OP’s looking for. But of course such structures aren’t built in the central core of any cities because there’s no room there