Given the Bay Area’s soaring housing demand and scarce land, building taller residential buildings seems like an ideal solution.
In practice, however, highrise buildings require steel or concrete framing and are far more expensive to build per square foot than lowrise, wood buildings. To cover those costs, highrise developers must target the upper end of the housing market where margins are fattest. But it doesn’t have to be that way, argues Randy Miller, co-founder of RAD Urban, an Oakland-based…