Comment by brailsafe

Plenty of things were built just fine or better and hold up with regular maintenance or modifications, and many are proving to have only been practical to build during a time that had a lower floor for better or worse depending on the thing.

Would some places have become what they are today had they not built their subway system when it was opportune or hilariously less expensive than it is now? The good things we can iterate on or refactor now would have way more overhead to build from scratch at todays standards, not all of which are inherently useful or justified. Sometimes a whole city burns down or all the labor was forced, which sucks and we don't want, but sometimes you're having to get shadow studies done to build anything higher than a bungalow