New York's lack of megatall skyscrapers actually has nothing to do with engineering. It's entirely feasible to build over 600-metres high in the city thanks to solid bedrock and an incredible amount of expertise in the local area. If you wanted to build a mega-tall then you could - but that's the problem. Hardly anyone wants to build a skyscraper that high in this city for a whole host of reasons. Firstly, there just isn't the demand. Manhattan's office market - which drove construction of the Empire State, World Trade Center and One Vanderbilt had become saturated before the pandemic and will likely take some time to recover afterwards. The luxury real estate market, which drove the construction of several super slender towers from small parcels of land along Billionaires Row in recent years, has also been cooling off. Those structures only really became financially viable because of the prices they were able to command for their location and park views. You couldn't let commercial space for anywhere near the same rate. Past mega-tall skyscrapers have cost well over a billion US dollars to construct, so any developer would need to recoup a pretty considerable sum from office or residential lets to make a profit. But past mega-tall skyscrapers were not constructed in New York - a market that frequently tops the list of the world's most expensive cities to build in. Project's here cost several hundred dollars more per square foot to build than in the Middle East or Asia.