It's hard me to accept your premise that a 30% increase is "bigger. much bigger." A 100% increase in size might reach that, this new one is less than a third bigger than the previous one.

But it's also an increase equal in size to a planned six-story health department headquarters that will house more than 300 employees.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.s…

Look at that footprint! This building will wipe most of downtown, the SE Industrial Area, and 5 bridges! They'll have to reroute the Willamette River (probably through some poor, brown neighborhood, no doubt). But worst of all, it'll cover up the Rose Garden Arena, the beating heart of our community. This plan is Rip Shitty, if you ask me.

A 200 million price tag is probably optimistic. That works out to about $475/sqr foot. After a bit of googling, it seem like in California courthouses in small to medium sized cities go for about $575/ sqr foot. and Travis County TX is building one that they estimate will cost $667/sqr foot. On the other had, somehow Broward County FL is getting one built for about $300/sqr foot.

If a downtown block is not big enough to fit a courthouse, that pretty much eliminates the downtown core for the courthouse. If you build it outside of downtown, you'll need a pretty big parking garage to go along with the courthouse. The Travis County courthouse includes a large underground parking garage and the Broward County one has a large above ground parking garage.

Land is cheaper in Florida because it's all going to be underwater soon.

I wandered around the courthouse when I was on jury duty. With the stairways, halls and upper floor atrium, there is easily 30% wasted space. With crime down, and intelligent law reforms and video conferencing court operations, we will not need a bigger courthouse, we would need a smaller one.