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New Cities

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Re: New Cities

#351

Post by davidw »

potatolicious wrote: post #324
mikestew wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I took a different take on your original post. I'll leave my original reply, as I still agree with the point, but I see where you're going with this and heartily agree. One of my main complaints with where I live is that it's a round-trip hour to walk to any store, yet $DEITY forbid that we put a corner store anywhere in my neighborhood lest a developer be prevented from plopping another house on that plot.

Agree in general - but keep in mind that $DEITY is often your neighbors. Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug. The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both…

> I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friendly cities, but ultimately I'm wary of even my own "plans" and think the freedom to have people doing different things, and let cities evolve naturally beats even the best of plans.

Re: New Cities

#352

Post by kapitza »

sama wrote: post #81
devinhelton wrote: post #58

The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are. This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you ima…

It would be better to move a few hundred startups. Startups sometimes grow up to be big tech companies, and it's much easier to move tiny companies. We could, uh, help with that.

I thought this wasn't a "libertarian utopia for techies?"

When you look at how ordinary people choose a city to live in, the most important variable is who else gets to live there. Everything else is a rounding error.

Boulder, Colorado is a beautiful little city. Its population is roughly the same as that of West Point, Liberia. Compare a city with the legislation and architecture of West Point, but the population of Boulder, to a city with the legislation and architecture of Boulder, and the population of West Point. Which would you rather live in?

When you treat human beings as generic, interchangeable parts, you're missing the first lesson of Christopher Alexander's approach: design real solutions for real people. You probably wouldn't fund a YC company that assumed the world consisted of 6 billion interchangeable customers.

Re: New Cities

#353

Post by TulliusCicero »

mikestew wrote: post #300
davidw wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city. Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this, but they aren't allowed to function any more in most cities in the US because of the amount of rules and regulations about what can be bu…

Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. As the my sibling comment points out, markets are great for maximizing incoming for the stores leasing space in the malls. One prime example I'm thinking of was 25 years ago, let's go to Google's sat view…

> No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks.

That's almost never "the market" in action. For one thing, street design is obviously under the purview of the local (and possibly state and federal) department of transportation, not private developers. Plus, local zoning regulations usually have minimum parking requirements that strongly incentivize those kinds of car-centric shopping malls. It's hard to build a pedestrian-friendly area if the law says you need to use a ton of space (often more space than is used for the actual buildings) for car parking.

> Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me

It's not "no true scotsman", it's simply the truth that it's the government pushing car-centric design. Now, in some cases the market might ALSO want car-centric design, but it's hard to tease that out when the rule of law is so strong to begin with.

Re: New Cities

#354

Post by nickff »

st3v3r wrote: post #328
nickff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, pointing any firearm at a clerk would be assault (with a weapon), whether or not it was loaded. If I told you that I went to a shooting range and used my gun, what would you think? That I'd pointed it at stuff? If I said that I went out onto the street and used my rifle, you would not surmise that I had looked over the iron sights. note: I do not own a firearm

You'd still be using the firearm, though. You wouldn't have shot it, but you used the threat of shooting it.

Would saying you'd go home, and come back with your firearm still be using it? What about threatening to go buy a firearm? How about saying you once went to a shooting range and shot a firearm? Telling a story about going hunting with a gun? Talking about an episode of "How it's Made" where they made a firearm?

Re: New Cities

#355

Post by mikestew »

underwater wrote: post #277
davidw wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I earn the equivalent of a few beers a month from affiliate links, but hey, if you feel that it's better to give that money to Jeff Bezos, that's your prerogative. I'm always happy to buy a beer or two (the entire proceeds of my ill-gotten gains!) at 10 Barrel or Crux or someplace for anyone who happens to visit Bend. Mostly though, since your account is new, we're ok with capitalism and making a bit of money here on…

Affiliate links feel spammy because it makes it hard to determine whether your recommendation is altruistic or financially motivated.

They feel spammy when attached to spammy comments from new accounts, and the comment/post seems to specifically target a site with decent traffic such as HN. Standing alone, I don't automatically have a problem with an affiliate link.

Not that davidw needs my endorsement, but the dude's got 43K in karma, and I've seen his comments around elsewhere. I'm fine with letting someone like that slide. As he points out himself, one can expect a little beer money from affiliate links unless you really go out of your way to spam the link.

Re: New Cities

#356

Post by bluthru »

BurningFrog wrote: post #325
davidw wrote: post #17

I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…

Old cities were built in much more unregulated ways, without planning commissions, neighborhood meetings, zoning and other bureaucracy. Just people filling their own needs on their own property.

They were regulated by materials and physics. Automobiles, HVAC, steel, etc. throw all of that out the window and can result in urban environments that aren't great for humans.

Re: New Cities

#357

Post by rwhitman »

athenot wrote: post #109
sama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

Cars in tunnels is a great idea, just like the subway: burry it so as to not impact life on the surface. Unfortunately, it is very expensive to operate that way. The easiest tunnels to build are the ones Paris did for their subway a century ago: dig up the soft limestone under the street, lay tracks, close it up. But you still need to deal with ventilation (especially for non-electric cars), fire suppressant, evacuat…

I've thought about this. My thought has been, bump the street level up one story to create a pedestrian / bicycle promenade and move building entrances to the second floor. Keep the existing street below intact, with parallel parking etc. Essentially build a boardwalk above a commercial street, so that traffic can flow below. (Though for ventilation purposes, it would be best if most cars at street level were electric.)

Raising the street grade one story has been done before, when flush toilets were introduced in the late 1800's. Notably in Seattle and Chicago but in pockets other low-lying cities as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground

Re: New Cities

#358

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

I see two endeavors that may be completely discrete:

1. Building from-scratch cities that are optimized for quality of life.

2. Evolving current cities into more nearly optimal.

Which direction will this effort go? Is there a risk of from- scratch cities being built so fast that and being so desirable that they cause historic cities to empty out?

And... what if the optimal solution is not cities at all, but, say, small towns?

Re: New Cities

#359

Post by potatolicious »

davidw wrote: post #351
potatolicious wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree in general - but keep in mind that $DEITY is often your neighbors. Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug. The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both…

> I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friend…

It's a tricky balance to be certain. I grew up in an Asian country with extremely laissez-faire regulations and the urban landscape was a bit hellish.

Very, very economically efficient with huge economic diversity and competition, but nonetheless unpleasant (and unsafe!) in many ways.

Complete freedom is likely not the right answer, but neither is the extremely prescriptive type of planning that has dominated American cities since the 50s, the type that Jane Jacobs rails against in her famous book.

Oddly enough we were really good at this between the late 1800s and early 1900s. The places in America that people continue to enjoy being (and now have become enormously unaffordable) have almost all come of age in that era. I'm still not entirely sure what the x-factor was, but part of it was probably a more "gardener/enabler" philosophy to urban planning than the "prescriptivist/masterpiece" thought that dominates now.

Planning in many places in that era was more about setting the foundations for the market to grow productively, rather than monumental projects designed to micromanage the conditions of every day life. See for example the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 in NYC.

Re: New Cities

#360

Post by Jtsummers »

simonswords82 wrote: post #175
sama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

Cars underground is a great idea but you'd need to find a way to make GPS work, especially since GPS is necessary for autonomous cars which are obviously a thing of the future.

GPS is helpful, and key, to autonomous cars. But let's not forget the various ways GPS can be hacked. We need multiple methods of navigation (visual/radar/lidar to stay within lines and avoid obstacles, inertial/GPS like aircraft use to sanity check your inputs, ground-based authenticated systems to identify current location (imagine being able to poll an intersection for its identity, we already have computers at every intersection with traffic lights)).

If we rely too strongly on GPS, we eliminate many existing roadways with tunnels, and many convenient constructs like parking decks, or new tunnels where they make sense.

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