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Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

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Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#71

Post by cal5k »

na85 wrote: post #67
cal5k wrote: post #54

People are cheering, but as a broader statement this is a small sample of how difficult it is to do business in Canada.

>how difficult it is to do business in Canada. Or, put differently, how difficult it is to exploit the public's privacy for financial gain in Canada? I'm Canadian, and I'm glad that Google didn't get carte blanche to come in and build their surveillance dystopia.

I'm not even a fan of that project in particular, but this is a common problem in Canada - the goalpost constantly shifts, the process becomes a political hot potato, and the foreign investor eventually just says "fuck this" and pulls out of the market. It's happened in oil & gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and a whole host of other sectors.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#72

Post by asdff »

supernova87a wrote: post #57

Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to…

What do you do when city council members profit off of the status quo? It's not that they are poorly informed, they are well aware of what they are doing and choose to ignore expert advice on city planning decisions. This is the frustration I have with my local government in LA. Most people who live in my city are renters, but most voters in local elections are homeowners so their voice is heard above all else, and council members are landlords or have multiple investment properties. When plans come up for building more density around transit, they overtly say 'this disrupts my view' but really mean 'this will limit the tax-free exponential growth I've enjoyed on my property values.' It's so frustrating, and I'm not sure how it can possibly be changed.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#73

Post by sudosysgen »

teen wrote: post #58
sudosysgen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, destroying luxury condos and not replacing them with anything will not help. But the housing market is more complicated that straightforward supply and demand, with a lot of second and third order effects, and in the end building incredible amounts of luxury condos has done nothing for rent prices and housing availability in Toronto, or in Montreal where I live.

How is supply and demand not the major factor here?

Because the housing market has mechanisms (such as leveraged landlords) that mean that the price of land tends to inflate up until a situation of equilibrium such that the price of rent is always relatively high in any city where land is somewhat constrained, because zoning is a thing, because most people cannot get mortgages and are as such not able to participate in the condo market, because the price of land is wildly variable for reasons of zoning, because real estate investors do not always operate rationally (for example, empty rental homes held purely as stores of value), because the type of housing affects the type of transportation used which affects which kinds of land is suitable for use as housing, because not all housing is created equal in function or in value, and so on.

Simply supply and demand is not a sufficient mechanism to explain the housing markets in cities such as Toronto.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#75

Post by ocdtrekkie »

pb7 wrote: post #69
at_a_remove wrote: post #50

Does this count for the Google Graveyard? I'm still waiting for that miraculous Google Fiber to come rolling in here. I am wondering precisely how projects get the green light at Google. This kind of thing is just ... it's like someone read some shiny-eyed sci-fi story from the 1950s and decided to Brave New World it into being with metrics without asking if anyone would find it objectionable or even desirable.

Google Fiber was a major success that got ousted by the incumbents with never ending lawsuits and resistance. Take your anger out on the monopoly ISPs across the country.

This is untrue. Talk to Louisville, where Google put trenches in the roadways, loosely covered them up with foam, letting the average snowplow rip up their network.

Fiber used real cities as experiment grounds, and ended up with at least one solution so bad they left the city rather than fix it, and had to settle with the city for all the damages to their roadways.

Pictures: https://www.wdrb.com/news/google-fiber-announces-plan-to-fix... (Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything.)

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#76

Post by 52-6F-62 »

cal5k wrote: post #71
na85 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how difficult it is to do business in Canada. Or, put differently, how difficult it is to exploit the public's privacy for financial gain in Canada? I'm Canadian, and I'm glad that Google didn't get carte blanche to come in and build their surveillance dystopia.

I'm not even a fan of that project in particular, but this is a common problem in Canada - the goalpost constantly shifts, the process becomes a political hot potato, and the foreign investor eventually just says "fuck this" and pulls out of the market. It's happened in oil & gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and a whole host of other sectors.

Outside of retail, all of the rest of those have real national security implications.

And if by retail you're referring to burger joints or Target, I'm afraid that's just market effect.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#77

Post by jimmaswell »

nick_ wrote: post #39

Good. Toronto doesn't need condo neighbourhoods with gimmicky smart-phone integrations. It needs re-zoning of low density neighbourhoods to allow medium density to be built, thus more uniformly distributing the large and growing population.

What do you consider low density? I really don't like the idea of stamping out all single family homes and nice green areas in proximity to cities. Mixing high density in with commercial areas seems fine though.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#78

Post by sudosysgen »

CaveTech wrote: post #51
sudosysgen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. In general construction of new condos is focused on the luxury kind of condos Google was undoubtedly looking at, which are absolutely not what cities need right now. We need affordable housing.

I'm not sure if either are you Canadian/Toronto residents, but Toronto has been developing a metric fuckton of condos over the last decade. In my neighbourhood alone (a 3x4 block area) there's been 15 30+ story condos built in that timeframe. We have no problems with condo development, imo.

I live in Montreal. Incredible amounts of condos have been getting built left and right, and they are inaccessible to people that need housing. The end result is that the price of housing for those that need it the most has increased dramatically. Now the city, after spending years focusing on getting more condos built, realized it's not going to fix the issues and will start building at least a few thousand units of state housing.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#79

Post by CPLX »

supernova87a wrote: post #57

Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to…

> city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic

If I were a Toronto resident I would not want a foreign, powerful, rapacious and often exploitative private company involved in those things, as they are better handled by democratic institutions.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#80

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Seems like they are using COVID-19 as an excuse to dump a sinking ship while trying to save face. Real estate value isn't going up, interest rates are going way down. But since people found out what Google was trying to do with Quayside, they've had nothing but opposition.

EDIT: Update from CNBC: "Toronto was expected to make its final decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on May 20."

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