Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 383 posts

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#81

Post by hinkley »

asdff wrote: post #72
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 c…

So you give the tools to watchdog groups, and eventually the council has to adopt them in order to reason about how they're being measured.

Then the endless game theory rounds begin...

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#82

Post by 3pt14159 »

frereubu wrote: post #41

Enjoy the HN cynicism from July 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487838

For those of us that live in Toronto and have experienced Palmerston and City Place; Kensington Market and Metro groceries it's so obvious that another set of condos built by a giant corporation are not what we need. You can call me cynical all you like, I'd rather have my city move in the direction of Europe (Vilnius or Paris) than Manhattan or Tokyo.

Count me as one of the many happy people that this fell through, even though I'm generally positive about Google's other enterprises.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#83

Post by sudosysgen »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #49
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.

> construction of new condos is focused on the luxury kind Supply is supply. Harlem is largely former luxury units. Anecdotally, the luxury building opening down the street let me negotiate down my rent. It sucked the highest earners out of my building (and renter pool), which reduced my landlord's leverage. And it let me compare perks ( e.g. included gym offsetting a membership), which increased mine. End result was…

Sure, and in most cities incredible amounts of condos have been built and prices of rent for low-income individuals have increased massively.

It does not work in the real world. Supply is not supply. For one, these condos being built can essentially not be rented, and that means that they are not supply for low and middle income individuals.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#84

Post by asdff »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62
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.

Condos are actually not expensive, just in the USA where they are mostly luxury products. In many other countries, condos are normal (and are called apartments or something similar) and much more affordable than single family homes or town homes.

A Condo in the U.S. refers to a specific type of apartment that you can buy, and usually cannot rent out or modify. Typically they have all the trimmings out of the latest catalogues when they are built, so they fetch expensive single family home prices due to all that granite. They are popular for downsizing after your kids have moved out of your house, or find yourself widowed or divorced. Due to their illiquidity and lack of space, they are less popular for younger people who might want more bedrooms some day if they have children.

In most major cities in the U.S., any sort of property, even an empty dirt lot, is prohibitively expensive to the majority of the population. In LA in particular, the median home is unaffordable to 75% of the population. And the median home is a rotting bungalow precariously positioned on wooden posts built in 1947.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#85

Post by sudosysgen »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62
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.

Condos are actually not expensive, just in the USA where they are mostly luxury products. In many other countries, condos are normal (and are called apartments or something similar) and much more affordable than single family homes or town homes.

Well, in Toronto they are quite expensive, so it really doesn't help. And that is mostly by design. If Google wants to build cheap condos, then so be it, I don't think anyone will oppose them.

They would have to be really cheap though, because in NA condos can generally not be rented out.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#86

Post by what_ever »

claudeganon wrote: post #63
briffle wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building Luxury condos does create affordable housing. Where do you think those people move from? interesting thought from this link: If you destroy 10,000 luxury condo's in Toronto tomorrow, will your prices go down? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1/how-luxury-hous...

...or international investors buy them up as an asset store or to launder money, leaving them mostly vacant. We unfortunately live in the real world, not an economist’s toy box, and have the example of Vancouver to prove it.

Isn't that a separate problem which Vancouver is already trying to fix by occupancy rules?

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#88

Post by neom »

4 years ago I co-founded a smart cities business. Basically a wysiwyg schema/api generator for non-technical municipal users. Idea being if you're procuring data generative "stuff" - municipal workers can define an integration point. In the first few months of starting the company, I met with sidewalk labs at their request. We talked about working together and I said that wouldn't be possible because we wanted to give a data tool to cities that was vendor agnostic. They asked me what would happen if we met in a city, I told them they would probably integrate with our platform so the city could have cross correlation of data with other vendors, they told me it was more likely they would make sure we wouldn't exist.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#89

Post by aljg »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #64
briffle wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building Luxury condos does create affordable housing. Where do you think those people move from? interesting thought from this link: If you destroy 10,000 luxury condo's in Toronto tomorrow, will your prices go down? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1/how-luxury-hous...

People who buy luxury condos are probably not vacating affordable housing to do so. Why would you think that to be the case? The Strong Towns link you provided gives two examples of apartments build approximately a century ago. Trickle-down economics at its best. Build luxury apartments, fine. Probably not exclusively though, as in many cities the need is more pressing than that.

No, that would be patently absurd. Of course they're vacating (the upper end of) mid-priced housing.

It's almost as if an equivalent amount of mid-priced housing would suddenly become available. I wonder who you think would move into that?

Build up.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#90

Post by FpUser »

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.

Depends on what kind of business. "We the people" do not exist to feed corporations (at least in theory). As a business it is your own private headache.
Post reply on HN