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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

#281

I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me. It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This…

There's a YC startup called Culdesac I've been following that's doing something interesting around city design. I'm not sure 'smart city' would be the right phrase for it, but they seem pretty cool. https://culdesac.com/

I'm confused what they're going for here. All the benefits seem to be exactly what you'd get living in many neighborhoods in many cities across the world. Most large, mixed-use apartment complexes have all these "amenities".

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detroit has some of the greatest increases in rent in the US[0]. Despite its population decreasing [1]. As for rural communities, they are not comparable in the slightest to cities. [0] : https://detroit.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21164568/detroit-rent-ra... [1] : https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/detroit-populati...

> As for rural communities, they are not comparable in the slightest to cities. Anything can be proven by discarding data that doesn't fit. Rural population is in decline, and prices drop with it. You can even buy entire towns in Appalachia for a song. > Detroit Your own cite says: “New housing construction has barely kept pace with the growth in housing demand over the past decade.”

>Your own cite says: “New housing construction has barely kept pace with the growth in housing demand over the past decade.”

This is an empty statement the article writer wrote to attempt to justify it. Housing demand in Detroit cannot have increased, because the population of Detroit was and is decreasing. If you can explain to me how a decreasing population can mean an increase in demand, I'd be all ears.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#283
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.

>I really don't like the idea of stamping out all single family homes and nice green areas in proximity to cities.

I don't think anyone seriously wants to replace every single family home with something more dense (even if the rhetoric indicates so). It's harmful and unnecessary. E.g.:

* There is an estimated 3-4 million housing unit deficit in CA, on 14 million total units (US Census). We'll take 4 million units to err on the extreme case.

* CA currently has 7 million single-family homes (US Census)

* Assuming 100% of that deficit is made from replacing a single family home with a quadplex, it would take 1.3 million single homes -> quadplexes to make up the 4 million unit deficit.

Even in that most extreme case, I can't imagine one quadplex per block would affect green areas or the totally legitimate choice to live a single family home.

In reality, I think most YIMBY advocates want mixed-use medium density, which requires an order of magnitude fewer buildings.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#284
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you start from "democratically elected governments exist to make the world a better place," then you're going to end up somewhere wrong. Even in the best of times, democratically elected governments exist to give the majority power over the minority. This is considered an improvement over other forms of government, where often a minority had power over a majority and treated them poorly. There are actually some "f…

> Most businesses do not have tax and police authority and must face the market test on a daily basis. The only thing that keeps businesses from claiming tax and police authority is the government monopoly on violence; they'd happily take if they could. Same goes for having to face the "market test": businesses certainly don't want to that and would happily get rid of it if governments allowed them to (or did not exi…

Wouldn’t governments also do all sorts of bad things if they were allowed to? History is full of examples and there are far more examples of rogue governments doing bad at scale than private businesses.

If there was something that inherently made governments to be “good” actors more than a person or a business, we wouldn’t need checks and balances.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Units within condos are rented all the time. Your argument seems to be that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that cannot afford to own their own home. Yes, and? We live in a global market and as a result, citizens of successful cities have to compete with people not just from that city, but from people outside, who are willing to bring in some cash. Oops, that means a bunch of people now can't afford to ow…

If your idea is that the current system is so broken that there is nothing we can do to avoid 40% of the population in major production hubs to have to spend ridiculous fractions of their income on housing, with other that simply can't, then maybe indeed a refactor isn't enough, and we should start thinking about a complete rewrite. This isn't even a question of competition. Prices are increasing purely because the m…

I am all for a complete re-write, but not on the level of society, but on the level of you and me.

If you could see into the future and know for a fact that you couldn't change a thing about it, would your concerns cease to have meaning?

If the answer is yes, then it is a matter of determining what in your short lifetime, you can realistically change and what you cannot.

For me, I've determined that the things I cannot change are human nature, including my own. What I can do is modify my lifestyle to be exposed to more of the human traits I cherish and fewer of the ones I resent.

That's the conclusion I've come to. Housing prices and inequality simply don't make the list of things I can do anything about and even if I could, I believe I'd be playing human sin whack-a-mole. I whack one sin, another one pops up. At some point, I just had to accept that there are traits human possess that upset me, and find lifestyle solutions to mitigate them, that's all :)

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law of gravity is actually not super simple. Relativistic gravity is an incredibly difficult and complex concept to understand, and the Newtonian law of gravity is simply wrong, enough that it has big impacts on the real world. Whereas the law of supply and demand is not only preceded by a lot of assumptions that never are true in practice, and even with all those assumptions still has serious exceptions that app…

> Relativistic gravity is an incredibly difficult and complex concept to understand You're right, but the underlying rules are simple. > leading to empty buildings, while prices still rise That's still supply & demand. In this case, it is likely that the demand is rising fast enough that delaying renting the building will result in higher rents in the future for that building. It's a chaotic system, and I mean that i…

No, the rules for Einsteinian gravity are not simple. Absolutely not. The underlying rules are not simple either. Simply calculating the instantaneous change in trajectory of an idealized two body system under Einsteinian gravity is an ordeal, and idealized bodies are a lot less useful under Einsteinian gravity than under Newtonian gravity.

I agree, it is indeed a chaotic system, and is even worse than that because there is no simple rule any agent is following.

If it is the case that not renting a building will result in higher revenue because rents will be higher in the future, then that building will not be rented out and neither will similar buildings, which will continue increasing rent at increasing speeds; and at the end rent will increase towards infinity. The simpler explanation is that no, not renting a unit does not lead to higher revenue, as leases are at most YoY, the YoY increase in rent would have to be over 50% for this to make sense, which isn't the case, and in fact actors in the market simply do not act as one can accept in any way, which is why you can't use supply and demand, or any basic economics for that matter.

For rent, for instance, you could have supply completely equal or even significantly higher than demand, as in there are significantly more buildings than tenants and more empty buildings that tenants looking for landlords, and still see prices increase. Indeed, if the landlords are coordinated or if they know that their tenants will not act rationally in the economic sense, you can simply have a system where all landlords continuously increase rent every year. And there is nothing that any tenant can do, so they have to pay increasing amounts of rent every year. In such a system, because commodities are not perfectly fungible, because actors are very far from fully rational, because knowledge from every actor is imperfect and because there are hidden costs both monetary and non-monetary, you can have a system where supply is higher than demand, and yet prices rise. No matter how you dice it, no matter which definition of supply and demand you use, the laws of supply and demand aren't being followed. Rental markets tend to follow this pattern, in even more complex ways with other effects that lead to supply and demand breaking down even more.

This is why trying to use macro-economic laws such as supply and demand without carefully going through each assumption behind them is a very dangerous mistake.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's irrelevant if that amount of condo is still not enough compared to the demand caused by 100 000 new residents moving into the region every year. Tech jobs are up. Airbnbs are up (as of before COVID). Supply is low. There are people lining up for renting apartments. It's a lack of supply.

Even in places where population is decreasing, rent finds a way to increase.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#288
post #88

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 giv…

> they told me it was more likely they would make sure we wouldn't exist

How? Is it possible for a smaller company to defend against such hostility?

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#289

I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me. It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This…

The entire idea of a "smart city" is pure anathema to how vibrant cities function. It's a technocratic wet dream, the digital version of Robert Moses and Corbusier making a comeback. The people preoccupied with this should read some Alain Bertaud and learn how markets work and then go do more productive things with their time than trying to micromanage cities.

[deleted]

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#290
post #250
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rent, I vote. Plenty of people do vote. But, a typical homeowner in LA is more well off and therefore has more free time to wait in line to vote, so that is who is most likely to vote. There are people here who need to work 60-80 hour weeks to survive.

We have very easy mail in voting in LA.

We do. We also had over a week to show up to the polls during the primary. I strolled in and cast my ballot and strolled out without waiting in line at all, it took me five minutes to vote. However, that's because I'm an informed voter who has ample free time to read about these things.

On the last day of polling, lines that were nonexistant the previous days suddenly appeared wrapping around the block at my polling station. A lot of people were still waiting to cast their ballot after polls closed, and local media ripped the board of elections a new one for having less locations (ignoring that you now had over a week to vote).

All of this could have been avoided if people had been paying attention to the multiple mailers sent to every registered voter on file, the banners put in front of polling stations ahead of time, the advertisements on TV and radio and the internet, the billboards, and the full vinyl wraps on trains and busses that advertised voting being over a week. None of this ended up mattering, because most people don't have the time to pay attention. And if you are ambivalent about the issues on a ballot and approach your polling place and see a line that wraps around two blocks, you will probably just turn back home.

This is why it's critical that decision making based on sound logic and establish facts should not be at the mercy of the ballot box, because that will never be where you find a carefully thought out thesis, but rather a popularity contest based on who has been shouting the loudest in the months leading up to the election.

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