Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto • Hacker News Board

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#321

Post by notatoad » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:21 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

owenwil wrote: post #8

I know the average Torontonian wasn't into this, but I live nearby and was really excited about what it could have been, even though it was fraught with missteps. This area is a concrete wasteland–just car-parks and abandoned lots–that's now going to be portioned off to more giant, glass condo buildings, and while Sidewalk's proposal had problems, it was focused on building something very different, community-oriente…

You can still advocate for such urban redevelopment and community planning without Big Tech behind it.

you can, but big tech had big tech money.

Unless you've got a few billion to throw away you're going to have a hard time convincing any developers to build something other than the most economically productive building. and for that location, that's a big glass condo building that looks like every other big glass condo building and doesn't benefit anybody other than the people who can afford to live in big glass condo buildings.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#322

Post by ccktlmazeltov » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:23 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #266

drusepth wrote: post #118

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.

I don't see how, I would say most of the decisions that were made in the US are. Cities in the US are not "vibrant" compared to Europe.

I think cars are mostly to blame, roads are so large, no pedestrian-only streets, parkings take so much space, etc.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#323

Post by bhelkey » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:38 AM UTC

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 believe the above posters point is that, though a tremendous number of housing units are being developed, the demand for housing is increasing faster than this development.

I don't have a stake in this matter but there appears to be some evidence to support this idea.

> Between 2016 and 2019, the GTA added more than 325,000 jobs, but only 102,000 new homes. [1]

[1] https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2020/02/15/toronto-...

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#324

Post by ocdtrekkie » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:43 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #272

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally they intended to repair the fiber lines and keep the network in Louisville, they decided to give the city money when they backed out so that the city could clean up the damage: Presumably by ripping up the fiber network entirely. Most of their other ideas were similarly discount. They bought fiber in places it was already run, and their issue with ISPs revolved around a push to demand the right to move AT&…

> the right to move AT&T's equipment around on AT&T's poles to make room for their own without supervision. That makes it sound like Google was being pushy here, but in reality, ISPs were being intentionally as slow and obtrusive as possible to cripple Google's expansion, which is exactly why Fiber failed. If they were given X days to do something, they would do it on the (x-1)th day on purpose to waste Google's time…

It makes sense to be very careful with this sort of thing. Comcast is infamous for "accidentally" severing other ISP's lines whilst running their own.

Also, given that Google has been playing the (x-1)th day game with the EU for nearly a decade, and asking for every possible extension in order to respond to even the most basic requests... let's not act like ISPs are bad and Google is good. Google is a bad actor that was trying to edge in on another market of bad actors.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#325

Post by aljg » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #96

aljg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

You don’t reckon landlords of those upper-end mid-priced dwellings are asking more for rent every time a lease ends and a new one starts? Because that does seem to be what’s happened in many cities. One issue here is ideological: is housing a universal right, or is housing a capital good to be accumulated and regulated to be artificially scarce?

Of course it's a universal right. I don't think there's an idealogical gap between us on that front.

The other side of the "or" is a particularly egregious example of the excluded middle (separate from the missing middle housing shortage). The idealogical gap, if anything, seems to stem from willingness to believe that supply and demand affect housing affordability. I believe they do. The "regulations making housing artificially scarce" are exactly those inhibiting supply.

To that point and your question---of course landlords will always raise rent to the extent that the law allows it and the market will bear it.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#326

Post by simonebrunozzi » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

"The city of the future" has been a passion of mine for several years now. I even co-founded a company driven by the desire to create one eventually (the company then moved to a cool product to digitize titles, US only for now; and secured seed funding long after I left).

I always had a problem with this initiative by Google, and others in general. These things don't scale.

You want to build the city of the future? It should be 10x more affordable, 10x less polluting, and be built 10x faster than traditional cities. It should find inspiration from Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Leon Krier, etc.

Sometimes I still dream about doing something about it. This blog post somehow summarizes where this desire comes from: "unf*ck" [0]. It's such a massive problem though. I keep thinking that I don't have the chops to be able to do anything about it.

[0]: https://medium.com/the-naked-founder/unfuck-710afbaa4092

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#327

Post by aljg » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #212

colinmhayes wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a naive take. Building luxury condos has definitely caused prices to drop, it's just that the effect of increased demand increased prices by more. Without the supply increase housing would be even more expensive.

I honestly don't believe this is the case. There is no empirical reason to believe it is the case, and there is research that suggests that it isn't the case [0] [0] : http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1914.pdf

>>> "no empirical reason to believe it is the case."

It takes chutzpah to assert a negative. But I appreciate that you honestly don't believe it. Perhaps this will cause you to update your priors?

[0]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1325...

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#328

Post by WalterBright » Fri, May 08, 2020, 12:59 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #286

WalterBright wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> The underlying rules are not simple either.

They are. By the principle of equivalence, it is just mapping the Lorentz frame onto curved spacetime.

pg. 386, "Gravitation", Misner

> actors in the market simply do not act as one can accept in any way

If other actors are acting irrationally, others can make money off of them. There are always smart people looking to make money off of irrational people, to the latters' detriment. Hence it is self-correcting.

> knowledge from every actor is imperfect

Imperfect knowledge is a common reason given for free markets not working. This is not true at all - another word for "imperfect knowledge" is "risk", and risk is certainly priced in everywhere.

> not perfectly fungible

Another word for this is "friction" and it is priced in to supply & demand, it is not separate from it.

> no matter which definition of supply and demand

I prefer not to make up my own definitions of terms in order to win an argument. I'll stick with the standard one.

> the laws of supply and demand aren't being followed

Your preconditions are incorrect, and hence your conclusion isn't, either.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#329

Post by sudosysgen » Fri, May 08, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #319

sudosysgen wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> empty statement Sorry, it's your cite. > explain Simple. People sharing living arrangements deciding to not share anymore. Fewer families with children, more single professionals. Confusing Detroit the city with Detroit the metropolitan area.

Both the detroit city and detroit metropolitan areas have decreasing populations and drastically increasing rent prices.

The share of unoccupied housing exploded from 2010 to 2018, to 23%, according to the census. This is a sure-fire indicator that supply is far, far superior to demand. And yet, the price of rent increased. This means that supply and demand simply does not explain the rising price of rent. I don't see anyway that demand might be higher than supply, while unoccupancy rates are above 10%.

Also, if you want a source that doesn't make empty, baseless economic statements without backing them by facts, there is this one: https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2019/03/06/is-...

I simply used the one above because it was clearer about the primary source used. But of course, websites run by real-estate investors will make baseless claims about supply and demand, without backing them up with any data, that is simply a fact of the matter as such a mentality seems to be widespread.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#330

Post by sudosysgen » Fri, May 08, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #304

sudosysgen wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What groups of people are moving in and out of Detroit? One explanation could be that people who previously could afford rents in Detroit can no longer do so, and the ones moving in are the ones who can afford these rents and mortgages. A lot of these low income neighborhoods in inner city Detroit have been raised and left to nature over the years, historic supply in the city center has been destroyed and what is lef…

The rate of occupied housing in Detroit has drastically decreased, while average rent has increased. If the supply and demand hypothesis of the real estate market held, one would believe that given the fungibility and non-stratified nature of housing in a given city, cratering occupancy rates would correspond to a decrease in average rent priced. If you believe that housing is indeed stratified and that the surplus of affordable housing has so little an effect on the average price of rent in the entire city, whose average income I should remind you is of under 30 000$ while the average price of rent is of more than 12 000$ a year, then I see no way that building luxury apartments could still mean a sizeable decrease in the price of affordable housing in say, Toronto.