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What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

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Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#41

Post by jeffbee »

dsl wrote: post #32
rchaud wrote: post #27

The project was killed for the right reasons; the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it. If smart cities are inevitable, then a mega-corporation like Google with all the resources in the world should be jumping at the opportunity to build a new settlement where none currently exists. Shouldering the cost of such a project should not be a h…

> the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it. When I lived in San Francisco proper this was the same reason I didn't have high speed fiber. NIMBYs didn't want a little green can out front of their houses. Sometimes progress has to be made despite the residents so they can ultimately reap the benefits.

All NIMBY power derives from the fact that authority is vested exclusively in the people who already live somewhere, and none is given over to people who could live there, or would like to, if policies could be changed.

The only thing that has eroded NIMBY power in California in my lifetime has been state laws, and only very recently, and only just barely.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#42

Post by dsl »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #36
dsl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google bought 12 acres of waterfront property and was working on development. Aside from the usual level of involvement (meetings, permitting, etc) the city had no skin in the game.

They bought the land at a heavy discount, continued to stretch their proposal far beyond the scope of the original RFP, demanded further city investment into transit/land development in order to facilitate their idea, and proposed low-income housing that was frankly a crap deal. In the end Google would've been reaping all the profits of the development deal while the city pays to clean up the mess. It basically boile…

The only difference here is that is has Google's name on it instead of AvalonBay, Greystar, Hines, Simon, Westfield, ProLogis, etc.

People have an opinion about Google, but they have never heard of any of the other companies that would have done the exact same thing, just with shittier neighborhood wifi.

They all get discounted land from the city, modify the original RFP scope to fit their vision, push the city to create an attractive level of services, drop in a token number of low income houses, and flip the houses for a profit.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#43

Post by ramshorns »

an_opabinia wrote: post #20
xnx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at around the same rate as cars.

If people wanted affordable housing, they are more likely to achieve it by letting some company monetize frankly meaningless, actually worthless data about urban living than by taxing people who don’t live there. In the very least, the economic forces discounting the rents in the former scenario have a chance to scale massively, while tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere in mar…

> tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere

This is the main reason for the housing crisis. Toronto has one of the lowest property tax rates in Canada; by bringing it closer to that of other cities we could fund a lot of public housing.

Some people want to live in luxury apartments. Many people just want to live indoors. Building more luxury condos for speculators to keep empty as investments doesn't really help make the city affordable to live in.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#44

Post by [deleted] »

etimberg wrote: post #7

As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved. Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? If Google, or any other…

[deleted]

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#45

Post by oh_sigh »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? No.

Since Google hates passwords, I can't imagine that they would support plain old metal keys for doors. Neither can I imagine how unlocking a Google door wouldn't involve an arbitrarily closable Google account. Other incidents have shown that once your Google account is closed, Google won't talk to you.

"Google must operate based on the stereotype I have of them in my head"

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#46

Post by etimberg »

wendyshu wrote: post #34
etimberg wrote: post #7

As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved. Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? If Google, or any other…

As someone who lives in Toronto, I'm disappointed we couldn't even have this as an experiment with smart city technologies. "It's time to build" and all that.

Agreed that it is unfortunate we could not have this experiment, but perhaps Waterfront Toronto can go back to the drawing board and do the experiment with local companies and homegrown technology.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#47

Post by meeks »

Xcelerate wrote: post #2

It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city. The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well). I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the sta…

Malaysia is working on a smart city from the ground up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFG-PIJ0GUE

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#48

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

dsl wrote: post #42
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought the land at a heavy discount, continued to stretch their proposal far beyond the scope of the original RFP, demanded further city investment into transit/land development in order to facilitate their idea, and proposed low-income housing that was frankly a crap deal. In the end Google would've been reaping all the profits of the development deal while the city pays to clean up the mess. It basically boile…

The only difference here is that is has Google's name on it instead of AvalonBay, Greystar, Hines, Simon, Westfield, ProLogis, etc. People have an opinion about Google, but they have never heard of any of the other companies that would have done the exact same thing, just with shittier neighborhood wifi. They all get discounted land from the city, modify the original RFP scope to fit their vision, push the city to cr…

I am acutely aware of active REITs/development firms in Toronto, and I have a lot more respect for their process than for what Sidewalk did.

We don't need neighborhood WiFi -- Fiber is widely available within the city and it's a lot cheaper than what I saw in the US.

Due to COVID-19, there has been far more innovation in the city, mostly top-down from the government, than what we saw with Sidewalk. Who cares if they can reconfigure the street? Let people ride their bikes, build community spaces, etc.

Sidewalk garnered negative public opinion because they tried to overreach what people are comfortable with from a real estate developer. Look at what Amazon did in Seattle over the last decade, and maybe take a page out of their book, instead of hand-waving about self-driving cars you're dreaming of sprinkling around the neighbourhood.

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#49

Post by nitrogen »

jeffbee wrote: post #41
dsl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it. When I lived in San Francisco proper this was the same reason I didn't have high speed fiber. NIMBYs didn't want a little green can out front of their houses. Sometimes progress has to be made despite the residents so they can ultimately reap the benefits.

All NIMBY power derives from the fact that authority is vested exclusively in the people who already live somewhere, and none is given over to people who could live there, or would like to, if policies could be changed. The only thing that has eroded NIMBY power in California in my lifetime has been state laws, and only very recently, and only just barely.

authority is vested exclusively in the people who already live somewhere

Isn't that the definition of democracy? Why should I be able to take what someone else has just because I want it?

Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?

#50

Post by an_opabinia »

stan_rogers wrote: post #28
an_opabinia wrote: post #13

> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings Guess Toronto got its crap back. > Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she said, as an example. It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way…

> Regardless of how you feel about data and surveillance and privacy or whatever, at least ad targeting has a long proven track record of actually delivering low real prices to consumers. That really depends on how you define "real price", doesn't it? It's a price I'm not willing to pay.

I just feel like people keep talking about the "price" of privacy in abstract, and we've had decades for someone to make a case for material damages. It's so intellectually dishonest.

We've had the Equifax hack, it isn't even a problem with ads, just data gathering generally, and we're all looking around for real damages there, just people who hypothesize that something something a meaningless form of speculative identity theft may have led to some abstract damage. I hate Equifax, and I hate the data gathering they do, but I'm not going to be a blowhard and say, "there were unobservable damages here and they must pay random suckers."

The BP Horizon oil spill put oil on the shores of Lousiana, there's real mispricing of environmental damage. But that shit is real, oil and pollution are real, they inhabit the literal real world. Your website browsing history is imaginary.

Time and time again people have been given the opportunity to pay for an e-mail client or a search engine. Dozens of software services. Ads are so obviously the superior way for the average end user to pay for networked services, trading your imaginary data that is basically only valuable in aggregate and has been very successfully sold anonymously-in-aggregate in exchange for not paying $10/mo for every single little software service you need. And then, because everyone has free e-mail and search, the surplus is enjoyed by society as a whole, instead of some kleptocratic corporation. If anything Google should be making so much more money!

You're paying the price. You choose to pay the price literally every day, it's ridiculous. Every one of these activists pays the price, they are walking-talking hypocrites. It's so intellectually dishonest to say you're not willing to pay it. You use the Internet, you're paying the price, don't use the Internet if you don't want to pay the price. You do, and you will, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The Sidewalk Labs people are the best positioned to provide below-market housing to meet the demand for it. Generally, the people doing innovative stuff with housing will actually succeed to meet demands for things the status quo will not provide. This is not saying much! We should be arguing for more innovative uses of land and architecture. Nobody would force you to live in the Sidewalk Labs complex!

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