[HN Gopher] Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto
___________________________________________________________________
Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto
Author : colinprince
Score : 236 points
Date : 2020-05-07 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| 34679 wrote:
| I'm all for smart cities, just not ones built by advertising
| companies.
| FpUser wrote:
| The last thing we need is super rich foreign corporation building
| spyware company towns and buying our government.
| rkagerer wrote:
| As a former Toronto resident I'm glad about this. In my eyes,
| Google lacks the track record or level of trust appropriate to
| make them a good fit for the project. They fall short on basics
| like privacy, user experience and commitment.
|
| Toronto has a thriving tech community; I'd love to see some of
| the less-controversial ideas pioneered on a smaller scale by
| local small businesses who will eat their own dogfood.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I run r/CitizenPlanners which is a forum for folks who are
| doing community development work without being full-time paid
| government workers, basically. I'm looking over your site a bit
| and I'm wondering if this is anything potentially useful to
| part-time people of that sort, who may be low-level volunteers
| or who may run a small, local non-profit or be a part-time
| elected official.
|
| Any thoughts? Suggestions? Blog posts or points of entry you
| could point me to that might help me package this as useful
| info for my audience?
| jacquesm wrote:
| The hubris of Google is just incredible. Half-baked commitments
| and then to tell someone who is actually dedicated to the
| mission that they will run them into the ground. It's really
| nasty. I've seen the same behavior from the first CEO of
| 'Spotlife', exactly the same tone of voice, exactly the same
| ending.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Do you still exist?!
| neom wrote:
| https://municipal.systems/ :)
| coopsmgoops wrote:
| You beat Google!
| airstrike wrote:
| Nice! Ever ran summary stats on which geographies have the
| most amount of data and possibly check for a correlation
| with developmental indices like HDI or GINI?
| the-dude-abides wrote:
| Very cool :)
| 1_over_epsilon wrote:
| Nice! How did you get your data?
| fudged71 wrote:
| This is a slick website!!
|
| I wanted to filter the waze data and ran into a problem. I
| was trying to filter anything that wasn't a weather hazard
| and wasn't before 2020. Any combination of filters and
| orders I tried brought up some results from those
| exclusions.
| sneak wrote:
| FYI your website completely fails to render with cookies
| (and thus localStorage) off. Detailed explanation:
| https://sneak.berlin/20200211/your-website/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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?
| owenwil wrote:
| 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-
| oriented, without prioritizing roads.
|
| Sidewalk really pushed the technology angle way too hard, and it
| was a clear overstep- most of it wasn't necessary for any sort of
| quality of life improvements, but many of the ideas like wooden
| 'skyscrapers' and de-prioritizing roads were exciting, now lost.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I was intrigued until they started getting into wanting legal
| jurisdiction over the region. Even beyond the assumed privacy
| implications that was the real hard line for me. They did back
| down off of that as far as I'm aware.
|
| I hope we can see the experimentation with wooden skyscrapers,
| etc, though.
| ramshorns wrote:
| > that's now going to be portioned off to more giant, glass
| condo buildings
|
| I hope it's something a bit different. Looks like Waterfront
| Toronto will turn back to the community for new ideas for
| Quayside.
|
| https://waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/water...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You can still advocate for such urban redevelopment and
| community planning without Big Tech behind it.
| tyre wrote:
| You can but change is measured in decades and even then often
| doesn't happen.
|
| Starting "fresh" with a single leading implementer is really
| how it needs to be done.
|
| Take San Francisco. There's the planning board, the planning
| department, environmental lawsuits, HOAs, abusing "historic
| landmarks" designations, political showmanship, developers,
| affordable housing, community meetings, unions, community
| groups (the cycling people are borderline militant) etc. etc.
|
| All of those can bring any change to its knees. And they
| have, repeatedly. There are good parts of this process and
| people shouldn't not have input, but I might not oppose a
| dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's still managed by Waterfront Toronto, the goal is still
| for it to be pre-planned in a smart way. However, I didn't
| see much in Sidewalk Labs that was so innovative. You talk
| of "without prioritizing road" but there was still zero
| dollar allocated for any kind of transit project, 2.5 years
| into it. Not that it's all Google's fault, but really for
| me lack of concrete plans for transit in development showed
| me it wasn't serious.
| kunai wrote:
| This type of mentality is exactly what led to "urban
| renewal" in the 1960s and the complete destruction of
| American inner cities to be replaced with 18-lane freeways
| and grimy concrete housing projects that concentrated
| poverty and sent crime rates skyrocketing.
|
| Because planners' hubris, similar to the insane
| technocratic Silicon Valley hubris these days, led to them
| making terrible decisions with zero community input and a
| team of yes-men around them.
|
| > I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and
| just having at it.
|
| Ironic a culture that fetishizes free markets and an open
| marketplace of ideas favors totalitarianism because they
| find the idea of being part of a larger human community
| with all its flaws icky. Step away from the keyboard some
| more and maybe, I dunno, go outside and talk to people?
| Problems like these are never solved with Docker.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| San Francisco has changed immensely in just the last
| decade.
|
| It may not be noticeable if you live there because you only
| see the incremental day by day changes, but as someone who
| only sporadically visits the Bay Area: it's nothing like it
| was in 2010. It's significantly more built up (and out),
| more skyscrapers, more apartments, more condos, more
| everything.
| asdff wrote:
| Housing prices would tell you there is actually less of
| everything, relatively. Demand has surged, sufficient
| supply has yet to be constructed, queue housing crisis.
| Not enough housing is being built in California's cities.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Less of everything on a relative basis, but more of
| everything on an absolute basis.
|
| It's a game of moving goal posts.
| vkou wrote:
| You can, but its difficult without an 800-pound gorilla on
| your team.
| bbeekley wrote:
| Local HOAs and similar have loud voices against these kind of
| projects. It might take another big voice (like Sidewalk
| Labs) to counter.
|
| I've tried calling my local reps to support walkable
| community projects and have been told, nearly verbatim, that
| if the HOA doesn't like it, they won't be voting for it. Then
| when big tech offices started moving in, the redevelopment
| projects finally started too.
| [deleted]
| leoh wrote:
| Sure, but it would have been really interesting to see what
| Sidewalk could have done here, especially given that it was a
| blighted area.
| na85 wrote:
| My issue with Sidewalk Labs was the incredibly obvious facade
| they put up: pretending to care about making cities better when
| it really was just a thin veneer over finding new ways to expand
| surveillance capitalism. In fact their "Head of Urban Systems"
| was quoted[0] as saying that public discussions over data
| ownership and privacy were "irresponsible". The true agenda is
| plainly obvious to anyone who cares to look.
|
| I'm heartened to see that there is a slow but growing opposition
| to parasitic business practices such as Sidewalk Labs' proposal
| and surveillance capitalism in general. Despite Zuckerberg's
| attempts to convince us that privacy is dead[1], I think people
| still realize on some base level that privacy, especially
| offline, is still valuable.
|
| [0] https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/how-smart-should-a-
| ci...
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU
| koheripbal wrote:
| "surveillance capitalism". Sounds like the latest meaningless
| activism buzzword that tries to engender anti-surveillance
| support from anti-capitalists.
|
| What's next, Communist Vegans?
| pdkl95 wrote:
| If you really haven't heard the term "surveillance
| capitalism" before, this[1] interview is a very good overview
| of the topic, including this explanation of the term:
|
| >> So even early on in the theorizing of capitalism it was
| understood that capitalism takes on different market forms
| and different eras in the context of different technologies.
| We've had mercantile capitalism, and we've had factory
| capitalism, and mass-production capitalism, and managerial
| capitalism, financial capitalism. And typically what happens
| in these new concepts is that modifier, like "mass
| production," or in my case "surveillance" capitalism, what
| that modifier is doing is pinpointing the pivot of value
| creation in this new market form.
|
| > engender anti-surveillance support from anti-capitalists
|
| Every anti-capitalist I know has already been anti-
| surveillance for a long time.
|
| [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-
| q-an...
| na85 wrote:
| Surveillance Capitalism is a well established term that means
| exactly what it sounds like - capitalism based upon
| surveillance. This is exactly the business model that
| Facebook and Google operate upon, and exactly what Sidewalk
| Labs was attempting. They claim to be benevolent saviours but
| really they're just there to watch everyone and sell the data
| to advertisers, governments, and Palantir-alikes.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| I'm not defending massive tech companies. But in this case it
| might be a bit different. Back when Larry Page still did
| interviews he mentioned a couple of times that the concept of
| cities needs to be rethought. Talking out of my ass I'm pretty
| sure that he more or less told Doctoroff to go wild and handed
| him 100 million.
|
| Alphabet can kind of do this stuff because so far their still
| growing steadily and a majority of voting shares are with the
| founders.
|
| So if there is any company I kind of buy, that they didn't
| necessarily have profit as the first priority, it would be
| Sidewalk Labs. They can always figure that out later.
|
| Worst case they spend a couple hundred millions and nothing
| came of it. Except many theoretical ideas about city building
| would have been known to work or not.
|
| Maybe I'm naive. But imagine you had a gazillion dollars and
| owned one of the most powerful entities ever. Wouldn't you want
| to try crazy shit that you thought of as a kid. Well Page/Brin
| can I guess.
| verelo wrote:
| So this comment is being downvoted a lot, but i've got to say
| there was a lot of concern from local residents. The largest
| concern everyone raised with me was that "Google will ditch
| this as soon as it suits them, leaving us with a mess of 'smart
| tech' to deal with for decades to come".
|
| Well, i hate to say it, maybe they were right? Turns out they
| ditched it before it even got moving, this might be a blessing
| in disguise.
| [deleted]
| claudeganon wrote:
| Unfortunately, a lot of people in tech ascribe to a kind of
| utopian imperialism. It doesn't matter what people themselves
| want, it's about what engineered fantasies can be imposed
| upon them.
| na85 wrote:
| Yeah I dunno, I'm basically showering in downvotes right
| now but it seems to be just Silicon Valley types who are
| upset that Torontonians didn't welcome their dystopia with
| fanfare and adulation.
| supernova87a wrote:
| 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 understand
| how to choose better for themselves. Not a technology patch.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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.
|
| You're not wrong but this is kind of a naive way of looking at
| the problem. Making city employees more efficient means less
| jobs politicians can write the deadbeat nephew of a local
| construction mogul a recommendation for, a direct reduction in
| their power and influence. Even if you discount politicians
| government itself is often a bunch of competing fiefdoms where
| anyone who becomes more efficient can expect less resources
| thrown their way as a result. While there are many bureaucrats
| who do want to make things better and more efficient the
| incentives that the politicians and appointed department heads
| who ultimately call the shots have to work under cannot be
| discounted.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| First of all, it's not either/or.
|
| Second of all, better democratic decisionmaking has _nothing_
| to do with Google 's expertise. There are plenty of political
| scientists and think tanks working on better decisionmaking
| processes. Spending Sidewalk Labs' money on them makes as much
| sense as asking for Kraft Foods or ExxonMobil to do so.
|
| But third, good democratic governance requires data and
| provides services. If Google can help generate real-time data
| to improve services (and inform better decisions), how is that
| not a win?
| thewebcount wrote:
| One way it's not a win is because all things Google involve
| them collecting the data in a way that can be monetized. That
| collection is generally problematic to a lot of people.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Have you ever tried to convince a politician to do something?
|
| It's disappointing. It is easier to get a contract and just do
| it you way.
| mcguire wrote:
| How would that allow Google to collect personal data in order
| to better sell advertisements?
| ex3ndr wrote:
| We tried to sell to Planning Department of SF. They literally
| told us: we are not going to buy anything that shows our
| weaknesses.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| And that's what I thought the original mission of Sidewalk Labs
| _was_. They seemed to do more research and less city-building.
| ramshorns wrote:
| Yes, though it depends on your goal. Alphabet's goal was
| probably not to actually make the city better to live in, but
| to find more ways to collect personal information for their own
| profit.
|
| Anyway, Cory Doctorow wrote recently that cities full of
| sensors need not be used to spy on citizens, and could just be
| helpful instead.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-...
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| ISL wrote:
| My belief, from personal experience, is that those who say
| "this disrupts my view" actually mean it. They've moved early
| into a place that suits them, and the place itself is
| changing.
|
| My neighborhood is slowly being transformed by increased
| density -- it is less and less the neighborhood into which we
| moved. It isn't the change in property value, it is the
| change in quality of life that matters.
|
| Different people measure quality differently. It is that
| difference that gives rise to friction. The effect spans
| income brackets -- there are people who mourn the loss of
| community in impoverished neighborhoods as density increases
| at the same time that there are those who mourn the loss of
| trees and single-family dwellings in wealthier neighborhoods.
|
| Change is hard.
| asdff wrote:
| The cognitive dissonance among NIMBYs is astounding. 80
| years ago, many neighborhoods in LA were just oil derricks
| and orange groves, which were sold and cleared (or hidden
| behind facades in the case of the derricks, which still
| pump today) for housing to meet surging demand after WWII,
| which never went away. Decade after decade the demand has
| only grown, yet the people living in these first batches of
| housing quickly built to meet demand they themselves
| created fail to see that their situation is no different.
| NIMBYs just happened to find work in LA a little bit sooner
| and fail to see that they were once a changing force to the
| landscape as well.
|
| If you want to preserve your neighborhood, you are free to
| buy as many parcels as you like and leave them be. If you
| can't afford the fair market price to dictate what gets
| built on the land, then you have no ground to stand on imo,
| but there are also plenty of options for you. There are
| planned communities you can move to with tight HOA
| regulations if you insist on limiting what others can and
| can't do with their belongings. To move to a city like LA,
| which experiences double digit percent growth decade after
| decade since its inception, and to expect nothing to change
| at all the minute after you sign your mortgage, is baffling
| to me. It isn't grounded in reality. Move to Cleveland if
| you want stasis, the greater metro population there is
| virtually unchanged over the past 50 years.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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...
| triceratops wrote:
| > Most people who live in my city are renters, but most
| voters in local elections are homeowners
|
| Sounds like renters should start voting. Why would city
| council members do anything for the interests of people that
| don't vote? Not only is it against their own self-interest,
| it's anti-democratic. Elected representatives _have_ to do
| what their voters want - it 's the bedrock of democracy.
|
| That reps are profiting off the system is a side-effect, not
| the root cause.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Just look at a typical city council video in the United
| States. Everyone who is there is old (because they have
| nothing better to do than spending 4 hours in a city
| council meeting), 60+, and they're against anything new.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| We have very easy mail in voting in LA.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| > has more free time to wait in line to vote
|
| Lobby for vote-by-mail, early voting, and holidays on
| election day. I'm sorry, but that's the only way. Hard
| problems don't have easy solutions. You can't expect any
| council member to go against their voters' wishes on any
| issue. Local elections are personal and people who vote
| in them follow the issues closely. A council member who
| listens to "expert advice" rather their voters will be
| voted out or recalled, and the next person would simply
| vote to put things back the way they were.
|
| If you want lasting change, you have to broaden the
| electorate and educate them on the issues.
| asdff wrote:
| Fundamentally, its a cultural issue we have in this
| country that is somewhat disgusting. Politicians should
| not be just listening to their voters, or their backers,
| they should be listening to all their constituents,
| everyone who lives in the areas they represent, with
| particular focus to the most vulnerable and not the other
| way around as what frequently happens. The incentives are
| completely backward. The interests of those that play the
| politick game well are prioritized at the cost of the
| people who need the most assistance from public
| government.
|
| I'm very supportive of expanded voting and recently LA
| has made election day into an entire week that you can
| stroll in and cast your vote (Of course, everyone waited
| until the last minute and polls wrapped around the block
| at the very last day you could cast your ballot, but that
| is beside the point).
|
| Even with vote by mail or other initiatives to get out
| the vote, this leaves a lot of people without
| representation in LA. There is the requirement that you
| have the time to study the issues and become an informed
| voter, which is a privilege not enjoyed by everyone.
| There are also a lot of undocumented people paying rent
| and working jobs in LA. I think these people who are
| contributing to the local economy should also be
| represented by the people in charge of the area in which
| they live their life. They have just as much right to be
| here as I or any other citizen does.
|
| I think the best way to overcome petty politicking would
| be to limit the control elected officials have over what
| should be logical and factually rooted decision making.
| In LA, council members are more powerful in their
| district than the mayor or any other elected official,
| they have absolute control over what gets built be it on
| parcels of land or even paint on the roads. Just look at
| the patchyness of the bike lane network to see this
| effect in action; metro has money earmarked and is ready
| to build but local council members just refuse to allow
| it to happen in their district. They operate as little
| feudal lords who award contracts to friends and deny
| contracts if some who holds their ear takes issue for
| whatever reason at all.
|
| Urban planning decisions should not be controlled by
| politicians, they should be controlled by urban planners
| who are highly trained civil engineers from the best
| engineering schools hired to do an apolitical job. They
| understand these issues better than anyone else in
| government, and their decisionmaking is rooted in the
| cutting edge theories and ideas present in their field,
| profit and personal preference be damned.
|
| This is how public government should be run, deferring
| decision making to informed experts rather than the wills
| and wishes of those who command the most influence over
| their representative.
| CPLX wrote:
| > 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What we need is for people to understand how to choose better
| for themselves. Not a technology patch._
|
| Google only has one hammer: the algorithm. It just comes in
| different colors.
|
| Traffic? Waymo algorithm.
|
| Municipal planning? Smart Cities algorithm.
|
| Advertising? AdSense algorithm.
|
| Journalism? Google News algorithm.
|
| Google, and certain other tech companies, need to learn that
| not every problem can be solved by a computer.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I suggest giving up on computers and "solve" everything with
| emotions, narratives, and dynamic morality. Who is with me?
| andromeduck wrote:
| Scalability? Data center algorithm! Security? The fuzzing
| algorithm! Healthcare? The medical algorithm! Mobile? The
| Android algorithm! Gaming? The Stadia algorithm!
|
| No that's utterly absurd. What Google builds are platforms,
| markets and generally scalable systems. They involve
| algorithms and algorithms may more often than not be their
| competitive edge but an algorithm does not a system make.
| drusepth wrote:
| Curious: what problem could be solved by a human (or group of
| humans) but not a computer (or group of computers)?
| [deleted]
| antipaul wrote:
| My half-serious reply: Figuring out what the problem is :)
|
| "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers"
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Whether an arbitrary program will end.
| seisvelas wrote:
| Haha I know this wasn't intended as a joke, but this
| answer made me burst out laughing. Very true!
|
| On the other hand, that's not such an easy problem for
| humans to solve either
| majormajor wrote:
| Any problem where the solution requires persuading people
| to adopt it or comply with it.
|
| All those projects google shuts down? Those were problems
| they tried to solve but failed to.
| rahulnair23 wrote:
| Inequity, education, sustainability, public policy,
| governance - few examples where techno-solutionism isn't
| the right approach.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Actually it would be, at least for sustainability,
| inequality and parts of public policy/governance.
| Simulations of "what-if-when" scenarios or analysis of
| data (which is what public policy of any kind should be
| based upon anyway) are precisely what computers excel at.
|
| What humans (or rather: our governments) don't excel at:
| accurately _using_ the data that technology gives us. We
| know that climate change is real, man-made and _will_
| fuck up entire continents, but still there are world
| leaders actively _rejecting_ science.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Security. Security cannot realistically be automated or
| scaled. Because any automated system at scale can be
| understood and gamed. And because humans interact with
| secure systems, and humans can be tricked. Even when you
| built a system that's say, cryptographically secure, you
| manipulate the humans to work around it, because humans
| aren't good at identifying cryptographic keys, and all
| automated systems serve human clients or masters.
|
| This is why the Play Store and Chrome Web Store are full of
| malware, and why human-curated app markets have effectively
| zero.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Any problem where the inputs are ambiguous. Like when
| YouTube's ContentID takes down your video of you playing
| your original composition because someone else decided to
| claim it. Like when your Gmail account is closed because of
| a "Terms of Service" violation, but they won't tell you
| which one or show you what you did wrong. Basically most
| problems people have with Google could be solved by having
| a human spend 5 seconds looking into the issue and
| realizing, "Oh yeah, this is an edge case with an answer
| that's pretty obvious to a human, but not an algorithm."
| pdkl95 wrote:
| _All_ problems are solved by humans; sometimes problem
| solving humans may use tools such as computers. Algorithms
| are just an automation that a human decided to use to solve
| a problem.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Anything that involves interpretation of ambiguous
| scenarios (most famous: Twitter, YT and Facebook deleting
| legal content that falls under freedom of speech based upon
| abusive mass reports but refusing to account for patterns
| of trolling behavior), and much that requires creative
| input (i.e. photo/video composition, shooting and editing).
| OJFord wrote:
| Isn't it ironic to blame the coronavirus? I imagine an alternate
| timeline in which it's a success story for the already-built
| 'smart city', with the masses of data it offers aiding crisis
| management in <ways>.
| saeranv wrote:
| I'll add another perspective to this, beyond the privacy/data
| ownership debate.
|
| The global building stock currently supplies roughly 40% of the
| world's greenhouse gas emissions; and we are in the midst of the
| largest growth of urbanism in human history concentrated in
| neighborhoods least equipped to deal with it. I've worked in the
| architecture/urban design sector for 6+ years (half as an
| architect, half as a researcher), and one of the most critical
| problems we have to address is the way we are attempting to
| optimize the building energy/embodied carbon use of buildings.
| It's a messy multivariable optimization problem, tied to time-
| consuming, complex simulation engines, that the industry is
| forced to try and solve as single-variable optimization with
| various hacks and rule of thumbs.
|
| I am very biased on this topic since I work in this area, but I
| feel this is fundamentally a ML/AI problem and I had/have some
| hope that Sidewalk labs could add the resources and brainpower to
| move the needle further, faster with the existing SOTA.
| Personally, I felt this provided the project with a very
| straightforward, explicit ethical utility, so as a Torontonian
| I've never been against it. I also was excited about the prospect
| of building up a community of building science-focused ML/AI
| researchers tackling a currently underserved existential threat.
| I know this isn't the end of Sidewalk Labs, but I feel like this
| is a huge loss for us.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Sidewalk labs has a LOT of good ideas but, even putting aside
| privacy concerns related to Google ownership, the simple fact is
| that these good ideas are nearly intractable even when planned by
| trusted organizations with the best of intentions. Western cities
| just don't move very fast nowadays, for better and for worse.
|
| Maybe this would work better in a country where cities develop
| faster and with less protest from citizens, but a lot of sidewalk
| labs best ideas boil down to "more affordable housing and less
| cars" which are mainly Western problems that derive from a lack
| of good urban development in the first place.
| AIME15 wrote:
| Works best if you can just steamroll through with the project
| from the start. PoC small scale (though much larger than 12
| acres, which is about 2 Manhattan city blocks), then large
| scale.
|
| Requires feds to be totally on board, have the power to green
| light everything quickly, and have tons of capital to deploy.
| Unfortunately for SWL, it's not possible for an Alphabet
| company to build in Saudi Arabia or China.
| xozorion wrote:
| The idea of "smart cities" seems great, and a lot of prominent
| people in tech/VC seem to be on board.
|
| Yet at the same time, I just don't see a realistic way to make
| this happen (zoning, NIMBYism) unless we're talking about
| desolate places that still have cheap real estate, but where
| nobody wants to live anyways e.g. Montana and the Dakotas.
| asdff wrote:
| History repeats itself. I'm willing to bet none of these people
| are aware of the failure of Epcot, the first smart city effort,
| when they take their families to Disneyworld. There are just
| too many people in this world who would prefer to say no to
| change.
| lostgame wrote:
| 'I've met thousands of Torontonians from all over the city,
| excited by the possibility of making urban life better for
| everyone.'
|
| This is simply not true, in my experience as a Torontonian. The
| overall opinion of this project was incredibly low, from at least
| dozens of people it's come up with - at work, at events, with
| friends - if anything, there'll be a lot of people happy to hear
| this. There were even questions as to why our tax dollars would
| even support this when we've got issues like homelessness, etc.
| As Forbes said, it was 'tech for tech's sake'.
|
| Forbes: 'In June of 2019, Sidewalk's master plan was released,
| eliciting a barrage of controversy around privacy and
| participation.
|
| The Canadian Civil Liberties Association initiated a lawsuit
| against local, provincial and federal government over data
| privacy concerns. Vice called the proposal a "democracy
| grenade".'
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/09/26/why-side...
|
| Edit: I'm shocked at the number of downvotes for similar comments
| - I guess backing up your points counts. If you don't think this
| closure is good for Toronto, especially if you live here, I'd
| like to know why.
| annapurna wrote:
| Couldn't agree more as a Torontonian. It didn't help that they
| conducted most of the discussions in bad faith with the whole
| "trust us with your data" approach when these were geniune
| concerns due to the amount of oversight and control they were
| provided.
| brutus1213 wrote:
| I agree that this was a train wreck in slow motion. What is
| sad is I didn't see any significant open engagement with
| GTA's existing tech scene (did hear a lot of talk of it
| though). Maybe the VCs club had access but as a technologist,
| I certainly didn't. If this was happening in SF, there would
| be grass roots meetups all over the place, and a more serious
| focus on action rather than planning.
| dirtyid wrote:
| They did a series of town halls, funded a bunch of urban /
| tech meetups. Pretty proactive for a period. The townhalls
| were very... SF style, it didn't mesh with the local
| culture well. But I don't think they did a lot of work
| either, there's a pretty lackluster showroom and they put
| out some very middling concept sketches - not proper
| renders like you see in most smart city projects. Didn't
| seem like they were taking things seriously. A lot of
| words. Maybe too many. At least not enough right ones.
| EdTsft wrote:
| I'm a Torontonian and I was looking forward to the project. I'm
| sad to see it cancelled. (It's a big city with many opinions, I
| don't think you can fairly claim that quote about "thousands of
| Torontonians" is "simply not true" from a sample size of
| dozens, the author is not even claiming all those people
| supported the Quayside project specifically).
|
| Sure, some parts of the project looked like tech for tech's
| sake but I was excited about the urban design plans and
| architecture. And who knows, maybe some of the tech-y things
| would turn out to be good too. That's what experiments are for,
| and this wasn't a very large scale or risky one when compared
| to the size of the city so it's worth it to me to try new
| things even if many of the ideas don't work out. As for data
| issues, it seemed like the city and Waterfront Toronto were not
| afraid to exercise a lot of control on that front so Sidewalk
| Labs wasn't going to be able to do whatever they wanted, a lot
| of effort was going into ensuring it was in the public
| interest. This latest news supports the idea that the city was
| uncompromising in supporting what they see as the public
| interest - even to the extent that Sidewalk labs gives up
| entirely.
| ska wrote:
| I think lots of people were interested in the idea of such a
| project.
|
| I don't know anyone with real experience in development, city
| planning, etc. who took it seriously though as anything other
| than a source of a few ideas. None of them thought google had
| the skills, experience, or even commitment to do the project -
| probably correctly.
| a3n wrote:
| > As Forbes said, it was 'tech for tech's sake'.
|
| It was more than that.
|
| A sizable number of people carry Android-based surveillance, or
| data collection, devices in their pockets.
|
| Imagine the upside for Google if people lived and worked
| _inside_ Google devices.
| NN88 wrote:
| Google has a pattern of pull out of high profile announcements.
| Its striking.
| drusepth wrote:
| 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 project was
| inspiring because it embraced what's possible in a new way and
| enabled many new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be
| possible in the typical piecemeal upgrades a city typically sees
| over time (especially in terms of construction guidelines and
| sustainability). People hated on Sidewalk Labs since its very
| inception, but I guess they bit off too much area and got shut
| down by the locals (and, I guess, covid-19 made a handy exit
| strategy).
|
| Hopefully the next EPCOT equivalent will either be a new city
| that attracts the kind of people who would want to live there, or
| at least find a city that would be happy to host their
| "experiments".
|
| FWIW I previously worked at a "smart cities" company that I won't
| besmirch, but I will say I would rather see a more well-known
| (and IMO trustworthy) company that has more experience managing
| and securing data at scale than them. In experimental projects
| like these, it just takes one "city's data leaks" headline and
| the whole market chills.
| anoraca wrote:
| If the whole thing is designed to be transparent from the get
| go you wouldn't have to worry about data leaks.
| save_ferris wrote:
| How much have you read on the exploitative history of company
| towns[0]? There are some really good reasons why people are
| skeptical of a private company coming in and trying to reshape
| the foundation of a community, particularly when that company
| happens to be Google.
|
| Sure, there's something idyllic about the vision of a community
| driven by technology as a first-class citizen, but let's be
| real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better
| place, it exists to make money. Full stop. Some of what Google
| does may happen to improve quality of life for some, but
| they're also happy to do things like permanently lock people
| out of their accounts for TOS violations with no recourse,
| causing major disruptions some of for their users.
|
| And then when they've decided that a project is no longer worth
| pursuing, they just kill it. How would you resolve the scenario
| where Google builds this smart city and then decides to bail on
| it? What happens to the people living there? Does the city of
| Toronto pick up the tab to keep it going? Google's mentality is
| fundamentally inconsistent with projects that require long-term
| stability, because not everything makes the kind of money that
| search ads do.
|
| You really want that company dictating how the community should
| operate? I'll pass.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#History
|
| edit: a word
| zaidf wrote:
| Your questions are valid. But you could pick holes about any
| party trying to bring about change, right? For example, you
| say "let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the
| world a better place"...my question to you is, _which_ org
| does exist purely to make the world a better place? And
| moreover, _how_ are those orgs doing in terms of impact and
| scale?
| monadic2 wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and say maybe privately
| owned capital explains why most orgs fail to do good.
| seneca wrote:
| > I'm going to go out on a limb here and say maybe
| privately owned capital explains why most orgs fail to do
| good.
|
| Nonsense. Efforts to eliminate private ownership have
| lead to many of the largest events of mass human
| suffering in history. Spouting empty political claptrap
| like this degrades the conversation.
| save_ferris wrote:
| > which org does exist purely to make the world a better
| place?
|
| I think the idea that one organization existing to make the
| entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are
| much better equipped to bring positive change than private
| companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries
| of government resources. For example, a municipal
| government's purpose is to administer public services, and
| a municipal government answers to its citizens. A private
| company, on the other hand, has a fiscal duty to its
| shareholders.
|
| I'm not arguing that any organization is perfect because
| such an organization does not exist, and that's true for
| companies and governments.
|
| > how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?
|
| Let's use various governments response to the coronavirus
| outbreak as an example. The US government opted to defer
| much of it's responsibility to private companies and state
| governments, which has resulted in less testing, less
| access to PPE, and more reported deaths than any other
| country. Testing hasn't scaled, and there have been
| numerous reports of corruption and interference in the
| medical community, some of which was alleged to have come
| directly from the White House.
|
| Contrast that response with countries like Taiwan, who
| moved quickly to provide necessary resources and
| communicate effectively to mitigate the transmission of the
| virus.
|
| The US has operated one of the most private-industry
| focused responses to this outbreak, and we're likely to see
| 3k deaths per day by June. That's a 9/11 death toll every
| single day.
| zaidf wrote:
| I could not disagree with you more. Are you in the Bay
| Area? The Bay Area avoided a calamity primarily _because_
| of private companies taking action long before the city
| and state.
|
| I'd counter that if private companies were completely
| left in charge, the response may have been better (I
| would not have said this in January).
|
| Private companies were called in _because_ our public
| efforts failed. If private companies were leading the
| charge from day 1, I struggle to see how our response
| could have been worse than it is today. And I completely
| disagree that our poor response can be attributed to
| involvement of private companies.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > Private companies were called in because our public
| efforts failed.
|
| in the u.s, how about other countries?
|
| it seems like, uniquely among first-world countries, the
| u.s the govt (local or otherwise) is pretty inept at a
| lot of things (especially now)...
| [deleted]
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Plenty of orgs exists purely to make the world a better
| place: They're nonprofits. And many nonprofits work at a
| wide, international scale.
|
| Have you looked at how Disney built Disney World, and the
| way they... govern... Disney World? There's a lot of
| similarities in Google's plan and their requests with what
| Disney built with the Reedy Creek Improvement District[0].
| Essentially a company territory with government, policing,
| and regulation all managed by the company.
|
| And did EPCOT actually create a world of tomorrow? No. But
| Disney World has made Disney a _lot_ of money.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Di
| stri...
| theklub wrote:
| Nonprofits are bogus in a lot of cases. They make tons of
| profit and make their founders/ceos rich.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Non profit CEOs make a fraction of what they'd make at a
| comparably sized for profit company.
| andrekandre wrote:
| that may be true, but it doesnt mean they cant be corrupt
| or inept (just look at mother teresa for example)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
| CPLX wrote:
| Democratically elected governments exist to make the world
| a better place, at least in the views of those who vote in
| their leaders. Businesses exist to make money.
|
| That's the distinction being drawn. Pretending there's not
| a fundamental distinction between the two types of entities
| is disingenuous.
| true_religion wrote:
| Democratic governments exist to make their territories a
| better place, often at the expense of anyone who isn't a
| resident of their territory.
| marris wrote:
| 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 "fundamental distinctions"
| between government and business. For example, most
| governments (democratic or not) are slow, monolithic, and
| effectively immortal. Since governments have tax and
| police authority, they can survive bad periods, including
| those caused by their own errors, for longer periods of
| time. Most businesses do not have tax and police
| authority and must face the market test on a daily basis.
| The businesses that fail the test typically die and new
| businesses replace them.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > Most businesses do not have tax and police authority
| and must face the market test on a daily basis.
|
| they would if they could...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > 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 exist).
| zaidf wrote:
| 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.
| CPLX wrote:
| I didn't say they were good. I said they were democratic,
| and that the lead to better outcomes in the view of those
| who control those outcomes, which is a tautology,
| purposefully so.
|
| That can lead to good or bad outcomes in your judgment
| depending on your values. But it's fundamentally a
| different dynamic than a for profit entity.
| nostromo wrote:
| > got shut down by the locals
|
| That's not what happened though. Google was free to continue
| the project but decided not too, using Covid-19 as a fig leaf.
|
| I agree with the thrust of your comment (we need more
| experimentation with cities, not less) but this is Google doing
| what Google does: changing it's mind and abandoning projects.
| tenpies wrote:
| And let's be thankful that it abandoned it now, instead of in
| 15 years when it would have created a horrible slum.
| rising-sky wrote:
| Hard to say that wasn't a factor in shutting it down. After
| several missed deadlines, major controversies around trust
| and privacy, scope creep such as attempts by Sidewalk Labs to
| alter to the project scope, for example, redevelopment of 350
| acres in the Port Lands area which was nearly 30 times the
| original proposal, withdrawal of key advisors, and proposals
| that were simply political explosive, etc. It seemed almost
| inevitable that the project was destined to fail or largely
| be a shadow it's lofty original goals.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/alphabets-sidewalk-labs-
| want...
|
| https://betakit.com/ann-cavoukian-still-has-problems-with-
| si...
|
| https://betakit.com/sidewalk-labs-announces-it-will-no-
| longe...
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| How can you say it was going to be a shadow of its original
| goals if was unable to scope creep.
| kinkrtyavimoodh wrote:
| Google abandons projects when they don't make business sense.
| Or perhaps you think Google is a charity that just keeps
| randoms apps running on servers? Maybe it should be funded
| with tax-dollars then.
| cat199 wrote:
| > Maybe it should be funded with tax-dollars then.
|
| this presumes in some sense that they are not already.
| mcphage wrote:
| > Maybe it should be funded with tax-dollars then.
|
| That's kinda what they were going after.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Unless they abandon an infrastructure project after ruining
| miles of city streets....
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/googl...
| fossuser wrote:
| 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/
| servercobra wrote:
| 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".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| kunai wrote:
| Jane Jacobs is required reading as well.
| [deleted]
| DHPersonal wrote:
| I don't think a "smart city" is our answer; I think actually
| looking to the past is a better plan for a good city, such as
| what Strong Towns advocates. https://www.strongtowns.org/
|
| (I have no affiliation with the organization)
| Andorin wrote:
| Absolutely. We know perfectly well what works in cities and
| it's got nothing to do with smart tech.
| netcan wrote:
| I'd like us to be more forward looking, ambitious and
| experimental with our cities as well, especially in the west.
|
| But... I think there's an institutional aspect here that needs
| resolution before we can. The internet is worryingly
| centralised. A small number of extremely profitable companies
| monopolise huge markets. Google tends to do this with data.
|
| I think the reticence was justified: " _Who owns the data? What
| kind of monopoly are google eventually going to have?_ " These
| are fair. A financial success case for google is some sort of
| data-centric monopoly. They don't really do business another
| way. It's fair to be dubious of their endgame.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I, for one, would like us to stop experimenting with re-
| inventing the wheel. We had functional cities for centuries
| now. We can make adjustments to match the century, but I do
| not think it is helpful to revamp the way we have lived until
| now to satisfy this odd new personality that pervades the web
| that needs to change UI every so often to feel relevant.
|
| Geez. I feel old now.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| That land was up for grabs since Toronto's bid for 2008
| Olympics. The only serious project that materialized was
| Sidewalks one. Kind of sad.
| jocker12 wrote:
| You should read this -
| https://smartenoughcity.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/8dthlkrx/releas...
| TLightful wrote:
| LOL .... man, google is a joke.
|
| I'm half expecting an announcement that they're sunsetting their
| search business.
| AIME15 wrote:
| The scope-limiting to 12 acres announced on October 31 was
| perceived as a win for the regulators, giving them more control
| over the project over time. At that point the project timeline
| became untenable for SWL's plans but couldn't back out due to PR
| concerns for Alphabet. The pandemic is a convenient excuse for
| the company to abandon the Quayside project.
|
| For the last three years SWL has bent over backwards to be
| transparent about its plans and address community concerns. Plans
| have repeatedly been scaled down to the point where it makes
| absolutely no financial sense to move forward.
|
| The calculation to bet the company on Toronto was made before
| this recent backlash against Big Tech. I suspect it would have
| been made differently had the company started a year later.
| eddyionescu wrote:
| The 12-acres (just Quayside) was what Toronto's RFP asked for
| in the first place and Sidewalk Labs won out for
| (https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-
| fir...), which now turns out to have not been financially
| viable for them given the high cost of their R&D (including
| those mass-timber buildings which aren't even in Ontario's
| building code yet). Sidewalk Lab's wider plans were really an
| unsolicited proposal that no one asked for, so it's unfair to
| blame "regulators" or the tech backlash.
| AIME15 wrote:
| Agreed that the responsibility was 100% on SWL to build
| consensus among the community and decision makers in
| Waterfront Toronto and Toronto's government entities. I'm
| just saying that this became a lot tougher due to the change
| in public opinion on big tech.
| ericzawo wrote:
| Bent over backwards? I don't think we were attending the same
| public hearings about Sidewalk Labs. I went to three of them,
| and do not - at all - share that view. In fact, they
| deliberately obfuscated many key points around their continued
| goal-posting moving of public-private terms, which has been
| well documented[1].
|
| https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-...
| Wacko_dacko wrote:
| This is great news. As a Torontonian I found their plan to be
| nothing more than a money grab on public space and the public in
| general. They also massively overreached in all their
| applications to the city.
| stanski wrote:
| Just a big tech company hyping up a project they were never
| really up to. Hopefully the city didn't spend a fortune on
| this. The fizzling out will come to no one's surprise.
| leoh wrote:
| > I found their plan to be nothing more than a money grab on
| public space and the public in general
|
| You're going to get a big real estate developer doing it
| instead.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| _Maybe_.
|
| Their plan would have implied the eradication of the
| properties of much of the film industry in the city who would
| have had to move to likely more expensive locations.
|
| Frankly, I was surprised they were cleared to build
| residences in that area (or were they?)
|
| When I worked in the film industry down on Commissioners--
| just a short bit west of Cherry St--there was still
| phosphorus seeping up through the ground on occasion...
|
| AFAIU Waterfront Toronto has rule over the area and they've
| done some pretty great work with the Harbourfront area, so I
| would put faith in them to do a good job with the region. I
| think their major roadblock (prior to the pandemic) is
| funding. https://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfron
| t/Home/w...
|
| https://portlandsto.ca/project-details/
| jungletime wrote:
| Thats a shame. I always thought Google would do a double plus
| good job of it. Who wouldn't want a listening device in their
| toilet. Just skip the town, and make a better smarter toilet
| Google. Control the world, starting with the throne. Thats where
| many are already watching youtube from anyway now. Take my
| temperature and test me for corona, update my social score and
| unlock the e-lock to leave my apartment. The Future.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUAG6t5aN8
| karmakaze wrote:
| The promised green-space would have been awesome. In all, I'm
| thrilled that Toronto won't be the first guinea pig testing out a
| privacy-flexible smart city. If it works well in other places and
| everyone's happy, we can get the new improved one with the quirks
| fixed.
| g8oz wrote:
| Google HQ never seemed to have to much to do with this. It was
| rather their subsidiary Sidewalk Labs that was going to make it
| happen. They always struck me as long on "vision" and short on
| execution.
| mrtron wrote:
| I am a very optimistic individual, and have considered this
| project as vapourware since day one. All vision and posturing,
| and no execution over years.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| 'Smart' is a marketing term that means 'useless BS'.
| new2628 wrote:
| No, it means "collecting data, showing ads".
| OrgNet wrote:
| It ends up being the case most of the time but of course it
| could be better.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Shame, some genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science
| and urban design. 11/10 chance the technology elements would have
| gone the way of the Google Grave yard after 10years, but at least
| it will leave a set of interesting buildings to draw lessons
| from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with generic
| condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google
| branding and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help.
| Simultaneously, the inability for western societies to at least
| entertain rapid urban experiments is going to backfire. I'm not a
| big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and at least
| tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of
| privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode
| well for anyone else.
| iclelland wrote:
| Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103610 as
| well
| nick_ wrote:
| 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.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| But... condo neighborhoods are exactly that medium density
| housing. Every city does need more condos in their existing
| neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. (Unless Covid-19
| will reshape the trajectory of urbanization, and major cities
| will mostly shrink for the next several decades. That actually
| seems somewhat plausible).
|
| But writing off all the sidewalk labs ideas as gimmicky
| smartphone integrations is pretty disingenuous. There were
| ideas for greener construction methods using more timber and
| less concrete, more space optimized for walking and biking
| instead of cars, interesting communal space arrangements to
| make spaces that can be heated in winter and converted to
| outdoor space when the weather is nice. There will always be
| some haters, but IMO all of these things would be amazing
| quality of life improvements in the majority of North American
| cities.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _There were ideas for greener construction methods using more
| timber and less concrete, more space optimized for walking
| and biking instead of cars, interesting communal space
| arrangements to make spaces that can be heated in winter and
| converted to outdoor space when the weather is nice._
|
| None of those were innovative, or Google-first. They're all
| things that have been in the works by cities for decades.
|
| The problem is that people who don't watch or attend city
| meetings don't know it because change at that scale is slow.
| Unlike computer code, you can't just delete a section of a
| city you don't like and rebuild it. A city is a living thing,
| and living things take time to change.
| nick_ wrote:
| I understand "high density" to mean condo neighbourhoods. I
| understand medium density to mean mid-rise, walk-ups, or town
| houses.
|
| The situation in Toronto is (and has been for some time) a
| stark contrast between low-density neighbourhoods of houses &
| small duplexes/triplexes, and high-density pockets of high-
| rise condos. This is bad for all the usual reasons of
| neighbourhood segregation.
| brummm wrote:
| I absolutely agree. Toronto has either single family homes
| (low density) or high rise condos (high density), but the
| medium density part is absolutely missing and it has a
| pretty negative effect on Toronto, I feel.
| jeromegv wrote:
| That's the issue. I'm all for condos in Toronto but the
| issue is lack of medium density, you either own your home
| and your lawn in the middle of downtown (which is now a
| multi-million dollar home) or you live in a condo tower
| of 30 floors. No in-between.
| mdkrkeo9 wrote:
| None of those things require Google per se
|
| Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon
| themselves to do it
|
| Which is hard since they are tasked with using their time to
| prop up big corps profit machinery most days
|
| I wonder if there's economic benefit to leaving peoples
| wealth in their communities instead of extracting it into
| silos for the investment whims of a minority of global elites
|
| Curious if that model of thinking could be of use to North
| American culture
|
| Since Google doesn't seem like really doing it, may be worth
| having a real think on it if you're so sure it all needs to
| be done
|
| Shit n hellfire, American's need to stop ogling the behaviors
| of others and behave exceptionally themselves. That might be
| useful to North America.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > None of those things require Google per se
|
| And it never did because it was never Google, it's Sidewalk
| Labs, which is a separate Alphabet company who's whole job
| is exactly to research and develop such plans.
|
| > Ultimately they require the community itself to take it
| upon themselves to do it
|
| I really dislike this argument. "We don't need AMP to make
| sites fast, webdevs can just spend time hand optimizing
| their sites themselves". Then you wait years and 95% of
| websites are still slow and bloated.
|
| Every single city and community has had the power to do
| this for years yet there are very few who have actually
| creating anything like it. Just because it's doable doesn't
| mean it'll happen without some incentive and help.
|
| > economic benefit to leaving peoples wealth in their
| communities instead of extracting it into silos
|
| Expect a lot of these create more value and wealth within
| the communities than they take. People love to blame tech
| companies, but without food delivery services for example,
| most restaurants would have no business right now. Google
| Maps and these other services all bring orders of magnitude
| more value to a city than they "extract into silos".
| irieid9 wrote:
| Thank you for the banal correction of Google vs Alphabet
|
| And comparing website dev to community planning
|
| And ignoring the argument that communities are stuck
| focusing on profit generation which is acting as a block
| on their agency to collectively improve their communities
|
| Did you actually read the post or get stuck on the
| alphabet not google part and fill in the rest of the post
| with non sequitur?
|
| Food delivery existed before "tech companies"
|
| I'm not sure you are living on Earth. You do know society
| existed before the year 2000, yes?
|
| We're ridiculing tech companies for capturing our agency.
| It has nothing to do with their technology but the social
| aspects of curving the masses attention to profit
| generating fiefdom a minority control
|
| Religion and monarchy before that operated on basically
| the same pattern in the abstract
|
| We don't talk of sky wizard but we do talk of appropriate
| behavior that aligns with economics models of men paid a
| lot to make those economics models. We rejected God but
| replaced him godly men of industry. Right back to literal
| fetishizing a minority of real men like they're kings. Oh
| and look at what's up in the Oval Office. Coincidence?
|
| The bias is deep in the limbic brain which heavily
| influences our agency response
|
| It's why I don't curate an online identity. I don't need
| to fetishize some profile that goes away if the servers
| shut down
|
| Stop importing other peoples semantic objects and
| applying your agency to their study and care. We still
| need tech but we don't need Google
|
| Invent your own
| ehsankia wrote:
| > Food delivery existed before "tech companies"
|
| Per-company delivery is not sustainable for anything else
| than Pizza and a few other fast food places. There was no
| centralized system like food deliveries. Also, not only
| is it keeping restaurants alive, it is also providing
| jobs to many drivers.
|
| > You do know society existed before the year 2000, yes?
|
| Yes, I remember having to pull out my paper map to go
| anywhere, having to go to video stores to get VHS tapes
| and not being able to go anywhere without a car. So much
| more freedom!
| mdkrkeo9 wrote:
| Jobs, restaurants, etc, arbitrary goals of a society. Not
| legal obligations at all
|
| Freedom from having my agency bent towards pampering the
| rich while my poorer family can't pay rent and goto a
| doctor is the freedom I'm after
|
| Freedom is a word. The definition is flexible. Your
| bouncing around the world easy peasy and not having to
| learn to cook is not an obligation everyone has to enable
| through grand scale effort
|
| Especially when the vast majority doing the work can't
| afford it themselves
|
| So much freedom for them! being your bellhop every day
|
| Omg a paper map and a first world problems of VHS! Better
| silo the masses cash to produce iPhones for this burdened
| creature (don't forget to charge margins that enable you
| to buy new a Ferrari every day for life, make them design
| and build it and pay you for the privilege)
|
| This is some disingenuous bullshit. The western world,
| ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday's creature comforts are
| today's burdens of invention. Omg!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Every city does need more condos in their existing
| neighborhoods if populations are able to grow.
|
| Except that is in cities like Toronto/Vancouver more condos
| doesn't mean more people living in those condos. These are
| investment vehicles. Many of these new condo biuldings in
| trendy neighbourhoods sit empty, having been purchased as an
| investment rather than as a living space. What is needed is
| more _rental_ units, not more places for rich people to park
| money.
| tempestn wrote:
| If you keep building them, they will become more available.
| You're increasing supply, without affecting demand (from
| potential investors or residents).
| ahsima1 wrote:
| And increasing supply is a great way to make them bad
| investment vehicles
| ehsankia wrote:
| Just tax empty places, isn't that what Vancouver does?
| Leaving a place empty/inhabited should be very expensive.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Leaving a place empty/inhabited should be very
| expensive.
|
| Vancouver is finding that difficult to enforce. How do
| you tell if a unit is "occupied" or not? At the moment it
| is largely voluntary. The city cannot tell whether
| someone is living in a unit or it living overseas ten
| months out of the year. They aren't going to be sending
| inspectors to knock on doors.
|
| I'm a good example of the difficulties. I was away on
| training (military) for six months. My apparment sat
| empty. Should I have been paying the tax? How would the
| government detect that I wasn't there?... Short of me or
| my landlord admitting to it and then paying the tax.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Maybe you can have one residence which is excluded, but
| for people who own dozens of condos, anything past the
| first one can be checked more thoroughly?
| true_religion wrote:
| There would probably be an exception for people in the
| military or government service. If on the other hand you
| spent 6 months in the US working for a private business
| like Google, then it would be fair to tax you.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Setting aside fairness, how would the government work out
| whether I am gone or not? Lots of people go away for
| several months. Policing the system becomes impossible,
| which is why I described vancouver's system as voluntary.
| asdff wrote:
| Say you own three properties in Vancouver, best case you
| can only occupy one at a time since you are not a quantum
| entity from another dimension. The city could ask for
| proof of a tenant renting the unit, and if you fail to
| prove it, you then need to pay empty unit tax on 2/3 of
| your properties.
|
| Someone being gone for a stint and leaving a single
| apartment unoccupied for a while might not be a big issue
| in the grand scheme of things, if most of the problem is
| from people who can afford several properties. If the
| city wanted to go after these sort of units, maybe they
| could pull utility data and see a drop off in use. I'm no
| plumber, but with Vancouver winters, maybe you do want to
| have your water service shut off if you will be gone long
| term? No one likes coming home to a house completely
| encased in ice inside and out.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| There's already property tax
| ehsankia wrote:
| That's different from the Empty Home Tax:
| https://vancouver.ca/your-government/vacancy-tax-
| bylaw.aspx
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Funny enough the city is actually making some real changes
| due to the pandemic.
|
| They're currently in the process of opening up certain
| roadways to pedestrian and cycle traffic and closing some of
| them off to cars save for local traffic. They've stated some
| of these changes are temporary, and some possibly permanent.
| This includes expanding the current bike paths and speeding
| up implementation of already approved paths.
|
| The program is called ActiveTO. It was just announced.
|
| https://www.toronto.ca/home/media-room/news-releases-
| media-a...
|
| ---
|
| Edit: Adding the following quote as a decent summary of the
| intentions of the project:
|
| > _"Our streets are going to look different in many places in
| the post-COVID world. We will need more road space for
| walking. We will need quiet streets. We will need more bike
| infrastructure. We are going about this in a responsible,
| common sense way with Toronto Public Health, Transportation
| Services and local councillors all involved in making common
| sense, health-focused decisions which broaden out our
| transportation network. "_
|
| - Mayor John Tory
| gabbo wrote:
| If you've been following Toronto politics for long, you'll
| realize this move from Tory is just another in his (and
| Toronto's) long history of poorly-delivered half-measures
| which come well after other major cities have already
| turned the corner.
|
| I would not laud the city for "making some real changes" as
| much as I would criticize the mayor for being a stale,
| retrograde leader who is clearly in the business of
| delivering the barest possible minimum solution only after
| made to look like a fool.
|
| Wake me up when he applies any pressure whatsoever to
| Toronto Police over their alarming lack of traffic
| enforcement and takes less than a year to support like the
| Bloor bike lane.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I wasn't singing the man's praises, I'm just hopeful that
| something will actually happen.
|
| They did point to SF, Portland, and other cities as the
| inspiration for actually making the step--even though
| citizens and newspapers have basically been crying out
| for this very thing for weeks.
|
| I'm just glad they're finally moving to do it. I was glad
| with how they stood strong on the King St traffic
| project. Hopefully many of these items will persist.
|
| I've enjoyed the sweeter air due to the lessened traffic
| so, so much.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| We'll see if it materializes into a truly bold and long-
| term improvement (out of character for Toronto), or fizzles
| out into marginally effective solutions sandboxed into very
| limited time/space constraints (very much in character for
| Toronto).
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| We will indeed.
|
| I'm hopeful, though. For all that can be said about Tory
| he has proven to react in the peoples' favour when he
| actual has to face the consequences of _not_ acting. I 'm
| referring to the case of our subways A/C breaking in the
| middle of summer heat waves. When he actually rode it
| end-to-end with someone who raised the issue with him and
| he stepped off at the end of the line drenched in sweat
| he actually acted and it tangibly improved.
|
| I'm hoping this may be a similar situation and prove to
| be a silver lining.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| That's a _very_ low bar though, isn 't it? I'd be happy
| with that kind of responsiveness from a mayor of a mid-
| sized Russian city appointed by Putin. Like ooh, we got
| lucky this time, the tsar sent us someone not entirely
| incompetent. I expect more from my Canadian elected
| officials. It's all about who the voters elect though,
| and what kind of feedback they give politicians, that's
| definitely true.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| It's no hard defense of John Tory. It's just an observed
| behaviour that I hope works in our favour (as it did with
| the subway line).
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| CaveTech wrote:
| Almost everyone I know lives in a rented condo.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's called an apartment, and is not what Google was
| building.
| WrkInProgress wrote:
| Condominium in Ontario (Toronto is in Ontario) is a form
| of ownership, it had nothing to do with the physical form
| of the home.
|
| You can own a condominimum townhouse (a row of single
| family homes with front yard, driveways, garage attached
| by common walls) or a condominium apartment (in say a 30
| storey building with 10 parents per floor)
|
| And yes, you can rent out a condominium apartment. Approx
| 60 % of the rental units in the Greater Toronto Area are
| condominium apartments.
| andechs wrote:
| Most of Toronto's rental stock is privately owned condos,
| rented out. There is next to no Condo Corporations in
| Ontario that aren't senior specific that ban renting the
| unit to long term tenants (many ban short term AirBnb in
| their bylaws).
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| NA condos can be rented out, it depends on the HOA terms
| but renting someone else's condo is like renting out
| someone else's house. Many condos are designed as
| investment properties to be rented out by their owners
| (eg the 4 bedroom condo near a university....).
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| matchbok wrote:
| No thanks. Government subsidized units are a mess, and have
| been tried before.
|
| Plop someone into an "affordable" unit and you are
| basically locking them there forever, as they cannot afford
| to move. That is a very bad situation to be in.
| refurb wrote:
| _Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs
| of most cities._
|
| What the alternative? It's either single family home or
| condominiums (apartments).
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Not necessarily, no. First, condominiums are not
| apartments, because they are supposed to be sold, and in
| general cannot be rented. This means that they are built
| for and priced for people that can afford a 450000$
| mortgage plus large condominium fees every month. Which
| are not the people that need housing right now.
|
| There are also duplexes and triplexes, and apartments, as
| well as housing co-ops and subsidized or state-built
| housing. These are much better, imo, than condos.
| alexashka wrote:
| 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 own a home.
|
| That's the world we're living in. If you want to cancel
| inflow of capital into big cities, that's a political
| decision that has nothing to do with building or not
| building housing. If you want to 'just build affordable
| housing', you're really saying let's give permanent
| government assistance to a slice of the population. Are
| you qualified and knowledgable of all the side-effects of
| doing so? I'm not, so I don't even bother pretending I
| have a solution.
|
| People need to become 1% smarter, to realize how complex
| human societies are and quit wishful thinking of 'just
| give/build more stuff for people who don't have enough'.
| You're a software developer, you know what a ball of mud
| most codebases are and how hard they are to refactor.
| Human societies are a worse version of that and it's a
| thankless job because by re-factoring one bit, you
| potentially break a dozen other places and boy will you
| hear from them.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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 market can bear more
| expensive housing. The net effect is that real wages
| after rent are decreasing year after year since the 80s.
| At this rate, the day will come where the real wages of
| the average citizen of the US after rent will be lower
| than in the disaster that was the Soviet Union.
|
| The problem is actually even more complex that simply
| capital inflow into big cities. Because capital is
| already centralized around big cities, and has been for a
| while, which leads to the question, where is that capital
| coming from? And the answer is that it doesn't actually
| have to do with capital moving, as that mostly cancels
| out, but instead with growing inequality.
|
| Also, if your end statement is that it's ok that most
| people aren't able to own their home anymore, aren't able
| to own their cars, aren't able to own their furniture,
| aren't able to own their phones and so on, which is the
| direction in which things are happening, you shouldn't be
| surprised when heads start to roll in the next economic
| crisis. Literally. This is not a small issue, it is a
| massive issue. The incentive, historically, for the
| average person to continue participating in capitalism is
| the promise that eventually they will be able to have
| their own property, and maybe pass on some capital to
| their children. If you take away this incentive, the
| system will likely not survive for much longer. There is
| a reason why the first people that the population turned
| against in the Chinese revolution were the landlords. I
| don't want to see this happen again.
|
| So yes, if fixing this issue will break a few other
| places, I don't care, we can see what we will do later.
| This is one of the most important economic issues full
| stop.
| alexashka wrote:
| 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 :)
| [deleted]
| geddy wrote:
| Housing projects, so that in a year everyone can complain
| about the crime rate increasing and the quality stores
| closing and being replaced by fast food chains. It's like
| everyone's solution to make everything affordable is to
| aim to please everyone below the poverty line while
| giving a middle finger to everyone above it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Wait what, you're saying that poor people bring crime
| right? And what's your solution, to make them even poorer
| or homeless? Or are you just using class as a proxy for
| something else?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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 a modest rent reduction.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| matchbok wrote:
| This is incorrect. Those homes are expensive because the
| land beneath them is expensive. The finishes are largely
| irrelevant.
|
| And the land is expensive because there are not enough
| places like them.
| asdff wrote:
| It all comes down to job growth driving demand on housing
| supply. The better the local economy, the more hiring is
| going on, the more people are recruited and look for
| housing convenient to work. Hardly anyone uproots
| themselves and moves to a new city without having a job
| lined up first. The value of the underlying land is
| speculative based on demand induced by job growth.
| triceratops wrote:
| > For one, these condos being built can essentially not
| be rented,
|
| Non-occupancy tax. Vancouver has one.[1]
|
| 1. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-
| homes-t...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| A non-occupancy tax is orthogonal to this particular
| issue, a lot of high rise condos cannot be rented,
| reasonably. And so they are only accessible to people
| that can afford to buy them, occupied or not.
| triceratops wrote:
| Why can't they be rented?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Exorbitant HOA/Condo Association fees and regulations
| that make renting out a condo unfeasible, or outright
| banned.
| triceratops wrote:
| Cool. So then people who buy condos for investment will
| have to choose between paying the non-occupancy tax or
| putting their money in property that isn't encumbered by
| those regulations. Accordingly the price of condos in
| buildings with such regulations should fall.
|
| Alternatively, if a city council has the votes to
| implement a non-occupancy tax, they may have the votes to
| nullify HOA clauses that forbid renting. Or levy
| additional taxes on such HOAs. Since it's the HOA that's
| forbidding renting, the HOA should foot the bill for the
| non-occupancy tax, not the owner of the unit.
|
| It's fairly common to include HOA dues and fees in the
| rent when renting out a condo.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I would like to see that happen then. It might work.
|
| However, even in Vancouver the occupancy tax is not being
| enforced nearly rigorously enough for such an effect, and
| the occupancy tax is still too little.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If demand increases faster than supply increases, then
| prices go up. It does not mean supply&demand theory is
| invalid.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| So, demand and supply has increased dramatically in
| almost every single city in the world, and in almost no
| cities has supply outpaced demand? The world is not an
| economics 101 textbook.
|
| In Canada for example, the only province with functional
| and affordable housing is the one that enacted serious
| rent control and public housing, and they didn't have to
| build a lot. Seems to me that supply and demand isn't the
| whole thing if your goal is to have affordable housing.
| asdff wrote:
| California is short by millions of units. This number can
| be calculated. A cheap city example is Cleveland. The
| reason why it's so cheap? In 1960, 900,000 people lived
| there. Today, 400,000 people live there. The population
| of LA in 1960 was 2.4 million. Today, its over 4 million
| in the city proper. Units in LA are on the market for a
| weekend, you sign your lease on monday, and move in by
| thursday. In Cleveland, listings stay up for months. The
| result is that 600k buys you two bedrooms and a bath in
| LA, and six bedrooms and seven baths in Cleveland. It's a
| very basic supply and demand problem.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > in almost no cities has supply outpaced demand?
|
| Detroit. Rural communities.
|
| In real estate, it takes a while (years) for supply to
| catch up with demand. What you're seeing is simply city
| populations are rising quickly.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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."
| sudosysgen wrote:
| >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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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 left or is currently being
| constructed might be pricier housing comparatively. The
| working class greatly outnumbers the capital class
| everywhere. Take it with a grain of salt as I don't have
| any data in front of me, I'm merely postulating, but this
| would explain this trend.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Toronto (as a region) is getting about 100 000 new
| residents every year. It's hard to say that supply and
| demand isn't working because really, there is SO MUCH
| DEMAND, supply can hardly catchup. Montreal still has a
| decent cost of living for housing and guess what, that's
| because their demand is lower (harder for non-French
| speaking people to establish themselves there)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That is true, but it is not the whole answer, as rent
| increases even in cities where population is stagnant or
| decreasing.
|
| But yes, Toronto needs more affordable high density
| rental housing, as well as much better transit.
| CaveTech wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Even in places where population is decreasing, rent finds
| a way to increase.
| briffle wrote:
| 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...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| teen wrote:
| How is supply and demand not the major factor here?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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
| claudeganon wrote:
| ...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.
| what_ever wrote:
| Isn't that a separate problem which Vancouver is already
| trying to fix by occupancy rules?
| claudeganon wrote:
| Vancouver is fixing the problem that the parent said is
| the solution - build a bunch of luxury stock to solve
| your housing crisis. It doesn't work out that way in
| reality, which is what they're now addressing.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| Just take a look at the housing market in any city with
| high demand, you won't see very much delta for a given
| size unit. In LA, the shittiest 1 bedroom apartment with
| cigarette burns in the carpet and a view of the freeway
| is only maybe 10% cheaper than new construction.
| Engineers working for Google in playa del ray are
| directly competing for the same housing stock as low
| income people who fit an entire family or three in a one
| bedroom in Palms.
|
| However, if you build an apartment with pretty colors and
| a pool and grill and some artificial grass for your dog
| to poop on, that engineer working for google in that
| cigarette stained apartment in palms might just stomach
| the premium on rent for a better place, and that slumlord
| with the cigarette stained apartments might have a little
| bit more trouble finding tenants at top of market rent
| rates.
| aljg wrote:
| 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_.
| vkou wrote:
| > I wonder who you think would move into that?
|
| Typically, migrant tech workers who came from somewhere
| else.
|
| In the rest of the world that is not San Francisco, there
| is, in fact, an unprecedented rate of construction of new
| properties. Seattle has more active cranes building than
| anywhere else in North America. The Vancouver skyline
| changes year-over-year as 30-story condos spring up like
| mushrooms around SkyTrain stations. Toronto is building
| and densifying at breakneck speed.
|
| And yet, rent in each of these locations is sky-high,
| squeezing the lower classes.
|
| Could construction be faster? Sure. Would the problem be
| worse if there was no construction? Probably. Is
| construction fixing the issue? Hell, no, it's not. Not
| even close.
| WalterBright wrote:
| All that means is demand is increasing _faster_ than
| supply.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Or, just maybe, the situation is a bit more complex than
| that, and demand as well as supply are stratified as well
| as other ancillary effects affecting prices beyond that?
|
| Or are we just going to pretend that the world works just
| like an economics 101 textbook and close our eyes to the
| real problems instead?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| That's a _super simplistic_ perspective.
|
| Property developers are probably going to preferentially
| build high-margin housing, right?
|
| And they're going to preferentially build those at a rate
| that doesn't meet demand, in order to keep prices high.
|
| So what's missing?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > super simplistic
|
| The law of gravity is super simple, but it produces all
| kinds of complex results.
|
| Underlying the complex behavior of the real estate market
| is supply&demand driving it.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| You're disregarding the site guidelines here.
|
| _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
| not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Are you interested in address the core of my argument, or
| only those two words in isolation?
| [deleted]
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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 apply to more and more and more goods as
| you move from theory to practice.
|
| The laws of supply and demand are simply not useful for
| analyzing this market. Any attempt to use them will have
| to be accompanied by more classical incentive analysis
| and experiments that mean that ignoring it will give you
| better results than relying on it in this situation.
| Attempting to apply it gives you ridiculous conclusions,
| like that demand for housing is increasing everywhere in
| the world at the same time faster than supply, even when
| in practice supply is often greater than demand, leading
| to empty buildings, while prices still rise.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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 in the
| mathematical sense, where simple rules lead to complex
| (and counter-intuitive) behaviors.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| 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?
| jeromegv wrote:
| Landlords charge more because people are still showing up
| to the open-house to rent. So of course they would
| increase rent. What you're describing is supply and
| demand. We lack supply. You can be sure the rent would go
| lower if nobody was at the door asking to rent their
| place. In fact, that's exactly what's happening right now
| with rent price in Toronto. Immigration is slowed,
| airbnbs visitors are gone and supply is up. Price are
| going down.
| matchbok wrote:
| The fit and finish of apartments and houses is largely
| irrelevant. The cost of the housing increase over the
| past 20 years is the cost of the land beneath it. Largely
| because we have not built transit and housing and jobs
| elsewhere.
|
| Based on your logic we should ban all new market-rate
| construction and magically prices will come down. That is
| nonsense.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| _affordable housing_ is a pretty loaded phrase at this
| point. In fact it has come to just mean government-
| subsidized housing. So by that definition you are
| probably correct, people aren 't often moving from
| housing projects to brand new condos. Nobody is saying
| that they do.
|
| _luxury condos_ is also a loaded phrase. In an expensive
| city, all housing is expensive, even if it is 50 years
| old and used to house working class people. So-called
| "luxury housing" is just regular-sized new apartments,
| with a few thousand dollars of added perks like sleek
| recessed lighting and upgraded appliances to help sell
| it.
|
| If you take out those loaded phrases, people are
| absolutely moving from existing, mid-tier market rate
| housing into only slighty more expensive new construction
| market rate housing. The more new construction housing
| you build, the more supply you have, and the more prices
| come down. Which allows market-rate housing to become
| affordable to more of the population. That was the case
| 10-15 years ago, and could be true again in the future if
| we just let people build enough housing to match the
| incoming demand of new residents moving into cities.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Yep, agreed, and all fair points.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| Personally, I'd leave the truly suburban areas where you
| can't even walk to the gas station without it taking 30
| minutes alone. However, there are plenty of neighborhoods in
| the US and Canada that were designed around walking to the
| streetcar. I think those neighborhoods are already laid out
| well for medium density apartments and improved transit.
| alexashka wrote:
| Why don't you like stamping out single family homes?
|
| What is the benefit/cost ratio of 2-3 story houses vs 10
| story housing vs 20 vs 30 vs 40?
|
| Houses are for families with kids right? What do kids want?
| Kids want other kids to play with. Kids want to attend
| classes and learn stuff. The more options a kid has, the
| better.
|
| Which area has more kids and therefore classes: low, medium
| or high density areas?
|
| I understand that there is a trade-off where we don't want
| 100-story skyscrapers but to me, single family homes are an
| infrastructure luxury that hasn't been thought through and
| something we'd benefit from re-considering and re-educating
| people about.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| some benefits off the top of my head:
|
| -More natural settings shown to improve mental health
|
| -"neighborliness" scales inversely with density to a point
| - less neighbors means you're more likely to get to know
| them, while with more people there are too many so the
| crowd of people gets depersonalized to a degree, because 50
| neighbors are too many to keep track of.
|
| -you don't have to go to some crowded city park full of
| garbage when friends have yards with their own stuff like
| sandboxes where they can have some privacy from for example
| sheltered city people or park cops freaking out over the
| kids having nerf guns
|
| -other activities become more feasible like bike riding (I
| wouldn't feel good letting a kod bike around NYC), ATV's,
| fishing
|
| -more outdoors setting prevents aesthma
|
| -safer setting for the kids overall
|
| Your concerns just don't work oout that way in my
| experience. I was in single-home-only towns as a kid and
| there was no problem playing with neighbors or anything.
| Even when houses are a mile apart it's really not a big
| deal just being driven to them.
|
| And since when do kids want to attend classes?
| alexashka wrote:
| You've provided anecdotal benefits. You've neglected to
| mention the costs.
|
| The benefit/cost ratio is what makes this conversation
| worth having.
| bbeekley wrote:
| >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.
| donpdonp wrote:
| $50M and two years later - where are the conclusions? The
| results? A blog post of what happened? Two years seems like
| enough time to say we tried some amazing things and this is how
| it did or did not work.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| Two years is nothing when it comes with planning and
| development in the US, unfortunately.
|
| A little anecdote, here in Cincinnati I was peripherally
| involved with a local nonprofit taking over management of an
| abandoned bit of city part to build new multi-use trails. It
| took 20 years for the park board to even listen, then once an
| agreement was reached it took another /year and a half/ to get
| the paperwork to the point where they would officially sign it.
| Just for a group to build trails, with no money needed from the
| city, no permits, etc.
|
| Projects like what sidewalk labs was trying to accomplish
| frequently take 5-10 years+ to get anywhere. Planning in the US
| is absolute garbage. It is a big part of the reason SF and
| other large US cities are so expensive. Luckily there are some
| groups like YIMBY making headway here.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I'm so confused by this comment. You're saying there is some
| city planning problem unique to the United States, but also
| cities in Canada? Could you help me understand how some
| friction to building in Cincinatti is relevant to Toronto or
| San Francisco, when different laws and political bodies apply
| to all?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _local nonprofit taking over management of an abandoned bit
| of city_
|
| This is why it took a long time. The city was handing over
| management over _part of itself_ in perpetuity. That needs to
| be done with care and deliberation.
|
| Moreover, there are liability issues related to third parties
| making alterations to city lands that could result in ruinous
| liability to the city if citizens get injured on the altered
| lands and the city didn't fully inspect the alterations.
|
| You also have potential drainage and soil issues to deal
| with, which need to be reviewed by geologists. And that's not
| getting into environmental reviews if there are at-risk
| species dwelling in that park.
|
| All of those things take time. Programmers always complain
| about their customers wanting X in a few weeks when it really
| takes months.
|
| So why are programmers always complaining that it takes
| engineers, geologists, architects, and city planners months
| to do _their_ jobs? Unlike programming, the stuff these
| professionals are doing /reviewing can't just be fixed with a
| patch.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Thankfully Waterfront Toronto has been doing those studies
| and has their own plan for the region! They want to convert
| a large part of the area into green lands and proper
| drainage of the Don River to prevent further flooding.
|
| I'm not sure if SWL's plan would have worked in conjunction
| with that work or if they would have overridden it.
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| pb7 wrote:
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I am not angry about Google Fiber, I'm _disappointed_.
|
| This project reminds me of Google Fiber in that it had a kind
| of optimism backed by a tremendous amount of capital, both in
| cash and in goodwill. For fiber, of course I knew about the
| incumbents. The 1990s were an enormous giveaway to the
| telecommunications industry in terms of tax breaks in
| exchange for a nebulous set of promises and, as far as I can
| tell, no teeth -- what penalties for failure to deliver? They
| took the money and devoted it to lobbying and eventually as
| much regulatory capture as they could manage.
|
| We knew going in that it would be tough. And of course
| infrastructure, physical infrastructure, is tough. You have
| legal requirements, like permits and easements. You have the
| "merely" physical task of digging all of these trenches, mile
| upon mile. You have an huge outlay of equipment, from
| ordering to configuration and maintenance. You have the
| relentless horror of the last mile. Most importantly, the
| competition wouldn't like it. Not one bit. They even spoke of
| it. I don't think anyone didn't know this going in, but the
| promise was that Google could and would deliver results
| because they knew all of this beforehand.
|
| Somehow, despite all of that, it didn't work out, but they
| were very certain at the time it would. They even managed to
| convince me and I come with a fairly dour outlook on these
| kinds of pitches.
|
| This has much the same smell as did Google Fiber. This I can
| be a little annoyed at because it sounds as if lessons were
| not learned.
| pb7 wrote:
| Your comment resonates well with me but I'm still confused.
| Google Fiber _wants_ to provide you service. They can 't
| for reasons outside of their control (some of which you
| very accurately described). It is not Google Fiber you
| should be disappointed with. Fighting against the
| telecommunications industry that is actively hostile
| towards consumers is really tough. They took the cash and
| used it to better defend themselves against disruption
| rather than building out the infrastructure for all to
| benefit from. Google has money but it doesn't have infinite
| money to throw at this particular initiative. I too am
| disappointed by the situation. Thankfully I am someplace
| where I do reap the benefits of it but I really wish the
| whole country had what is available to me because it is
| wonderful.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.)
| ehsankia wrote:
| > Talk to Louisville, where Google put trenches in the
| roadways
|
| Yes, Louisville was indeed a failure. They tried something
| different to help speed up laying out lines, and it didn't
| work. All that is not really relevant to the comment above,
| which still is true regardless of the issue in Louisville.
|
| > Ignore the title, Google decided not to repair anything
|
| That's misleading, they decided to instead pay the city for
| the repairs instead of doing it themselves.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/04/googl...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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&T's equipment around on AT&T's poles to
| make room for their own without supervision.
|
| ISPs have their problems but Google wasn't in it to build
| a long-term, quality infrastructure. They were trying to
| make a splash on the cheap, but the costs would be bound
| to go up anywhere they couldn't employ cheap hacks.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > 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 and delay them as much
| as possible.
| pb7 wrote:
| >ISPs have their problems but Google wasn't in it to
| build a long-term, quality infrastructure. They were
| trying to make a splash on the cheap, but the costs would
| be bound to go up anywhere they couldn't employ cheap
| hacks.
|
| There is a disingenuous take. ISPs were provided $100Bs
| of taxpayer money to build out infrastructure in the last
| few decades. It is not theirs to control or monopolize.
| Everywhere Google Fiber was introduced, the incumbents'
| prices dropped and speeds increased. If they're able to
| operate at the reduced prices, why are they siphoning off
| additional profits after they were paid the
| aforementioned infrastructure money to provide these
| services? Google Fiber disrupting ISPs was exactly what
| people are clamoring to happen to other giants like
| Amazon and yet here you are bashing the initiative.
|
| For the record, Google Fiber is still well loved
| everywhere it has been rolled out. I had Comcast and
| Verizon for decades and hated every moment of it --
| constant battle for reliability, price increases, and
| hidden fees. Ever since I got WebPass (owned by Google
| Fiber), it has been nothing but bliss for a fraction of
| the price and 0% of the bullshit. You should be deeply
| upset by the fact that Google Fiber is no longer
| expanding. It is a hit against progress and we are all
| worse off for it.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| The backlash against this is pretty ridiculous. Despite the
| dystopian rhetoric, in reality it was a small project of 12 acres
| that would have held a few condos. By comparison CityPlace is 44
| acres and was also done by one company.
|
| So shat do people imagine will happen now? Instead of trying
| something new and interesting on a small scale, that same land
| will be given to another generic developer
| (Concord/Tridel/whatever) and they'll just do more of same. It's
| not bad, just meh. But honestly, Toronto is a fairly conservative
| place, so it makes sense.
| saltedonion wrote:
| I think most people were bothered by the technology
| integration, and not the urban planning.
| hn_check wrote:
| For most of its lifecycle it was a 190 acre project, not 12
| acres.
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/06/21/google-sister-co...
|
| "By comparison CityPlace is 44 acres and was also done by one
| company"
|
| That company owned the land, and via the normal development
| process they ended up dedicating 8 acres to parks, etc.
| cmdshiftf4 wrote:
| >that same land will be given to another generic developer
| (Concord/Tridel/whatever) and they'll just do more of same
|
| Pre-COVID I'd likely agree with you, however due the new
| realities of COVID I believe the future of cities has
| drastically changed.
|
| I personally don't believe Toronto will recover from COVID to
| anywhere near the state it held at the end of 2019 and
| therefore further expansion/housing/real estate development
| will likely look drastically different.
|
| >Toronto is a fairly conservative place, so it makes sense.
|
| Compared with where? And why would you believe that to be the
| case?
|
| My own interpretation, having lived there for years, is that
| the appetite for further infrastructure development has been
| strangled from Torontonians via very high costs of living, low
| wages compared to similar cities and high direct & indirect
| taxes.
| catalogia wrote:
| If it really were nothing more than mundane construction work,
| then why was Google involved in it?
| namu022 wrote:
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| her. I'm so excited and I'm kinda sure that you really work.
| Anyway, thank you very much Mama Lulu. I wish I could tell you
| how happy I am right now and everybody should try out this divine
| Luck Ring. The moment you touch the ring its gonna change things.
| I'm sure who ever gets this lucky charm Ring won't regret.
| greendave wrote:
| > An independent panel was set up to scrutinise its plans and
| released a report suggesting some of its ideas were "tech for
| tech's sake", and potentially unnecessary.
|
| I wonder what could have given them that idea.
|
| > In his blog, Dan Doctoroff said the firm continued to invest in
| start-ups "working on everything from robotic furniture to
| digital electricity".
|
| Oh, right.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| > digital electricity
|
| This marketing term piqued my interest. Turns out it is
| basically PoE. Ok.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > hundreds of sensors collecting data on air quality and _the
| movements of people_
|
| > It was also told [by the independent panel] that any data it
| collected from its sensors would have to become a public asset.
|
| Wonder if that influenced their decision to end this project.
| pupppet wrote:
| TO dodged a bullet.
|
| It's Google's nature to lose interest and abandon their products.
| You think it's bad with software, imagine them building part of
| your city.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| Yeah. Tech companies almost by definition have (and should
| have) a very short attention span. I wouldn't trust them with
| building anything that impacts people's lives for decades and
| longer. It's pretty much guaranteed that they will "pivot" away
| and jump on something shinier soon.
| leoh wrote:
| The cynicism here boggles the mind. You can talk blue in the
| face about all the products they haven't killed that power the
| world and people will just shake their heads in dismay and walk
| away muttering about Google Reader.
| OrangeMango wrote:
| Categorize Google's products into two buckets - "home grown"
| and "bought the company". Then it starts to make a lot more
| sense.
| Arelius wrote:
| Hmm, I think I lack the insight to know what this means.
|
| Knowing that YouTube and Android were acquisitions,
| suggests that acquisitions may have more lasting potential,
| but I don't know enough about gmail, docs, maps, etc to
| know if any of them were home grown.
|
| And looking at the list of acquisitions don't really
| clarify anything, all of their successful products seem to
| have some amount of acquisitions involved, but it's unclear
| to me if they were all sourced from the company, or if they
| bought companies to bring in talent into an ongoing home
| grown environment.
| acdha wrote:
| The problem is that they have killed or mismanaged
| (Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/Meet, Nest) enough products without
| any executive suffering consequences that it's not
| unreasonable to ask how committed they are to anything which
| doesn't sell ads. It'd be different if there was new
| management but absent a correction the same pattern seems
| likely to repeat for anything which isn't a cure product.
|
| For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer
| attention span than has been on display.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| I followed the Google Sidewalk Labs/Toronto development for a
| while from a place of confusion more than anything else. Never
| really figured out what problem Sidewalk Labs was trying to solve
| or how technology was going to make a positive impact on peoples'
| urban lives.
|
| The dominant problems that cities face are really the ancient
| ones of class conflict, racism and land use, with the core issue
| being that of the rich making life worse for the poor through
| politics and exclusionary zoning.
|
| You could make cities dramatically better with only 19th century
| levels of technology (ie. the bicycle). Of course you'd need to
| have a political culture willing to share land and remove it from
| exclusive car use. Apparently a tall order.
|
| The core things holding NA cities back are entirely political in
| nature.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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."
| frereubu wrote:
| Enjoy the HN cynicism from July 2018:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487838
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Such nonsense! Everyone loves the idea of pie-in-the-sky
| dreams.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| What is the difference between the four cities you mention?
| At least three of them have been restricting density,
| resulting in steadily increasing prices.
| thinkloop wrote:
| I would guess skyscrapers vs. 4 stories. West/East Village
| in Manhattan are generally considered the most pleasant and
| they are skyscraper-free.
| ehsankia wrote:
| What is the source on Sidewalk Labs planning to build
| skyscrapers? The definition of a skyscraper is over 40
| floors, the most I see in any of the mock designs are at
| most a dozen floors. Sure it's not 4-floor either, but
| Quayside is fairly small so if they put 4-floor
| apartments, you'd maybe fit 100 people total.
| neilv wrote:
| "Ann Cavoukian, former Ontario privacy commissioner, resigns from
| Sidewalk Labs", 2018-10-21.
| https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sid...
|
| "Google's 'Smart City of Surveillance' Faces New Resistance in
| Toronto", 2018-11-13. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-
| quayside-toronto-...
| oiasdjfoiasd wrote:
| And collectively, Torontonians breath a sigh relief
| ericzawo wrote:
| What a colossal waste of time and money that confirms the obvious
| to anyone who actually lives in the city -- they never really
| were about improving the downtown core neighbourhood of Quayside,
| which is ripe for development, and instead wanted to use public
| land and money for R&D. Good riddance and I hope people who are
| serious about aiding the public take note in the missteps
| Sidewalk made time and again, to fail to win the trust of the
| very city they were trying to become a community member of.
| cal5k wrote:
| People are cheering, but as a broader statement this is a small
| sample of how difficult it is to do business in Canada.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| True, it's difficult to slash and burn through the political
| process with half-baked techie ideas and opaque data collection
| practices. Not to mention ones requiring huge taxpayer
| commitments for a project that is way beyond the bleeding edge
| (at best) or a priori only partially achievable "but let's try
| it and see" (at worst).
|
| Bureaucracy and elaborate processes slow things down. Every so
| often, that's a great thing.
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| na85 wrote:
| >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.
| cal5k wrote:
| 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.
| AlanYx wrote:
| There's probably a lot more merit to your comment than most
| people realize.
|
| Absent from most of the media reports I've read today is
| that Sidewalk Labs was facing yet another approval decision
| on the project from Waterfront Toronto in less than two
| weeks (May 20, extended from an earlier March 31 deadline).
| My guess is that they heard through the grapevine that the
| decision was going to be highly conditional, and that the
| project was going to be saddled with yet another set of
| hoops to jump through, so Sidewalk Labs just decided to
| bail.
|
| It's basically exactly the same pattern we saw in late
| February with the Teck Resources decision. The company
| bailed literally days before the deadline for approval.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 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.
| cal5k wrote:
| There's a big difference between considering national
| security issues and bungling foreign direct investment
| completely (except for real estate). It's also no excuse
| for the protection of oligopolies that don't act in the
| best interests of Canadians.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| In that case I'll take the likely unpopular opinion that:
| it's better our assholes than someone else's.
|
| And foreign direct investment in energy, food supplies,
| telecommunications absolutely has national security
| implications. I would be loathe to have a foreign entity
| become the major stateholder in our telecommunications
| infrastructure. I don't harbour any deep love of the
| Rogers family, but they are solidly Canadian at least.
| alteria wrote:
| Plus Target shot themselves in the foot with poor SAP
| integration among other blunders.
| na85 wrote:
| I'm not going to disagree that our governments tend to play
| political hot potato. You can downvote all you like but I
| don't feel any sympathy for abusive "investors" like Big
| Tech or Big Oil who all too often socialize the risks but
| privatize the profits. See for example Amazon trying to get
| billions in tax breaks for HQ2. See also the Keystone XL or
| Northern Gateway projects. The oil companies have excellent
| propaganda machines operating tirelessly to convince
| Albertans that the rest of the country is being
| unreasonable when they demand environmental controls and
| assurances.
|
| Not all investment is beneficial to the citizenry. I'd much
| rather my government err towards overcautious than
| overpermissive.
| FpUser wrote:
| We already have foreign investors taking a lease of the
| section hwy 407 in Toronto and wrestling ministry of
| transportation to not extend license plates of people who
| did not pay fee. The reason included not sending bills,
| false billings, denying plates after official bankruptcy
| etc. And those ever increasing tolls. Thank you very much
| for your business and corruption.
| thinkloop wrote:
| The article says the issue is Corona not Canada?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It's not, CNBC says "Toronto was expected to make its final
| decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on
| May 20."
|
| COVID has nothing to do with it.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Whether the final blow was due to COVID-19 or if it was just
| an excuse, it doesn't change the fact that it's been an
| uphill battle for over 3 years with very little progress.
| empath75 wrote:
| Not all business is good business.
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