I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.
Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood.
But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.
And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
Anyone that thinks the US has an insane bureaucracy has never tried to deal with French, German, Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Greek, Italian, or Indian bureaucracy. For those last 6, bribes are a mandatory part of of the process.
Look, at least with the one I had experience of, you knew what you were getting. They would invite you to tea. You grease their palms, and the vast majority of the time, you got what you tacitly agreed to. And you did it after you built, not before. If something went wrong, it was all just haggling on price. Nothing esoteric & labyrinthine with a few warring ideals going up against a hundred petty voices and a handful of corporate interests.
... The french contractors who built the tgv tried working with california in 2011 to build HSR here too. But they backed out, saying the bureacracy was too great and they were going to help Morocco instead. And guess who has high speed rail today? California or Morocco?
That sounds like a made-up story, given that in 2011 the major impediment to the CA HSR wasn't bureaucracy, it was politics, and the CA HSR authority hadn't yet put any portion of the HSR rail out to bid.
Also, the French company (Alstom) that helped build the Morocco HSR is currently bidding to build the CA HSR...
It evolves. Laws, rules, regulations accrue but are very rarely re-evaluated to see if they serve their original purpose. It's easier for most lawmakers to leave things alone. Eventually, the state declines or fails under the weight of a century of well-intentioned (maybe) laws that have outlived their usefullness.
Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.
Every new generation is convinced that all the cruft of the existing system is useless or obsolete so they create a new system without the cruft based on "first principles" or somesuch bullshit. And then through pain and loss they rediscover why all that cruft was there in the original system in the first place. What seems "obsolete" is many times a bedrock principle of the old system that only seems obsolete now because it is/was so effective that the problem it is intended to address/prevent no longer occurs.
Also, legislators review the existing laws all the time. Most "new" laws are just amendments to existing laws.
Well, partly. Cryptocurrencies rediscovered why there are so many regulations. But they also enabled near-instant (hours) cross-border transactions in a way the existing system just can't do because it is too ossified. It also allows people to opt out of regulations they feel are getting in their way too much, which is a good check against over-regulation.
That's a matter of political culture and state institutions. Finland is largely governed by rewriting laws. Each government coalition has a few focus areas, where they try to do a major rewrite of all relevant laws and regulations. And then there smaller changes to many other laws. The initial drafts almost always come from career civil servants, and there are processes that try to ensure that all relevant viewpoints have been heard before the proposed changes go to the parliament.
Not a new idea but its a good one. Its basically garbage collection but for laws. Another term for it is "sunset clauses" where a law must have reasonable conditions for expiring instead of being on the books for the rest of time.
In practice that would create even more ineffective veto points that already result in stasis and dysfunction in the US Congress.
For more than a decade the US has been stuck operating by renewing the same budget more or less with minor modifications at random intervals of time depending on the political mood. It always gets approved eventually after occasional pointless, wasteful shutdowns. But nothing actually changes from those veto points, just more routine dysfunction and grandstanding.
Same with debt ceiling. Another veto point that gives leverage but has zero effect on actual spending. It probably sounded like a brilliant idea to control spending in the 70s or whenever it originated. But is entirely ineffective at the purpose of addressing the deficit.
Self expiring legislation would very likely end up the same way. Just another pro forma procedural roadblock that wastes time and makes the legislature even less effective at real problem solving instead of posturing.
There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.
Fun fact, that's basically the case in large swaths of the country. Many states do not have home rule, which means counties can't set zoning rules. So in mostly rural areas of these states, it's wide open unless the state has decided to set rules or to be benevolent enough to grant the county the right to set zoning rules
YES. I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.
People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.
All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings
The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".
This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.
I keep saying that permitting should be - broadly - same as driving.
You get handed a nice set of rules, you get tested on them.. and then you can go ahead and build within those rules without asking anyone for permission.
If you break the rules - we break your piggy bank to set everything straight. You can buy insurance (which will have its own set of rules) - or not.
Maybe in some jurisdictions you need to buy insurance, while in others you get to have a choice.. after clearing it with your financier.
Zoning is actually rule-making. Permitting is just bureaucracy. Keep them separate.
Imo this should be the biggest political issue. By-right zoning and permitting accross the board. So much graft, corruption, waste, and stagnation from discretionary approval/denials.
Don't want factories zoned next to elementary schools? Perfectly reasonable rule, but then you don't get to pass a variance for the mayor's nephew's cousin's factory. And vice versa.
This is called as-of-right development or by-right development, which is how things (nominally) work in several states. That is, as long as a project adheres to the zoning and other regulations, approval is as-of-right.
It's not necessarily a black or white approach. In theory as-of-right is supposed to be the rule everywhere as Due Process guarantees mean government can't act capriciously. And there's actually pre-existing SCOTUS precedent regarding how zoning plans are supposed to be applied, and how community input processes aren't supposed to allow mobs to subvert the rule of law with a de facto but informal veto power. In practice, non-as-of-right municipalities and states basically have zoning rules and approval processes that are fuzzy and ambiguous, effectively granting regulators significant interpretive leeway and discretion.
Federal and often state courts are extremely reticent to jump into the fray and defend the rule of law. In fact, there's SCOTUS procedural jurisprudence designed to make it difficult to "make a federal case" out of zoning disputes. NIMBY battles are just too politically fraught and courts are afraid of falling into the bottomless tar pits of adjudicating public grievance, which is what politicians are supposed to be for.
I’m aware of this - what I’m curious about is whether we can go a step further and skip the “as by right” process.
This is similar to the difference between “shall issue” and “constitutional carry” states.
In the former you still have to deal with the system to exercise your right, and the system has to have staff to deal with you.
In the latter you’re approved - without anyone being on a taxpayers dole and having an incentive to keep themselves employed by enacting more laws and keeping the system inefficient.
> What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway?
They did. Google Robert Moses for details.
Ultimately I think this particular problem is a diseased outgrowth from the cancer that is "homes as an investment vehicle." Is it so much that people don't want change or is more that they (correctly) identify a house and the land it sits upon as the only thing in their life that appreciates in value, consistently? It represents stability, a future to be handed down to one's children, that sort of thing.
It seems to be having houses function this way is just causing too many social ills to ignore. It's why private equity is holding tons of houses, during a housing crisis, and refusing to sell. It's a cornerstone of the 2008 financial crash. It's why few in my entire damned generation can HAVE a home, not to invest in but to simply live in.
IMO a house can be a need for life, or it can be an investment. It can't be both at the same time.
> Ultimately I think this particular problem is a diseased outgrowth from the cancer that is "homes as an investment vehicle." Is it so much that people don't want change or is more that they (correctly) identify a house and the land it sits upon as the only thing in their life that appreciates in value, consistently? It represents stability, a future to be handed down to one's children, that sort of thing.
There's no one cause. Even if homes weren't "an investment vehicle," I don't think it would change much. Few people in a neighborhood of single family homes would want a 20-story apartment tower getting built next door.
Perhaps it's a failure of my ability to empathize then. I have owned a home for 8 years, I have never once been concerned with anything going on nearby. Buildings being built of any sort, of any height, at all. And I genuinely struggle to enter the mind of someone for whom this is top priority, something they put time into.
> Perhaps it's a failure of my ability to empathize then. I have owned a home for 8 years, I have never once been concerned with anything going on nearby. Buildings being built of any sort, of any height, at all.
You don't really have to empathize all that much. Can't you imagine anything you wouldn't like built near your home?
> And I genuinely struggle to enter the mind of someone for whom this is top priority, something they put time into.
OK how about this: you live in a quiet neighborhood, where kids are safe playing in the street. Your house gets a nice amount of sun in the afternoon. You like it.
Then someone builds a couple of 20 story apartment blocks, just south of you. The sun is blocked, traffic increases. The neighborhood isn't quiet anymore.
> You don't really have to empathize all that much. Can't you imagine anything you wouldn't like built near your home?
A data center or sewage treatment plant (but I repeat myself)
> Then someone builds a couple of 20 story apartment blocks, just south of you. The sun is blocked, traffic increases. The neighborhood isn't quiet anymore.
Okay? Why am I entitled to dictate who builds what near my home? Because I bought a 0.25 acre plot there?
Maybe the 20 story apartment block will contain a new friend. Maybe it'll bring a bunch more kids to play with the neighborhood kids, who btw aren't plants and don't require constant sunlight. Maybe the block will come with a pool I could use for a reasonable fee, or basketball courts for the kids. Maybe that block going up will increase the overall local population enough so we get better restaurants in the area, and it'll almost certainly increase property tax revenues to local schools.
Like I dunno if you find this situation absolutely intolerable, you could always just... move?
> Few people in a neighborhood of single family homes would want a 20-story apartment tower getting built next door.
Only this is just a thing that really doesn't happen much at all. Very few developers are putting up 20 story apartment buildings in the middle of an existing SFH community in the suburbs somewhere. Most of those such fights are people fighting the 5 over 1 development built greenfield just outside the current SFH neighborhood in question. And for those such people? They should have zero say.
If they are doing so, it's typically in very dense city cores that support the density and thus investment. If someone wants to put up a 20 story building next to me in my Chicago neighborhood, sounds good to me! I am upset there are not more of them and that zoning has effectively made them illegal to build here, as I'm roughly 500 feet away from a rapid transit station and two arterial roads with high frequency bus routes. It's a crime that they are illegal to build.
I'd be an asshole if I bought a house in such an area and wanted my little conclave to be protected at the expense of everyone else in the city. I should rightly be overruled and told to pound sand and move the hell out if I don't like it.
Instead, laws have enabled such people to effectively veto such buildings. Or even simply stuff like 12 unit 4 floor apartment buildings that already exist due to predating zoning on my block.
Many areas of the US are effectively retirement communities by zoning. People who moved in 20-30 years ago who demand zero change and have captured nearly all political power.
Robert Moses held a lot of different offices at once, and many of them were a kind of local government: parks commissioner for New York City, commissioner for certain bridges in New York City, &c.
He is not really quite what you would get if zoning, &c, were handled at the state level.
That's true, that wasn't really my point. My point is that privileged people will dictate these "nightmare scenarios" for why they need to have unchecked power, to prevent? And almost universally it's something that the same privileged people have done to other unprivileged people prior. It's a remarkably consistent cognitive blind-spot.
Like genuinely, with as good of faith as I can muster for people who spread really dogshit ideas, the core concern they seem to have but won't say, with a gun to their heads, is they are scared shitless that minority groups will, somehow, at some point, attain power greater than their own, at which point the minority group will enact the exact same horrific policies that were enacted unto them. It's a core fear of really every society that has at once point had slaves in my experience.
> I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.
The homeowners are making rational choices. That's the problem. As the most expensive asset a typical homeowner will ever own is their home, it makes rational sense for them to support any policy that supports it's value and oppose any policy that undermines it's value. Building more housing undermines it's value.
And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.
My impression is that "home value" is often a dodge that sounds better on paper than "I don't like change". You generally can't sue over hurt feelings, but if you can attach some kind of monetary value to it then the courts may take your case.
As you note home value is an extremely nebulous concept as it is tied to whatever people who currently do not live in the community might pay to buy a house. No matter what someone sells for they can always say "it would have sold for more if every single house was painted exactly the same shade of beige, you miscreants with your off white, ecru, and oatmeal houses have cost me tens of thousands of dollars!"
> And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.
If you start giving "hypothetical people" a say, you stop having democracy. You can invent as many hypothetical people as you want to force any outcome.
And real democracy requires local control. A distant democratically-elected government making centralized decisions may just as well be replaced by a tyrant, given how unresponsive it will be to your concerns.
The "hypothetical people" are in actuality all the other voters in your country. Lots of people are "pro-development, just anti-development near themselves".
Do you think that the Japanese system where permitting is centralized away from local government antidemocratic?
But aren't there other salient factors? Is energy policy any less "big" than zoning in its effect on your local environment? The thing is, it's just really hard to get certain policies to work right when they are set at too small a scale -- even if they have a big effect at a small scale.
When I consider the housing situation, I am starting to think that land use policy seems to be that kind of thing.
Ultimately, cities are granted a charter by the state. It's not a given that they can control zoning, the location of people's garage doors, &c. We can think about these things and decide.
no it doesn't, high density allows more value to be extracted from the same plot of land since the volume of units offset the individual price reduction of each one. as a result, developers regularly offer homeowners 2x or 3x their market value to incentivize selling.
Yes, it more efficiently utilizes the land. But, if you are not the person who owns the plot that gets developed, more housing being built next to you harms you.
Density will make their home value go up. They are perhaps making rational choices if what they want is for the neighbourhood to stay the same -- but then they are accepting a lower value, by retarding economic growth.
No, that would be terrible and much worse, obviously, compared to walking down the street to my local borough building and getting a permit. In the vast majority of the country, that would be very silly suggestion.
Isn't that fundamentally what California did to solve the problem? They provided a route that a local municipality could not override to build housing, as long as the state level rules were followed.
Yes, but the rule only came into effect this summer. I think we should start to see some traction in the next year or two when developers begin to challenge NIMBYs.
I dunno, it seems like decisions about what to build in a given spot should be made as locally as possible. If I want to build a house in Sonoma, the voters in LA should not get a say.
Major projects like power plants or dams should be made at a state or even national level, but rules for which house goes where, less so. And if your town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid, that's an issue for your town's government to solve.
>If I want to build a house in Sonoma, the voters in LA should not get a say.
Should they get a say about building the necessary infrastructure to make your home (as opposed to homestead) possible in Sonoma? Their tax money is spent on it.
>And if your town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid, that's an issue for your town's government to solve.
And whose issue is it to solve if every single town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid? Not for incumbent homeowners, mind you, for them all is well and they'd like to keep it that way. But for renters and those wanting to afford a place to live.
This sounds reasonable, but all this means is "nothing gets built".
For example there's me, an empty plot, and the next neighbor. Nothing is more local to the both of us than the empty plot. We've even grassed it, and maintain it.
The owner of the plot wants to build a house. Since we are the locals we simply say no. We like the plot as it is. Plus the loss of this open plot would affect the value of our property. And traffic in the neighborhood would increase.
This sounds bonkers - surely the owner of the plot has rights too? Sure, but this is democracy so our 2 votes outweigh his one.
The consequence of small govt is that nothing gets done at all because the majority of people are resistant to any change at all. If everything takes a majority, well, nothing happens.
Ultimately though local people are the worst decision makers. Which is why my city let's the owner build on his plot, and doesn't allow me and my neighbor to decide.
Those highways were mostly built through neighborhoods filled with poor, marginalized people. Most of the NIMBYism that you see in the US is suburbs that don't want to upzone for more density that is badly needed.
At least in North America if you build something, it exists. In Germany they have a system where the government will bulldoze a completed skyscraper if you did the paperwork wrong. As a result it takes years to start construction because they don't want that risk.
This is a particularly Western democratic trend. Japan and Singapore both have their own models for democracy (ish, functionally both are one-party states and it's dubious how democratic their electoral processes or fair their justice systems truly are by Western standards). Each builds things differently, and gets it done.
We still build lots of things here in the United States, too. While many people can point to examples of projects that couldn't get off the ground due to red tape, you can also look around and see a lot of projects that are being built.
Everyone wants to be the one with the power to remake the world according to their own designs.
Everyone also doesn't want to be the one being remade according to the designs of others.
It's really weird that in "the last of the free" it's considered completely normal for the government to tell you that you can't build a shed bigger than a certain size.
This is the same sort of mindless gotcha as asking someone who thinks it should be legal to own a pistol whether they think private nuclear weapons should be legal.
Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere.
I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.
A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper
but do you think restrictive zoning and onerous permitting requirements would have prevented that? It's not like laws against murder prevented lynchings, I think in most cases these rules would have just been ignored by municipalities because they largely exist to protect monied interests not vulnerable populations.
Not to be argumentative, but it's worth noting that Lynchings were considered legal because there was usually a criminal accusation and local officials involved.[1] A bill has been introduced in every Congress since 1918 to make Lynching illegal. It actually became illegal with the Emmett Till Antilynching Act (H.R. 55), enacted on March 29, 2022[2].
Now it's true that it could have been prosecuted anyway as murder or a civil rights violation, but it wasn't because of that convenient interpretation.
> I think in most cases these rules would have just been ignored by municipalities because they largely exist to protect monied interests not vulnerable populations.
When there are rules on the books, and they are bulldozed over, you can generally sue.
Your city council may be composed of criminals and racists, but with the courts, you get another shot at getting a slate of people who can help you who might not be.
There's nothing you can do in a society that's 100% biased against you, but in a society that's 50% biased against you, appeals might rule in your favour.
In Berkeley, CA, restrictive zoning in the early 1900s was used to reinforce and codify those outcomes that separated the rich and the poor. Those laws stayed in place for over 100 years, far longer than the term of a single elected official. So you have to be careful what kind of laws you pass.
Given the rent required to live in Berkeley, its basically the nightmare scenario that we are all talking about. The only people who benefit from Berkeley's laws are the landowners/landlords. Everyone else suffers including the local businesses and especially the renters. Even taxpayers in other states are penalized as lots of federal money is used to subsidize poor renters which ends up both increasing the rental prices even more while benefiting the landowners even more. Basically, whatever Berkeley is doing, do the opposite and you will be fine.
Also worth mentioning architects have spent so long intentionally designing ugly modernist crap that the public reflexively assumes anything new will be an eyesore.
The irony is our reaction to the Urban Renewal era was to introduce so many veto points and red tape to projects (both public infrastructure and private property) that we are nearly incapable of fixing the problems that era introduced.
When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.
I fully reject this POV. There's currently a bill working through ATL City Council to rehash our Zoning laws. The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members - they are lawyers representing private development firms, many of whom make five to six-figure political contributions to sitting council members. They're the ones pushing against any pro-social, community-oriented zoning practices (like ADUs, parking lot restrictions, and public transportation and pedestrian requirements).
Believing that neighborhood units are the largest impediment to effective and efficient planning is to believe the corporate landowners at their word. There's so much astroturfing that happens in these spaces, largely rejecting density and public transportation.
I can name off the top of my head a half-dozen community-oriented projects by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in and torpedoed a neighorhood deal and its community organization over requirements for private developers to address rainwater overflow. This same director who later went on to be hired by the same, private firm for a six-figure job, all of it going unreported in the news and hushed right up.
"The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members"
They are community members just not the ones who share your point of view. Those community members who might share your point of view don't show up.
I've never seen community members fight for density either. We want to tear down our housing so large buildings blocking the sky can be built by corporate landowners. You know who owns large buildings? Corporate landowners. The people with little houses are average citizens.
Public transit doesn't need density. Public transit exists in places with little density.
One, they quite literally do not live in the city. Most of them live in the very rich ex-urbs. Their retainers, too, do not live in the city, not even in the penthouses. They live in places like Alpharetta and Cobb.
Not my experience at all in my neighborhood. Development gets torpedo'ed by current residents. Parking and traffic almost always being the primary one. As in, more parking minimums. Developers showing up are the only people trying to actually build anything at all, most community members are NIMBY.
Not sure what a private developer would have to do with public transit though. That's the city's job to provide and figure out the routes for. Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings 2 blocks away from train stations.
I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.
> Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations.
This one kills me. It's so common and yet there's wide agreement among the local populace that there's a housing shortage.
So it sounds like perhaps this community process is not working to advance equity as you might hope?
Because I can assure you with 100% confidence, never having been to a single one of their meetings, that all the wealthy suburbs around you are using this "process" to keep their suburbs extremely exclusionary, while they siphon their fraction of the economic productivity from Atlanta into their own hands, and keep their tax dollars sequestered away from the city that allows them to make their high incomes.
What you see with your personal experience is only part of the picture, and the same process that seems to get abused to allow "non community" to exert development pressure in Atlanta is simultaneously used to keep middle class and poor people out of the wealthy suburbs.
> Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways
you: "hey have you considered that actually you're a piece of shit?"
yes, these rules exist for a reason. some places (like Atlanta) are still guilty. i'm not saying we should plow down Chesterson's fence, but your hostile tone also sucks
Dude your posted to Hacker News and now you are getting your feelings hurt because a reply to a reply to your post mentioned 100% accurate historical facts?
No one ever said anything like "you are a piece of shit".
By saying "right, because it was so much better [back then when black people were getting screwed]", paimapi was not providing historical context. He was putting words (emotionally charged, flamebait words at that!) in his interlocutor's mouth which were never said, and then attacking that strawman. It's a bad post and deserves to be called out as such.
this site has always welcomed posters who are incredibly shitty and rude, so long as most of the shit is kept as _subtext_. Then they can pretend they were polite, even though they weren't.
HungryHobbit's response is just making that clear... he's actively defending what was objectively a shitty and unnecessarily snarky and confrontational post, because it adhere's to the HN norms of being smug, superior, dismissive, and dickish... but in a way that is just indirect enough that these maladjusted fucking nerds can pretend that they're polite and professional.
You'll enjoy the site more if you walk in expecting that everyone you're talking to is a smug little asshole who needs to get punched in the fucking face.
I have and it's a regularly rejected one by social historians that relies on ignorance to exist. From Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities to Caro's The Power Broker and the multitudes of reports and other books confirming widespread redlining and racism across America perpetuated by private insurance companies and the government (eg Color of Law by Richard Rothstein).
You'd have to read absolutely zero books and place yourself into a silo of intentional, practiced ignorance to believe that no other American cities have racism-related baggage codified into their very laws and neighborhoods.
Not to mention that Moses himself was a planner for NYC, not ATL.
What big city in the USA has not had redlining or had highways blasted over disadvantaged racial minority communities? I'll wait while you look that one up.
"For a long time, the spaces where Mesa’s orange pickers and other migrant workers first settled before the Second World War were not much coveted. Just as Black people were segregated in a neighborhood to the north of downtown, immigrants from Mexico and later other parts of Latin America were relegated to unmaintained dwellings to the south."
These policies that allow locals to push back against state or federal government overreach were made with good intentions, but the reality on the ground is that the people who take advantage of these policies are not the poor and disenfranchised but the wealthy, and the way they wield their power is to slow down development that would help the masses. https://yimbyaction.org/chapters/peninsula-for-everyone/post...
This is true but I'd rather close loopholes and have independent auditors that root out astroturfing than do away with the system entire. It's got good bones - it's just the flesh that's rotten.
Robert Moses (ab)used eminent domain. If somebody buys a piece of land and can't build on it, that's not the same problem. Most rules now in place encourage far lower and less walkable development. Even a massive chunk of Manhattan has height restrictions that are lower than what's currently built and grandfathered in.
A lot of our 'process' is dominated by wealthy people who benefit from the status quo (or think they do). I wrote up this housing hearing I went to, and I wish more people could experience something like it to understand the problem:
You're truly doing the lord's work, as they used to say. I think one of the main struggles we have is awareness for movement work and rarely do people blog about their experiences in a public way. If most people actually advocated like you did, we'd live in a much better world.
Just because somebody suggests one extreme is a bad idea doesn't mean they are advocating for the other. The framing of this response, especially the "bulldozed over predominantly Black communities" line very much feels like an attempt at character assassination, as if you were trying to connect opposition to the status quo with racism.
I've been to city hearings for new condo developments and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected.
I would also add that the infrastructure that Robert Moses was able to get built in New York, massively improved logistics in the city, which massively improved job opportunities. A lot of later problems, like the flight of higher-income residents to the suburbs that was caused by the crime wave of the 1960s, is falsely attributed to those projects. And those projects are arguably not nearly as harmful as claimed to those specific communities. The owners of the property were compensated, maybe not always perfectly at the appropriate level, but it wasn't some highway robbery.
And in terms of the black communities that were disrupted, there were many more black communities that were helped by the improved logistics.
Because the contractors can be arseholes and still make enough money?
Why bother heeding requirements not to run heavy machinery outside people's houses at 4am?
Why bother getting proper utility surveys done, just yolo it and if a few thousand people end up without water/power it's fine because the people profiting from the work live elsewhere and can just blame the workers?
"but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport."
The only people who don't like low density are the poor, and this is why most of America is car culture, and owns their own houses. "Housing shortages" is another way of saying that existing home owners are earning strong equity.
Yeah, I do want no traffic and lots of parking, so low density please!
And oil shortage is another way of saying that existing oil owners are earning strong income. Why is either of those things the desired state? (Other than self-interest, if you happen to be sitting on a stockpile of oil.)
The point is to slow things down, so only the things that truly matter get done. Otherwise growth for growth's sake leads to chaotic hellscapes where no one is at rest, everyone is confused and scared. Slower is better.
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” - Winston Churchill
It's very easy to throw stones through windows. But before discounting one of our greatest creations, one which is so annoying and yet has brought us so much prosperity, what alternative do you propose?
True in general, but on the specific topic of housing, democracy may not even be the "least bad" system.
Dictatorships, especially the communist style often use it as an argument for why their system is better than what we have in the western world. It is obviously propaganda, but why would they choose that propaganda? There is probably some truth in it. Commie blocks in particular managed to solve a serious housing problem very effectively. It wasn't great, didn't age well, but it gave people a decent place to live.
> It wasn't great, didn't age well, but it gave people a decent place to live.
This is, arguably, the big problem. Things akin to Commie blocks have been tried in non communist countries, but in general government run housing has this major issue of almost always winding up poorly budgeted and supported, so it quickly becomes a nightmare as tax payers don't want to foot the bills on some other persons housing, and it's extra ripe for corruption and corner cutting, and so on.
Not that it shouldn't be investigated (any option should be considered), but it does seem to be one of the big weaknesses. In theory if a private landlord/building owner breaks the law, you have recourse though the legal system (yes in theory), while if the government isn't living up to what it said it would do....well you tend to lack any option for recourse.
To be clear this is a disgustingly simplified summary of a subject I have at best a casual hobbyists knowledge of, but there seems to be an advantage to leaving housing in the realm of private so that you have the option of kicking them in the teeth with the government if they completely fuck up. As messy as that might be, the alternative seems to be messier.
Ironically, the thing we learned in the US about public housing is that it can't be in high-rise apartments. It has to be duplexes or small 1/2 story apartment buildings. It also must minimized all public space so that each part of the land "belongs" to one unit. If you don't do this, the public areas get messed up really quickly. This tends to lead to the rest of the residents being less willing to take care of the area and it all spirals from there.
The Soviet solution to this was 3 ft thick concrete walls but the crime and other problems that get created by public housing were never addressed there.
I mean, I literary lived through both polar systems. I watched my uncle pass bricks in a giant ant-like line to build their commie block. A year later, my mom and I left for the USA.
Now, I am partially back in Poland, as the Soviet occupation is long gone. There are many problems, but generally, Poland is now a country one wants to come to, not escape.
I would like to also point out that whatever the USA might be, it is no longer a democracy. I would argue that after Citizens United, the USA is now finally a "Capitalism" - it's kinda getting Russified over there.
Communities should have a say in their community. The issue is lack of new towns being built with high speed rail / transportation to bring people into central hubs. All the good land is taken. Build further out with tiny homes and build public transportation lines. Let people build affordable communities that suit them. No, they aren't going to have beach views or anything like that. But YOU will own it. We already know from the mouse utopia experiments that increasing density is a terrible idea for humans. Expand out.
It's not just democracy, but also huge population growth and population clustering. People moving from the country to the city as jobs increasingly moved into the city.
I have a house in Costa Rica where there a lot of expats living in communities need to self organize because zoning and permit laws are slow, bureaucratic, and basically unenforced.
I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost.
People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did do and do get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
> People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission:
Fun fact! What would be an illegal bribe to a city employee (eg planning/permitting department) isn't illegal if it's an HOA instead. No wonder they're popping up everywhere!
I'd say so. It sure looks, walks and smells like a government. They're often responsible for things that ought to be the local council's job, and have a tendency to enact rules which will lead to consequences if not followed (just being able to be fined by one, even if the rules are reasonable, sure does make one feel like a government). It's all on a smaller scale than the government-government, but that doesn't really make it a non-government to me.
Precisely. But it's very hard to discover what the HOA is like before moving, unlike, say, a town. In some cases you literally would have to pay money to get a copy of the regulations. The neighborhood I live in now has a couple minor nuisances that a HOA would probably fix, but I'm happier living there than in a microprincipality run on nosiness and passive aggression.
They're not popping up anywhere. They're only ever installed in a brand-new development. (Okay, I'm sure somewhere at least one, probably very small, neighborhood has voluntarily formed one for some specific reason, but in general.)
They are in all new developments in most states because the suburb model is financially unsustainable (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 for the argument why), so, if you want to build a nice new development, the town/city is going to say "Who's gonna maintain that little park? Who's gonna cut the grass in the green spaces? Who's gonna sweep the streets?" etc. Not to mention, every amenity outside individual homes (clubhouse, pool, playground) etc. needs to be maintained. Cities can't afford to take them on as public parks, and the individual neighborhoods whose home prices paid for their construction don't really want them to be public either.
And the developer needs to have an entity with which all these responsibilities will vest when they're done building, so, HOA needs to exist.
The alternative is either no shared amenities of any kind, or trying to get the whole city to approve paying for the perpetual maintenance of a new public park when building a new housing tract. Good luck getting that passed, since most existing residents (besides the ones in the next tract over) would say "F that, I'd never go there, why should my taxes pay for it?"
Then why do they have the nice schools? Somehow, suburbs both have the best amenities and the lowest taxes but they are unsustainable? That link is a word salad BTW. In reality, since suburbs have low crime, the policing is cheap. And policing is by far the biggest expense in most cities. Most incorporated suburbs have balanced budgets. Mine does. It also has the best schools in the county. But somehow the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools. I think you just don't like suburbs and will twist your logic into knots to claim a rational reason for it. Truth is, you just don't like suburbs. Most people do, get over it.
Wait a few decades until your infrastructure needs replacing.
Old water pipes have been the financial downfall of many suburbs.
Odds are you don't have a lot of heavy fright coming through, so your roads don't need constant replacing. You likely don't have bridges that carry heavy freight, those are a maintenance nightmare.
But once all the buried pipes need replacing, suddenly all the roads need tearing up, and that is expensive.
> Somehow, suburbs both have the best amenities and the lowest taxes but they are unsustainable?
The best amenities? What does that mean, specifically?
> In reality, since suburbs have low crime, the policing is cheap.
Are you sure?
"The average spending on police for jurisdictions with more than one million people was 10 percent in 2017. The average for jurisdictions with fewer than 50,000 people was 13 percent."
> But somehow the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools.
Not sure what that has to do with the sustainability of suburbs.
> I think you just don't like suburbs and will twist your logic into knots to claim a rational reason for it. Truth is, you just don't like suburbs. Most people do, get over it.
That has nothing to do with whether what they are arguing is correct or not.
The video clearly laid out the arguments, not sure why you either couldn't follow it or refute it.
Is your suburb growing at present? If so, and if your taxes are as low as the typical place, your town is enjoying the fun part of the cycle. Same as Bernie Madoff's customers were happy with their returns for years. When they stop building, it's a matter of time before the city will have to choose between skimping on all the things that make it nice and neglecting roads and pipes, OR, raising taxes.
> the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools
That's because most of those cities are run by idiots, elected by the people who vote for all the goodies, borrow whatever it takes, but also don't raise taxes. Almost no cities levy payroll taxes (meaning, taxes non-residents such as commuters from your suburb have to pay) though.
PS: I live in the suburbs, and would never go back to the city. I like it here. That doesn't change the plain fact that under most circumstances, suburbs aren't financially sustainable in the long term.
That’s basically what a Homeowner’s Association is. They can levy fees, prosecute violations of bylaws, and generally do whatever the bylaws say. They have very little oversight.
I often read stories on the internet of how dysfunctional American HOAs are, and nobody ever explains why it's like that. HOAs in most other countries seem to work fine. But it sounds like they have too much power and not enough safeguards for democracy (like a quorum).
Like, there's other contributing causes, but those are the root origins of it all. The US suburban HOA structure started from a mix of communities trying to keep minorities out, and from suburban towns trying to push off infrastructure costs by legally forcing HOAs to provide their own services instead of covering it with taxes.
Combine dysfunctional structural origins and you get a dysfunctional culture around the subject.
US condo HOAs tend to be fairly culturally distinct from the other HOAs since they exist for fundamental and obvious pragmatic reasons (somebody's got to keep the roof repaired), though they also tend to have the same disease of excessive cost-cutting that's like a microcosm of US politics in general (see the Surfside condo collapse for an example).
They essentially aren't describing a government. It's just a community, and yes, communities tend to suck because once you get over about 10 people you've got enough voices represented that no one anywhere can agree on anything. A majority rule just means you've got 10 people livid and 10 people maybe happy, and you can't even do that in these cases because you lack what a government has, which is authority.
As they pointed out it's hard to get anyone to do their fair share, and unlike a government which can just MAKE you, they have no such option.
It can be fast by disregarding consensus, which is different from democracy. The power of democratically elected executives is that they are, unless otherwise bound by rule or regulation, free to execute very quickly, but they will (generally) align those actions with the will of the majority of the public if they want to be re-elected. Elected legislators are a bit different but the same principle more or less applies; by trading consensus for majority acceptance, you can move faster. This is largely what distinguishes anarchists from lower case D democrats.
Because famously, most existing government were created with a willingness to be a lot larger than necessary, right?
Your reasoning is the same as developers who systematically say "we have to restart from scratch, I can do it better than those morons who apparently really wanted it to get complicated".
This sounds really efficient actually compared to the alternative in many developed countries where new houses simply do not get built at all after spending a lot of money on admin fees for nothing.
"Nuance gets lost" well with centralized politics, the whole damn point gets lost.
> I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services.
There are two different problems here.
One of them is, you want to have some kind of non-excludable service. But if only 10% of people are contributing then they start to feel resentful and stop contributing, so then only 5% of people are contributing, until no one is contributing at all. So instead you want to have a majority vote and if everybody decides they want it, then everybody pays e.g. $10/month to provide it and you avoid the tragedy of the commons.
This one often has problems, especially if you allow centralization -- then special interests finagle their way into the budget being an onnibus take it or leave it bill where the large majority of what's in wouldn't pass if you put it up for a vote by itself, but nobody wants another government shutdown so now the deficit is two trillion dollars. But this one works pretty okay at the local level.
The other one is, we don't want jack the ripper or for the river to catch on fire. The way this one fails is that instead of prohibiting murder and leaded gasoline, a bunch of busybodies start trying to micromanage everything and pass rules where the marginal cost of administering the rule is larger than the marginal benefit of people following it. Which in turn allows special interests to insert rules that aren't even trying to be net positive and are just a thinly-veiled pretext over suppressing competition or creating demand for a particular industry's services by mandating it, which get easier to hide in the thicket the more unnecessary rules there already are. Which the local governments are even worse at because they're often prohibiting something (like housing construction) that people who can't currently afford to live in (and therefore can't vote in) that locality want.
So those are the two categories: a) spending tax money, b) prohibiting something. But the thing you're describing as being needed there is the first one and the thing people are objecting to with regard to permits and things is the second one.
And the second one has a fairly decent solution, if we would actually implement it: It should be harder to enact a prohibition than repeal it. Things that >80% of people agree should be prohibited stay prohibited, things some busybody managed to push through that one time are easier to get rid of.
I first heard this on the Omega Tau Podcast [0], where the guest discusses an article he wrote [1] discussing, in part, the book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [2].
> [1] Human societies historically act as problem-solving organisations that tend to develop ever-greater organisational and technical complexity in order to solve the social, economic and political problems they are confronted with. As their complexity increases, the problems they have to deal with become more difficult to solve, requiring growing investment in further economic and societal complexity. According to Tainter, however, investment in socio-political complexity eventually tends to reach a point of diminishing returns, where the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity begin to decline, leading to a lowered capacity to solve the new problems that arise and to deal with their consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies struggle to uphold the level of complexity they have reached and may have to move down to a lower complexity level. This, says Tainter, is the pattern behind the rise and fall of most civilizations in human history.
"But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed."
Seems more like a flaw of high density than democracy if you look at democracy in low density areas and citizen happiness in other types of government in high density areas.
I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws.
Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.
Yeup. People often like to conflate things that aren't directly related. Doesn't mean their observations or experiences aren't valid, but it does also lead to lots of going in circles.
It doesn't help that buildings are likely to be the most expensive thing a person will create or own, and they have a very high impact and demand. You need electricity, water, sewage, access to make it usable, then you need to make sure all of that was done right to make it safe, and then you want to make sure it's not put in a spot that'll just piss people off... and so on.
Obviously we do tend to come up with similar solutions for these systems because I don't think there's some clear and obvious "well just do that" living out there. Yes it's better in communities that are small with lots of space, lots of funds, and like minded members, but the moment everyone wants to live on the beach in the 70-80F weather you're going to start running into lots of issues.
It's unfortunate because people like to imagine it's just "Them" doing it. "Them" being the perfect mental image of an adversary who we all have 100% dealt with. The petty neighbor breaking out technicalities to stop you from getting something you'd like for no better reason than "fuck you". Unfortunately it's hard to design systems with that kind of person in mind, because when you're dealing with 100/1,000/10,000 people, it's a lot harder to just say "you're just being an asshole, no one cares if you're correct, you lose"
would you rather a china where 996 is technically against the law but you have to suffer it and no protection at all for your property rights and you can be moved for the three gorges dam for little compensation? i would much rather amtrack then the wenzhou crashing bullet trains from china where the executed's bullet fees are charged to the parents.
Don't forget all the entrenched interests, both inside and outside government, that benefit from the status quo and are willing to fight to maintain it.
If you think this kind of over-abundance of laws and regulations is exclusive to democracies, early 18th century France would like a word. It’s a problem that plagues most places. Laws compound upon themselves as time goes on. It is less about keeping everyone happy so much as it is about keeping stakeholders happy. If it wasn’t a democracy, those stakes holders would just be oligarchs, nobles, the military, etc.
Democracy never handles situations well where one side of an issue is a small highly motivated group, and the other side is a larger group that kinda-cares.
It's the reason we subsidize farmers. It's the reason our tax code remains so complicated. It's also why it's hard to get anything built: Existing owners are highly motivated to block development, and the potential beneficiaries (people who might someday live there, etc.) are too diffuse to mount a defense against them.
I’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.
> Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
You're talking like this is the same group of people that want no traffic, less density, low noise, etc and then are complaining about housing shortages and public transport.
These are two distinct people. The former group is going to be mostly homeowners. People who bought property in a place are mostly happy with how it was when they bought it so if the public transport is bad they don't mind by selection bias. Obviously they don't really care about housing supply.
Non-homeowners, on the other hand, are usually looking for their golidilocks neighborhood (no blame on them, that's why looking for a home is so difficult and why people who find them are protective of them). They are the ones who found a place they can afford but the commute is too long and public transport is bad or they can't afford a place near their work because it's all low density and in high demand, etc.
Importantly, I think the groups of people with gripes about the housing market are pretty distinct sets of people who really don't agree with each other. There are people who are price out of home ownership (always with the caveat of "in the place they want to live") and there are people who are priced out of living where they want to live, even renting. One group wants density and one group wants those SFH and low density, just cheaper.
The SFH crowd can't be satisfied. It's just reality that highly desirable places are more expensive. The high density folks could be satisfied but at the expense of all the people who chose to live in the neighborhood they do. I find it hard to sympathize with people who don't live in a place and want to change it to suit their needs, at the expense of people who do.
> But yay, democracy?
Yes, working as intended.
As a mildly related aside, It's funny to me how "NIMBY" has gone from someone who wants something, in general, but not near them (homeless shelters, for instance) to someone who just doesn't want a thing at all while still carrying the same stigma. Certainly the people who live in a place should have more of a say as to what goes on there than the people who don't.
> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
I only blame the politicians who make promises they know they can't keep. They're typically not lazy, incompetent or corrupt, they just lied to get elected.
It's not the result of 100 years of democracy: it's the result of Euclid v Ambler and the subsequent cases that support it. Exclusionary zoning baring residential zoning outright is a taking and should be treated as such. Filthy poors are a nuisance:
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite . . ." Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)
You could find extreme difficult level in nuclear industry: from my country argentina (I tried to build a service company providing nuclear solutions to an important client in Europe; killed by my government bureaucracy) to the US (se Nuscale hugh expenses on certifications from 2016 to 2020).
I would actually love a Sim City designed for realistic economic experimentation. A population of 1000’s of professions all acting self-interestedly with their various characteristics, motives, social and economic arrangements.
With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!
No, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is very much a strong state (aka player) game with basically zero agency from workers as long as they get fed.
Not to say it isn't a great game, it has managed to steal a great deal of my time. With the caveat that its very unpolished and clearly straining under a load bearing amount of duct tape
This is brilliant, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend time playing it as a game. No one in my town wants to run for mayor since it is a thankless and impossible job that pays a fraction of the cost of living here. There is no fun or joy or escapism in being hated by everyone and not being able to please anyone.
I just played it for half an hour, it's enjoyable! My budget's tidy, the beloved raccoon still has a place in the city hall, and my mayor approval is steadily- but ever so slowly- going up. Feels like old school sim city!
I'm really impressed by the quality given that it seems heavily vibe coded, I'd assumed I would encounter many issues, but I've found only very minor bugs so far.
Couldn't get past the new city screen where I'm choosing "Blank Slate" or the other one. I assume theres a button to press odd I scroll down, but scrolling is locked. Fun idea tho. There's a Factorio Mod where the biters attack you with paperwork instead of trying to kill you directly that this makes me think of.
Screen turns largely black after a short bit of loading the city with these errors:
.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_OPERATION: glRenderbufferStorageMultisample: Texture total allocation size is too large.
play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
228[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElementsInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
11[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElements: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
10[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArrays: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glBlitFramebuffer: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
play/:1 WebGL: too many errors, no more errors will be reported to the console for this context.
I’m sorry you ran into this! It looks like the game tried to allocate too much memory. I got claude to fall back to lower resolution textures when this happens, thanks for reporting.
A little too much going on all at once in the beginning. For a complex game like this I think you have to start small and slowly introduce functionality. Why are so many buttons available to me from minute 1? I'm not using them.
Yeah I was excited to try this right up until I looked at the toolbar and inspected a property and got the AI wall of text.
The subject area is great (teach actual civics) but this fails in execution. It could really use a strong pass on UX and learning curve, because right now its a product that everyone is just going to bounce off of.
Whether or not the topic is complex is beside the point. The point of this project, as far as I can see it, is get to teach this subject through experience to as many people as possible. Walls of text and buttons fundamentally undermine that purpose. Teaching complexity comes by removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary and arranging the complexity in a form that introduces it in compelling bite-sized chunks, so the player is always engaged.
Thanks - I obviously didn’t get the balance right for everyone, and honestly it’s partly because I started with a maximalist position of “don’t hide the complexity that’s the point”, spent a bunch of time getting those details right…and then quickly realized during playtesting the same thing you and many others pointed out: progressively layering/revealing the depth works better to establish the contrast, while also being significantly easier for players to actually engage with.
Thanks for taking the time to take a look and give thoughtful feedback!
I took some perverse pleasure from the wall of complexity-- as you said, "that's the point". That really came through in my play experience, and I think that adds to it.
I wouldn’t necessarily fault the maximalist starting point, we’re in a new era of software where subtractive building (rather than additive) is starting to be a real approach to building. I’ve gone through the same process on a few projects - build to learn by laying all the ideas out and reacting to the ones that draw you in most, and then either chisel away the rest or start with a new project and swipe the gems from the last.
Please god stop making the x to close windows on the middle or the left. Majority of people who using computers are using Linux or Windows where it's on the upper right and it's a muscle memory. You aren't being clever or helping. I get that in some cases you may want people to read the information you have and pause a bit more, but it just irritates me and does not make me want to engage with whatever it is if I have to waste so much more time closing every window as a result. It literally wastes an exponential amount of time.
If this was an installable, moddable game, this would be cool. Further, I'm not sure why they could not add this as an existing module or feature within SimCity 3000 itself. It's a nice little wanna be clone. But playing a browser game just doesn't feel like a game.
> It writes my code, obviously. Almost all my personal projects are either 100% hand written or 100% vibe coded; almost nothing in between. The vibe coded projects are significantly more ambitious and feature rich.
The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.
But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.
This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.
I think the bigger reason the original "EPCOT as a city" didn't happen is that once Walt passed, everyone else in the company looked at the plan and knew it would be a bottomless money pit from day 1.
I think EPCOT could have been quite successful. The Villages, Florida was centrally planned and designed by many Disney architects (among others) and it is hugely successful and profitable.
Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.
I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.
Well, sure, but The Villages doesn't have all vehicles restricted to an underground roadway supply system grid built out under an entire city, pedestrian PeopleMovers for an entire city, a downtown completely enclosed in a climate-controlled dome, the legal issues that come with changing peoples' furnishings out from under them or trying to evict anyone unemployed, etc etc. There's a huge difference between 'planned community' and the kind of absurd stuff that Walt wanted to build that would all need to work perfectly before anyone could even ove in for the first time.
The residents in EPCOT would have been renters, so the ideas of evicting for nonpayment, or the landlord doing remodeling and upgrades, seem pretty banal.
Separating vehicle form foot traffic is a strong feature of modern urbanism and even the buried road network doesn't seem prohibitive, if done on greenfield. But it is a rigid concept, that would expose you to immense costs down the line, as the city grows and tries to adapt to changing reality.
There are fully planned and built cities, like around here so called "Garden Cities": Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes.
I've been in several and they actually feel okay to live in, to run errands, to shop.
It only sounds funny if it's cranked up to the extreme -- like abusive housing associations, a cancer growing on the corpse of the old communities which just wanted some quiet evenings and the bins to not be overflowing, but it can be done well.
The garden cities were merely planned in layout and after that have "normal" levels of planning control. It does make them a bit different but not in uncomfortable ways. Sometimes called "soulless", which really just means "new" - lack of feeling the connection to previous generations through heritage.
It sounds essentially like 1984. Not that the world needed him for that though because with the most recent Samsung TV scandal about microphone and camera spying on users it seems also that fiction became reality to a certain extent.
I wouldn’t mind a complete recording of my life at all times, provided I get to determine who has access to what. Would end a lot of I never said that arguments in my house.
I haven't tried the game, but this is slightly hilarious and awesome.
I've often wondered about this kind of thing. When I go to an airport, it seems strange to me that each one is different with some of them having elaborate train systems, or multiple runways.
The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator?
Sim City was a fantastic simulation from the stand point of a game, but I'm curious; if you build a city simulator and let it grow organically (game of life style) can you put in sufficient regulation/parameters that get you to where we are today?
And if so, is there a simulation that shows us a way to get us to a better tomorrow?
> The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator?
Optimistically, because each one has a different optimal solution given all the unique constraints for each airport project.
Also, airports aren't just built and then done. Often the cities around them will grow and the airports will need to expand and adapt to new constraints, sometimes many decades after they were first built.
Every airport is different because every local geography, existing land use, and weather pattern is different.
Seattle has generally ether north or south winds depending on season, and the airport is located on the only buildable flat plateau for miles around, so has 3 runways all going the same direction, N/S.
Denver built an all-new airport way outside of town where there was unlimited buildable land. Their winds are highly variable even within one season, so they have 6 runways in a crossing configuration.
The optimal airport has two parallel runways, 9,000 feet apart, that align with prevailing wind. If a location has variable strong winds, another set can be built at a 90° angle. It's possible to add more runways at 9,000 intervals, but you're usually better off building an airport somewhere else.
Most airports were built during or before WWII, so few are designed to most efficiently accommodate modern usage. Maybe in the future we can better handle closer runways in low visibility, but first we'll have to figure out how to have two computers communicate directly with each other, instead of having one computer generate routes that get read out load by a human, transmitted over an analog radio, listened to by another human, then typed into another computer.
> but first we'll have to figure out how to have two computers communicate directly with each other, instead of having one computer generate routes that get read out load by a human, transmitted over an analog radio, listened to by another human, then typed into another computer.
That just makes it computer -> person -> computer -> computer -> person -> computer
We need something where a control center computer that issues clearances can radio them directly into an aircraft's flight management computer. This wouldn't disallow ATC from reviewing the routes before transmitting them, or the flight crew from reviewing them before accepting them, but without people manually copying over the information, there's a lot less potential to insert errors in the first place.
We have done this internally at our company (link in bio). We have an internal simulation game, kind of like the OP. The game was vibecoded, but it can run using the same rules as a city in our actual system. The simulation game is really just a toy that is fun to mess around with, but the rules engine is an actual thing in our product.
For those who are curious, this is what I could gather:
- Three.js for rendering
- react 18+ UI built with Vite
- charts are custom, no libs
- main bundle size is a js file of 1MB (290KB gziped)
- No router, no redux/zustand
- saves using indexedDB + service-worker
Tangential: Elon was tweeting recently about how he blames bureaucracy for the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor's failure (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2112102304782680107). Whether that is ignoring other major problems with the plan or not, there's been bi-partisan criticism of how the traditional western democracy has severely slowed down infrastructure investment (see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...). I see a lot of people going to China after being oblivious to it for years mostly due to western propaganda and being in awe with how fast the country has advanced its industry and public infrastructure with superior high speed rail, power grid, and other investments. I wonder if the west will ever find a way to adapt the dynamism that an autocracy affords to its system of government (which sadly has been increasingly described as an aristocracy/plutocracy/corporatocracy/kleptocracy).
I'll get downvoted by the Musk fans, but the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor failed because Hyperloop doesn't work, is non existent, and that corridor is already served by the only profitable train line in the US, the Amtrak DC -> Boston train. It made no financial sense to do this. Bureaucracy is just an excuse for yet another Musk pipe dream to pump stock.
If you wanna talk about abundance, talk about abundance, but mixing that with the disaster of yet another snake oil Musk project being stalled is not something to blame it for but to be thankful for.
I was daydreaming about building sandcastles on the beach or the playground but with heavy machinery, strong concrete foundations and, of course, permits. Signed by the townhall
The various decisions/petitions that pop up can break the immersion by mentioning details that don't fit the city(petitions with signatures from >250% of the town population, traffic issues at the "4-way intersection in front of the feed store" when no such place exists, or the new building causing shadows when there's nothing around it). It would be great if more text was turned into templates that pull game data for accuracy, and if the simulation were able to feed definitive descriptions of the town layout into generative AI prompts to make the text talk about scenarios reflected in the game.
Thanks so much for your feedback! I originally started with a pretty diverse corpus of prewritten story arcs for diversity, and went back to retrofit them into the engine once I started customizing stories and details for the city. It looks like I missed a few spots, sorry about that!
And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought
I'm a huge fan of city builders and a politics nerd... I can't wait to try this. But I hope it really is procedural in the details too!
To the parent post: I have actually seen public interest groups bring petitions to a small city council with more signatures than there are residents of the city... but hopefully there's some countervailing force in this game too where local residents reject petitions that are driven by outside parties. In other words, not every signatory to a petition is a resident, and there's local resistance to regional causes. I guess this happens quite a bit more in the exurbs of major metropolitan areas.
Usually the local petitions for city matters are spread through WhatsApp groups of friends and family of everyone directly involved, so they usually get a lot of signatures from people outside the city (valid more or less for any size of city)
some of the things come up over and over and over... I've trained 5 people in being food service acapble for the volunteer fire pancake breakfast and they've all moved to the county seat. I'm just a jobs program I guess.
Yeah, I played for a while and something just felt "off". I like the idea of being involved in individual proposals, but there are too many immersion-breaking dialogs that come up (some of which just seem silly). And the text in them is "off" in a fashion that feels like it was written by AI. The news articles and such in SimCity felt much more hand-curated, concise and clever - thus more entertaining.
>The various decisions/petitions that pop up can break the immersion by mentioning details that don't fit the city(petitions with signatures from >250% of the town population, traffic issues at the "4-way intersection in front of the feed store" when no such place exists, or the new building causing shadows when there's nothing around it).
This is how real life works when when your development doesn't fit the vision unaccountable bureaucrats and institutions have for the vibe of the community.
There's no need for it, archive.org, myabandonware all have [play] on your browser support via emulation, C&C isn't there because of copyright reasons, and also you can do an AI recompilation which means most of the code should be thrown out.
358 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] threadMunicipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood.
But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.
And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
Morocco's high speed rail line opened in 2018.
Also, the French company (Alstom) that helped build the Morocco HSR is currently bidding to build the CA HSR...
Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.
Wait, do we need to pass a law for this?
Every new generation is convinced that all the cruft of the existing system is useless or obsolete so they create a new system without the cruft based on "first principles" or somesuch bullshit. And then through pain and loss they rediscover why all that cruft was there in the original system in the first place. What seems "obsolete" is many times a bedrock principle of the old system that only seems obsolete now because it is/was so effective that the problem it is intended to address/prevent no longer occurs.
Also, legislators review the existing laws all the time. Most "new" laws are just amendments to existing laws.
For more than a decade the US has been stuck operating by renewing the same budget more or less with minor modifications at random intervals of time depending on the political mood. It always gets approved eventually after occasional pointless, wasteful shutdowns. But nothing actually changes from those veto points, just more routine dysfunction and grandstanding.
Same with debt ceiling. Another veto point that gives leverage but has zero effect on actual spending. It probably sounded like a brilliant idea to control spending in the 70s or whenever it originated. But is entirely ineffective at the purpose of addressing the deficit.
Self expiring legislation would very likely end up the same way. Just another pro forma procedural roadblock that wastes time and makes the legislature even less effective at real problem solving instead of posturing.
Most laws in most countries (including the US) have sunset clauses. They are incredibly common and have existed for centuries.
People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.
All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings
The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".
This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.
You get handed a nice set of rules, you get tested on them.. and then you can go ahead and build within those rules without asking anyone for permission.
If you break the rules - we break your piggy bank to set everything straight. You can buy insurance (which will have its own set of rules) - or not.
Maybe in some jurisdictions you need to buy insurance, while in others you get to have a choice.. after clearing it with your financier.
Zoning is actually rule-making. Permitting is just bureaucracy. Keep them separate.
Don't want factories zoned next to elementary schools? Perfectly reasonable rule, but then you don't get to pass a variance for the mayor's nephew's cousin's factory. And vice versa.
Depends on the type of factory I would say. Some work silently and without toxic exhausts, I would not mind those.
It's not necessarily a black or white approach. In theory as-of-right is supposed to be the rule everywhere as Due Process guarantees mean government can't act capriciously. And there's actually pre-existing SCOTUS precedent regarding how zoning plans are supposed to be applied, and how community input processes aren't supposed to allow mobs to subvert the rule of law with a de facto but informal veto power. In practice, non-as-of-right municipalities and states basically have zoning rules and approval processes that are fuzzy and ambiguous, effectively granting regulators significant interpretive leeway and discretion.
Federal and often state courts are extremely reticent to jump into the fray and defend the rule of law. In fact, there's SCOTUS procedural jurisprudence designed to make it difficult to "make a federal case" out of zoning disputes. NIMBY battles are just too politically fraught and courts are afraid of falling into the bottomless tar pits of adjudicating public grievance, which is what politicians are supposed to be for.
This is similar to the difference between “shall issue” and “constitutional carry” states.
In the former you still have to deal with the system to exercise your right, and the system has to have staff to deal with you.
In the latter you’re approved - without anyone being on a taxpayers dole and having an incentive to keep themselves employed by enacting more laws and keeping the system inefficient.
They did. Google Robert Moses for details.
Ultimately I think this particular problem is a diseased outgrowth from the cancer that is "homes as an investment vehicle." Is it so much that people don't want change or is more that they (correctly) identify a house and the land it sits upon as the only thing in their life that appreciates in value, consistently? It represents stability, a future to be handed down to one's children, that sort of thing.
It seems to be having houses function this way is just causing too many social ills to ignore. It's why private equity is holding tons of houses, during a housing crisis, and refusing to sell. It's a cornerstone of the 2008 financial crash. It's why few in my entire damned generation can HAVE a home, not to invest in but to simply live in.
IMO a house can be a need for life, or it can be an investment. It can't be both at the same time.
There's no one cause. Even if homes weren't "an investment vehicle," I don't think it would change much. Few people in a neighborhood of single family homes would want a 20-story apartment tower getting built next door.
You don't really have to empathize all that much. Can't you imagine anything you wouldn't like built near your home?
> And I genuinely struggle to enter the mind of someone for whom this is top priority, something they put time into.
OK how about this: you live in a quiet neighborhood, where kids are safe playing in the street. Your house gets a nice amount of sun in the afternoon. You like it.
Then someone builds a couple of 20 story apartment blocks, just south of you. The sun is blocked, traffic increases. The neighborhood isn't quiet anymore.
A data center or sewage treatment plant (but I repeat myself)
> Then someone builds a couple of 20 story apartment blocks, just south of you. The sun is blocked, traffic increases. The neighborhood isn't quiet anymore.
Okay? Why am I entitled to dictate who builds what near my home? Because I bought a 0.25 acre plot there?
Maybe the 20 story apartment block will contain a new friend. Maybe it'll bring a bunch more kids to play with the neighborhood kids, who btw aren't plants and don't require constant sunlight. Maybe the block will come with a pool I could use for a reasonable fee, or basketball courts for the kids. Maybe that block going up will increase the overall local population enough so we get better restaurants in the area, and it'll almost certainly increase property tax revenues to local schools.
Like I dunno if you find this situation absolutely intolerable, you could always just... move?
Only this is just a thing that really doesn't happen much at all. Very few developers are putting up 20 story apartment buildings in the middle of an existing SFH community in the suburbs somewhere. Most of those such fights are people fighting the 5 over 1 development built greenfield just outside the current SFH neighborhood in question. And for those such people? They should have zero say.
If they are doing so, it's typically in very dense city cores that support the density and thus investment. If someone wants to put up a 20 story building next to me in my Chicago neighborhood, sounds good to me! I am upset there are not more of them and that zoning has effectively made them illegal to build here, as I'm roughly 500 feet away from a rapid transit station and two arterial roads with high frequency bus routes. It's a crime that they are illegal to build.
I'd be an asshole if I bought a house in such an area and wanted my little conclave to be protected at the expense of everyone else in the city. I should rightly be overruled and told to pound sand and move the hell out if I don't like it.
Instead, laws have enabled such people to effectively veto such buildings. Or even simply stuff like 12 unit 4 floor apartment buildings that already exist due to predating zoning on my block.
Many areas of the US are effectively retirement communities by zoning. People who moved in 20-30 years ago who demand zero change and have captured nearly all political power.
He is not really quite what you would get if zoning, &c, were handled at the state level.
Like genuinely, with as good of faith as I can muster for people who spread really dogshit ideas, the core concern they seem to have but won't say, with a gun to their heads, is they are scared shitless that minority groups will, somehow, at some point, attain power greater than their own, at which point the minority group will enact the exact same horrific policies that were enacted unto them. It's a core fear of really every society that has at once point had slaves in my experience.
The homeowners are making rational choices. That's the problem. As the most expensive asset a typical homeowner will ever own is their home, it makes rational sense for them to support any policy that supports it's value and oppose any policy that undermines it's value. Building more housing undermines it's value.
And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.
As you note home value is an extremely nebulous concept as it is tied to whatever people who currently do not live in the community might pay to buy a house. No matter what someone sells for they can always say "it would have sold for more if every single house was painted exactly the same shade of beige, you miscreants with your off white, ecru, and oatmeal houses have cost me tens of thousands of dollars!"
If you start giving "hypothetical people" a say, you stop having democracy. You can invent as many hypothetical people as you want to force any outcome.
And real democracy requires local control. A distant democratically-elected government making centralized decisions may just as well be replaced by a tyrant, given how unresponsive it will be to your concerns.
Do you think that the Japanese system where permitting is centralized away from local government antidemocratic?
Because it's one of the biggest things that affects your local environment?
But aren't there other salient factors? Is energy policy any less "big" than zoning in its effect on your local environment? The thing is, it's just really hard to get certain policies to work right when they are set at too small a scale -- even if they have a big effect at a small scale.
When I consider the housing situation, I am starting to think that land use policy seems to be that kind of thing.
Ultimately, cities are granted a charter by the state. It's not a given that they can control zoning, the location of people's garage doors, &c. We can think about these things and decide.
no it doesn't, high density allows more value to be extracted from the same plot of land since the volume of units offset the individual price reduction of each one. as a result, developers regularly offer homeowners 2x or 3x their market value to incentivize selling.
Major projects like power plants or dams should be made at a state or even national level, but rules for which house goes where, less so. And if your town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid, that's an issue for your town's government to solve.
Should they get a say about building the necessary infrastructure to make your home (as opposed to homestead) possible in Sonoma? Their tax money is spent on it.
>And if your town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid, that's an issue for your town's government to solve.
And whose issue is it to solve if every single town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid? Not for incumbent homeowners, mind you, for them all is well and they'd like to keep it that way. But for renters and those wanting to afford a place to live.
For example there's me, an empty plot, and the next neighbor. Nothing is more local to the both of us than the empty plot. We've even grassed it, and maintain it.
The owner of the plot wants to build a house. Since we are the locals we simply say no. We like the plot as it is. Plus the loss of this open plot would affect the value of our property. And traffic in the neighborhood would increase.
This sounds bonkers - surely the owner of the plot has rights too? Sure, but this is democracy so our 2 votes outweigh his one.
The consequence of small govt is that nothing gets done at all because the majority of people are resistant to any change at all. If everything takes a majority, well, nothing happens.
Ultimately though local people are the worst decision makers. Which is why my city let's the owner build on his plot, and doesn't allow me and my neighbor to decide.
We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.
I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.
A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper
Now it's true that it could have been prosecuted anyway as murder or a civil rights violation, but it wasn't because of that convenient interpretation.
1. https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-l...
2. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55
When there are rules on the books, and they are bulldozed over, you can generally sue.
There's nothing you can do in a society that's 100% biased against you, but in a society that's 50% biased against you, appeals might rule in your favour.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/07/23/berkeley-zoning-has-...
When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.
Believing that neighborhood units are the largest impediment to effective and efficient planning is to believe the corporate landowners at their word. There's so much astroturfing that happens in these spaces, largely rejecting density and public transportation.
I can name off the top of my head a half-dozen community-oriented projects by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in and torpedoed a neighorhood deal and its community organization over requirements for private developers to address rainwater overflow. This same director who later went on to be hired by the same, private firm for a six-figure job, all of it going unreported in the news and hushed right up.
They are community members just not the ones who share your point of view. Those community members who might share your point of view don't show up.
I've never seen community members fight for density either. We want to tear down our housing so large buildings blocking the sky can be built by corporate landowners. You know who owns large buildings? Corporate landowners. The people with little houses are average citizens.
Public transit doesn't need density. Public transit exists in places with little density.
Two, and more importantly, the issue is with their disproportionate influence. If we lived in a perfect world where your regular-degular corporate lawyer had the same say in politics as anybody else, sure, you'd have a point. But it's been more than a decade since Citizen's United (https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/money-politics/influenc...) and so that's not even close to reality: https://capitalbnews.org/georgia-lawmakers-real-estate-inves...
Not sure what a private developer would have to do with public transit though. That's the city's job to provide and figure out the routes for. Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings 2 blocks away from train stations.
I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.
This one kills me. It's so common and yet there's wide agreement among the local populace that there's a housing shortage.
Because I can assure you with 100% confidence, never having been to a single one of their meetings, that all the wealthy suburbs around you are using this "process" to keep their suburbs extremely exclusionary, while they siphon their fraction of the economic productivity from Atlanta into their own hands, and keep their tax dollars sequestered away from the city that allows them to make their high incomes.
What you see with your personal experience is only part of the picture, and the same process that seems to get abused to allow "non community" to exert development pressure in Atlanta is simultaneously used to keep middle class and poor people out of the wealthy suburbs.
> Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways
you: "hey have you considered that actually you're a piece of shit?"
yes, these rules exist for a reason. some places (like Atlanta) are still guilty. i'm not saying we should plow down Chesterson's fence, but your hostile tone also sucks
No one ever said anything like "you are a piece of shit".
No he's reacting to an accusation that anyone wants to go back to that
HungryHobbit's response is just making that clear... he's actively defending what was objectively a shitty and unnecessarily snarky and confrontational post, because it adhere's to the HN norms of being smug, superior, dismissive, and dickish... but in a way that is just indirect enough that these maladjusted fucking nerds can pretend that they're polite and professional.
You'll enjoy the site more if you walk in expecting that everyone you're talking to is a smug little asshole who needs to get punched in the fucking face.
You'd have to read absolutely zero books and place yourself into a silo of intentional, practiced ignorance to believe that no other American cities have racism-related baggage codified into their very laws and neighborhoods.
Not to mention that Moses himself was a planner for NYC, not ATL.
"For a long time, the spaces where Mesa’s orange pickers and other migrant workers first settled before the Second World War were not much coveted. Just as Black people were segregated in a neighborhood to the north of downtown, immigrants from Mexico and later other parts of Latin America were relegated to unmaintained dwellings to the south."
>For much of the 20th century, minorities were barred from buying property in most parts of Mesa
https://www.eastvalleytribune.com/news/mesa-protecting-histo...
https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
And in terms of the black communities that were disrupted, there were many more black communities that were helped by the improved logistics.
Why bother heeding requirements not to run heavy machinery outside people's houses at 4am?
Why bother getting proper utility surveys done, just yolo it and if a few thousand people end up without water/power it's fine because the people profiting from the work live elsewhere and can just blame the workers?
The only people who don't like low density are the poor, and this is why most of America is car culture, and owns their own houses. "Housing shortages" is another way of saying that existing home owners are earning strong equity.
Yeah, I do want no traffic and lots of parking, so low density please!
Personally I want no traffic but also little parking. Car infrastructure is a general blight on public spaces.
Prospective residents and transit riders are harmed.
Rules and hearings overwhelmingly favor existing residents.
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” - Winston Churchill
It's very easy to throw stones through windows. But before discounting one of our greatest creations, one which is so annoying and yet has brought us so much prosperity, what alternative do you propose?
Dictatorships, especially the communist style often use it as an argument for why their system is better than what we have in the western world. It is obviously propaganda, but why would they choose that propaganda? There is probably some truth in it. Commie blocks in particular managed to solve a serious housing problem very effectively. It wasn't great, didn't age well, but it gave people a decent place to live.
This is, arguably, the big problem. Things akin to Commie blocks have been tried in non communist countries, but in general government run housing has this major issue of almost always winding up poorly budgeted and supported, so it quickly becomes a nightmare as tax payers don't want to foot the bills on some other persons housing, and it's extra ripe for corruption and corner cutting, and so on.
Not that it shouldn't be investigated (any option should be considered), but it does seem to be one of the big weaknesses. In theory if a private landlord/building owner breaks the law, you have recourse though the legal system (yes in theory), while if the government isn't living up to what it said it would do....well you tend to lack any option for recourse.
To be clear this is a disgustingly simplified summary of a subject I have at best a casual hobbyists knowledge of, but there seems to be an advantage to leaving housing in the realm of private so that you have the option of kicking them in the teeth with the government if they completely fuck up. As messy as that might be, the alternative seems to be messier.
The Soviet solution to this was 3 ft thick concrete walls but the crime and other problems that get created by public housing were never addressed there.
Now, I am partially back in Poland, as the Soviet occupation is long gone. There are many problems, but generally, Poland is now a country one wants to come to, not escape.
I would like to also point out that whatever the USA might be, it is no longer a democracy. I would argue that after Citizens United, the USA is now finally a "Capitalism" - it's kinda getting Russified over there.
I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost.
People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144005
No wonder they're popping up everywhere!
They are in all new developments in most states because the suburb model is financially unsustainable (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 for the argument why), so, if you want to build a nice new development, the town/city is going to say "Who's gonna maintain that little park? Who's gonna cut the grass in the green spaces? Who's gonna sweep the streets?" etc. Not to mention, every amenity outside individual homes (clubhouse, pool, playground) etc. needs to be maintained. Cities can't afford to take them on as public parks, and the individual neighborhoods whose home prices paid for their construction don't really want them to be public either.
And the developer needs to have an entity with which all these responsibilities will vest when they're done building, so, HOA needs to exist.
The alternative is either no shared amenities of any kind, or trying to get the whole city to approve paying for the perpetual maintenance of a new public park when building a new housing tract. Good luck getting that passed, since most existing residents (besides the ones in the next tract over) would say "F that, I'd never go there, why should my taxes pay for it?"
Old water pipes have been the financial downfall of many suburbs.
Odds are you don't have a lot of heavy fright coming through, so your roads don't need constant replacing. You likely don't have bridges that carry heavy freight, those are a maintenance nightmare.
But once all the buried pipes need replacing, suddenly all the roads need tearing up, and that is expensive.
The best amenities? What does that mean, specifically?
> In reality, since suburbs have low crime, the policing is cheap.
Are you sure?
"The average spending on police for jurisdictions with more than one million people was 10 percent in 2017. The average for jurisdictions with fewer than 50,000 people was 13 percent."
- https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
> But somehow the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools.
Not sure what that has to do with the sustainability of suburbs.
> I think you just don't like suburbs and will twist your logic into knots to claim a rational reason for it. Truth is, you just don't like suburbs. Most people do, get over it.
That has nothing to do with whether what they are arguing is correct or not.
Is your suburb growing at present? If so, and if your taxes are as low as the typical place, your town is enjoying the fun part of the cycle. Same as Bernie Madoff's customers were happy with their returns for years. When they stop building, it's a matter of time before the city will have to choose between skimping on all the things that make it nice and neglecting roads and pipes, OR, raising taxes.
> the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools
That's because most of those cities are run by idiots, elected by the people who vote for all the goodies, borrow whatever it takes, but also don't raise taxes. Almost no cities levy payroll taxes (meaning, taxes non-residents such as commuters from your suburb have to pay) though.
PS: I live in the suburbs, and would never go back to the city. I like it here. That doesn't change the plain fact that under most circumstances, suburbs aren't financially sustainable in the long term.
I often read stories on the internet of how dysfunctional American HOAs are, and nobody ever explains why it's like that. HOAs in most other countries seem to work fine. But it sounds like they have too much power and not enough safeguards for democracy (like a quorum).
Like, there's other contributing causes, but those are the root origins of it all. The US suburban HOA structure started from a mix of communities trying to keep minorities out, and from suburban towns trying to push off infrastructure costs by legally forcing HOAs to provide their own services instead of covering it with taxes.
Combine dysfunctional structural origins and you get a dysfunctional culture around the subject.
US condo HOAs tend to be fairly culturally distinct from the other HOAs since they exist for fundamental and obvious pragmatic reasons (somebody's got to keep the roof repaired), though they also tend to have the same disease of excessive cost-cutting that's like a microcosm of US politics in general (see the Surfside condo collapse for an example).
There are close to half a million of them, if only 1% had some news event yearly, you'd think they all were bad, they're not.
You can list it's the actual negatives, but its not a whatsapp group with no laws.
You're literally describing a government
You actually have a slow government and are complaining about it. You have not experienced any alternative to slow government.
As they pointed out it's hard to get anyone to do their fair share, and unlike a government which can just MAKE you, they have no such option.
There's your problem. You are requiring unanimous agreement? Republics (et al.) were invented for a reason.
Your reasoning is the same as developers who systematically say "we have to restart from scratch, I can do it better than those morons who apparently really wanted it to get complicated".
"Nuance gets lost" well with centralized politics, the whole damn point gets lost.
There are two different problems here.
One of them is, you want to have some kind of non-excludable service. But if only 10% of people are contributing then they start to feel resentful and stop contributing, so then only 5% of people are contributing, until no one is contributing at all. So instead you want to have a majority vote and if everybody decides they want it, then everybody pays e.g. $10/month to provide it and you avoid the tragedy of the commons.
This one often has problems, especially if you allow centralization -- then special interests finagle their way into the budget being an onnibus take it or leave it bill where the large majority of what's in wouldn't pass if you put it up for a vote by itself, but nobody wants another government shutdown so now the deficit is two trillion dollars. But this one works pretty okay at the local level.
The other one is, we don't want jack the ripper or for the river to catch on fire. The way this one fails is that instead of prohibiting murder and leaded gasoline, a bunch of busybodies start trying to micromanage everything and pass rules where the marginal cost of administering the rule is larger than the marginal benefit of people following it. Which in turn allows special interests to insert rules that aren't even trying to be net positive and are just a thinly-veiled pretext over suppressing competition or creating demand for a particular industry's services by mandating it, which get easier to hide in the thicket the more unnecessary rules there already are. Which the local governments are even worse at because they're often prohibiting something (like housing construction) that people who can't currently afford to live in (and therefore can't vote in) that locality want.
So those are the two categories: a) spending tax money, b) prohibiting something. But the thing you're describing as being needed there is the first one and the thing people are objecting to with regard to permits and things is the second one.
And the second one has a fairly decent solution, if we would actually implement it: It should be harder to enact a prohibition than repeal it. Things that >80% of people agree should be prohibited stay prohibited, things some busybody managed to push through that one time are easier to get rid of.
> [1] Human societies historically act as problem-solving organisations that tend to develop ever-greater organisational and technical complexity in order to solve the social, economic and political problems they are confronted with. As their complexity increases, the problems they have to deal with become more difficult to solve, requiring growing investment in further economic and societal complexity. According to Tainter, however, investment in socio-political complexity eventually tends to reach a point of diminishing returns, where the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity begin to decline, leading to a lowered capacity to solve the new problems that arise and to deal with their consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies struggle to uphold the level of complexity they have reached and may have to move down to a lower complexity level. This, says Tainter, is the pattern behind the rise and fall of most civilizations in human history.
[0]https://ota.skadi.cloud/en/episodes/040O0P0C0P2C180H2B3z1W1N...
[1]https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/the-crisis-of-co...
[2]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_C...
Seems more like a flaw of high density than democracy if you look at democracy in low density areas and citizen happiness in other types of government in high density areas.
Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.
It doesn't help that buildings are likely to be the most expensive thing a person will create or own, and they have a very high impact and demand. You need electricity, water, sewage, access to make it usable, then you need to make sure all of that was done right to make it safe, and then you want to make sure it's not put in a spot that'll just piss people off... and so on.
Obviously we do tend to come up with similar solutions for these systems because I don't think there's some clear and obvious "well just do that" living out there. Yes it's better in communities that are small with lots of space, lots of funds, and like minded members, but the moment everyone wants to live on the beach in the 70-80F weather you're going to start running into lots of issues.
It's unfortunate because people like to imagine it's just "Them" doing it. "Them" being the perfect mental image of an adversary who we all have 100% dealt with. The petty neighbor breaking out technicalities to stop you from getting something you'd like for no better reason than "fuck you". Unfortunately it's hard to design systems with that kind of person in mind, because when you're dealing with 100/1,000/10,000 people, it's a lot harder to just say "you're just being an asshole, no one cares if you're correct, you lose"
Sounds like you don't really understand what a "democracy" is.
Sure, our system is not working currently. Doesn't mean that the principle of "democracy" fundamentally doesn't work, does it?
USA harms a lot under the orange clown. So first that term you use must be defined - what IS a democracy?
Russia and North Korea also claim to have some kind of democracy some sorts.
There are just too many differences in the term here.
> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
Many are corrupt. Many are incompetent. Many are lazy.
By the way, at best you describe indirect democracy. This one has more limits than democracy, which - conversely - requires more effort.
It's the reason we subsidize farmers. It's the reason our tax code remains so complicated. It's also why it's hard to get anything built: Existing owners are highly motivated to block development, and the potential beneficiaries (people who might someday live there, etc.) are too diffuse to mount a defense against them.
Seems pretty earned in a lot of ways
I’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.
You're talking like this is the same group of people that want no traffic, less density, low noise, etc and then are complaining about housing shortages and public transport.
These are two distinct people. The former group is going to be mostly homeowners. People who bought property in a place are mostly happy with how it was when they bought it so if the public transport is bad they don't mind by selection bias. Obviously they don't really care about housing supply.
Non-homeowners, on the other hand, are usually looking for their golidilocks neighborhood (no blame on them, that's why looking for a home is so difficult and why people who find them are protective of them). They are the ones who found a place they can afford but the commute is too long and public transport is bad or they can't afford a place near their work because it's all low density and in high demand, etc.
Importantly, I think the groups of people with gripes about the housing market are pretty distinct sets of people who really don't agree with each other. There are people who are price out of home ownership (always with the caveat of "in the place they want to live") and there are people who are priced out of living where they want to live, even renting. One group wants density and one group wants those SFH and low density, just cheaper.
The SFH crowd can't be satisfied. It's just reality that highly desirable places are more expensive. The high density folks could be satisfied but at the expense of all the people who chose to live in the neighborhood they do. I find it hard to sympathize with people who don't live in a place and want to change it to suit their needs, at the expense of people who do.
> But yay, democracy?
Yes, working as intended.
As a mildly related aside, It's funny to me how "NIMBY" has gone from someone who wants something, in general, but not near them (homeless shelters, for instance) to someone who just doesn't want a thing at all while still carrying the same stigma. Certainly the people who live in a place should have more of a say as to what goes on there than the people who don't.
> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
I only blame the politicians who make promises they know they can't keep. They're typically not lazy, incompetent or corrupt, they just lied to get elected.
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite . . ." Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)
Yeah how awful that a government system works for its people....
With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!
Songs of Syx is closer but still too micro
I've heard the soviet one is closer to what you're looking for - https://www.sovietrepublic.net
Not to say it isn't a great game, it has managed to steal a great deal of my time. With the caveat that its very unpolished and clearly straining under a load bearing amount of duct tape
I'm really impressed by the quality given that it seems heavily vibe coded, I'd assumed I would encounter many issues, but I've found only very minor bugs so far.
Sure. And because LLMs.
For those wondering. I haven't played, nor am I planning to. I already suck at vanilla Factorio, tyvm.
The subject area is great (teach actual civics) but this fails in execution. It could really use a strong pass on UX and learning curve, because right now its a product that everyone is just going to bounce off of.
Whether or not the topic is complex is beside the point. The point of this project, as far as I can see it, is get to teach this subject through experience to as many people as possible. Walls of text and buttons fundamentally undermine that purpose. Teaching complexity comes by removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary and arranging the complexity in a form that introduces it in compelling bite-sized chunks, so the player is always engaged.
Thanks for taking the time to take a look and give thoughtful feedback!
I took some perverse pleasure from the wall of complexity-- as you said, "that's the point". That really came through in my play experience, and I think that adds to it.
I wouldn’t necessarily fault the maximalist starting point, we’re in a new era of software where subtractive building (rather than additive) is starting to be a real approach to building. I’ve gone through the same process on a few projects - build to learn by laying all the ideas out and reacting to the ones that draw you in most, and then either chisel away the rest or start with a new project and swipe the gems from the last.
https://housing.over.pizza/
A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864 - Oct 2026 (201 comments)
If this was an installable, moddable game, this would be cool. Further, I'm not sure why they could not add this as an existing module or feature within SimCity 3000 itself. It's a nice little wanna be clone. But playing a browser game just doesn't feel like a game.
Guessing it’s the latter. Pass.
But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.
This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.
Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.
I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.
Separating vehicle form foot traffic is a strong feature of modern urbanism and even the buried road network doesn't seem prohibitive, if done on greenfield. But it is a rigid concept, that would expose you to immense costs down the line, as the city grows and tries to adapt to changing reality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
https://youtu.be/fiChvSOABxI?is=Yt3nPcQI9e2NWr5j
I'm pretty sure the point of the game was to make a statement and make people think/talk and boy-howdy op you did a great job.
I've been in several and they actually feel okay to live in, to run errands, to shop.
It only sounds funny if it's cranked up to the extreme -- like abusive housing associations, a cancer growing on the corpse of the old communities which just wanted some quiet evenings and the bins to not be overflowing, but it can be done well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury is the King's pet village which is more dirigiste.
I've often wondered about this kind of thing. When I go to an airport, it seems strange to me that each one is different with some of them having elaborate train systems, or multiple runways.
The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator?
Sim City was a fantastic simulation from the stand point of a game, but I'm curious; if you build a city simulator and let it grow organically (game of life style) can you put in sufficient regulation/parameters that get you to where we are today?
And if so, is there a simulation that shows us a way to get us to a better tomorrow?
Optimistically, because each one has a different optimal solution given all the unique constraints for each airport project.
Also, airports aren't just built and then done. Often the cities around them will grow and the airports will need to expand and adapt to new constraints, sometimes many decades after they were first built.
Seattle has generally ether north or south winds depending on season, and the airport is located on the only buildable flat plateau for miles around, so has 3 runways all going the same direction, N/S.
https://wrcc-archive.dri.edu/cgi-bin/wea_windroseclim.pl?laK...
Denver built an all-new airport way outside of town where there was unlimited buildable land. Their winds are highly variable even within one season, so they have 6 runways in a crossing configuration.
https://wrcc-archive.dri.edu/cgi-bin/wea_windroseclim.pl?laK...
Most airports were built during or before WWII, so few are designed to most efficiently accommodate modern usage. Maybe in the future we can better handle closer runways in low visibility, but first we'll have to figure out how to have two computers communicate directly with each other, instead of having one computer generate routes that get read out load by a human, transmitted over an analog radio, listened to by another human, then typed into another computer.
Tada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller%E2%80%93pilot_data_...
We need something where a control center computer that issues clearances can radio them directly into an aircraft's flight management computer. This wouldn't disallow ATC from reviewing the routes before transmitting them, or the flight crew from reviewing them before accepting them, but without people manually copying over the information, there's a lot less potential to insert errors in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
Both are similarly unplayable, but I guess it's the thought that counts.
Tangential: Elon was tweeting recently about how he blames bureaucracy for the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor's failure (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2112102304782680107). Whether that is ignoring other major problems with the plan or not, there's been bi-partisan criticism of how the traditional western democracy has severely slowed down infrastructure investment (see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...). I see a lot of people going to China after being oblivious to it for years mostly due to western propaganda and being in awe with how fast the country has advanced its industry and public infrastructure with superior high speed rail, power grid, and other investments. I wonder if the west will ever find a way to adapt the dynamism that an autocracy affords to its system of government (which sadly has been increasingly described as an aristocracy/plutocracy/corporatocracy/kleptocracy).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tryzj05cpX0
My impression so far is that hyperloop is simply a scam.
And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought
To the parent post: I have actually seen public interest groups bring petitions to a small city council with more signatures than there are residents of the city... but hopefully there's some countervailing force in this game too where local residents reject petitions that are driven by outside parties. In other words, not every signatory to a petition is a resident, and there's local resistance to regional causes. I guess this happens quite a bit more in the exurbs of major metropolitan areas.
This is how real life works when when your development doesn't fit the vision unaccountable bureaucrats and institutions have for the vibe of the community.
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347552/north-berkeley
https://github.com/adityaravishankar/command-and-conquer