I'm fascinated by the politics simulation within the game. Is there a red state vs blue state angle? How much of the mayor levers affect political campaigning, alignment, bill signatures, etc. this could be done as much as a political sim as much as a city planning sim.
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.
First, it's awesome the developer is giving this away for free. I love the tongue in cheek approach, and the polish and labour-of-love artifacts visible in portions of the UI and gameplay.
That said, after playing it for a while 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 too irrelevant). And the text in them is sometimes "off" in a fashion that feels like it was written by AI (though I'm not sure if it was). The news articles and such in SimCity felt 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 proposed development doesn't fit the vision some random unaccountable bureaucrats and/or institutions you have to go through have for the vibe of the community.
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.
Kind of like this one[1] which made the rounds on HN a few weeks ago. Looks like the social commentary from them are similar: "Real life is worse than SimCity because of rules and the public getting a say." and/or "Why can't we in real life let the mayor use the Bulldozer Tool to just wipe out any property he doesn't like and put up whatever property he likes in its place?"
I remember in Transport Tycoon, under certain conditions, you were no longer allowed to bulldoze willy nilly. If you wanted to put in a new bus station and were out of favour with the populace, you could try the old fashioned way: with bribes (and tree planting).
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.
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 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 move 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.
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?
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 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.
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.
Isn't this the opposite of escapism? I want to play games precisely because I don't have anyone giving me hassle (well, maybe a little). This just triggers me because my working life is dealing with "politics" and certain people who don't know what they are doing.
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.
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 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.
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).
> roving bandits in the absence of any government proper are a government of a sort.
Very experienced players eventually come to realize most governments eventually devolve to not be much different than non-roving, entrenched bandits. :-)
And even more elite players eventually come to realize that above the non-roving, entrenched bandits, there are roving bandits forming their own government. :-)
>Somehow the anarchists never seem to expect people to use their newfound freedom to erect a new government in place of the old.
Theres so much anarchist writing on this exact topic lmao. It's even the core theme of Le Guin's Dispossessed, with the anarchists replacing a state with an internalised social hierarchy, even while worrying that certain elements of their organisation layer are going to become the government, they rebuild the government.
No anarchist I have ever met has ever thought that one day they turn the government off and thats the end of the job.
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.
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.
That is exactly the point OP is making. If you do not have a mandate to govern from the people, you need unanimity from all homeowners. Those are the alternatives.
> If you do not have a mandate to govern from the people, you need unanimity from all homeowners. Those are the alternatives.
You don't strictly need a mandate from the people; authoritarian governments can be legitimate despite not having such a mandate. However, it's an impossible trilemma: successful action needs at least one of unanimity (parent commenter's approach), threat of coercion (government), or tolerance of free-riding (charity).
Why would you leave out the form specified by the GP? Representative (republican) government where the 40 members would hold an election to nominate a smaller number of representatives to decide on what should be done and bind everyone to abide by their decisions.
If you require unanimity then everyone has veto power over every decision which is difficult to manage even with 40 people. If you select 5 or even 3 people out of that group of 40 then it become much easier to make a decision. If everyone can nominate and vote for their representatives then they should feel it is fair when they have to abide by their decisions. At such a small scale you have very direct access to your elected representatives so you should feel that they have heard everyone's opinions and will hopefully do their best to accommodate them and if they don't then you should not elect the same people again.
At this scale you really can't call it threat of coercion, the land isn't owned by a separate entity so individuals could choose not to participate and all participants have direct access as well as a significant weight to their vote. It is a self-binding agreement if you choose a representative.
Sure, there's no threat of coercion for OP's street (or whatever) since nobody involved has any license to exercise power over the collective. But I thought the person you replied to was speaking of any group of people in general.
In the case of the 40 people, if a few of them consider whatever proposal stupid they can ignore it (e.g. not pay their share of something).
If they organize a republican government and have 4 representatives, some of the citizens could still refuse to pay (even if they accepted at first the election of the Street Senators). Coercion is what makes, say, Rhode Island, different than that person's street because if a few Rhode Islanders decide property taxes are stupid and refuse to pay, eventually all their land will be confiscated and they'll be dragged off of it by armed police.
Except there are always going to be many more sheep than wolves because how predators live. Just like how billionaires need the masses to support their predation.
The oldest Epos we have, Gilgamesh (from the top of my head):
"We came early in the morning.
Anyone opposing, we killed.
We took everything.
...
until they learned it was better to submit to us."
The rest is how he became then a king, but got bored and now thought, might as well be a good king (but that too got booring, so he got onto adventures angering the gods).
So this is the founding mythos of Babylon. Often considered the root of civilisation.
I like Gilgamesh and I don't recognize that part. My translation has "the king should be a shepherd to his people" on the first page. This is part of complaining about Gilgamesh's arrogance, which is why the gods have to distract him by creating Enkidu, his equal. I mean sure, Gilgamesh is an asshole, a liability, but the text seems to know that.
The analogy of a shepherd to his flock gets used a lot in literature and religion, but it doesn't really work in the way it is normally intended because shepherds aren't doing it out of altruism but because they want the wool and flesh of the sheep to use and sell.
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".
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.
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.
Eh not really? Sounds nice, but the most important part of government is authority. If i tell my neighbor I will lock him in a room unless they pay their taxes, i'm a fucking lunatic. It is 100% within the governments right however to do so.
You don't have to have the monopoly on violence to be the government, but it's often a defining feature, and where their authority stems from. A bunch of people together is just a community, and has no legal or other form or authority. If one of them decides to start stealing from the others, the appropriate retribution is mostly going to depend on who caught them.
At that point you're closer to libertarian/anarchy which, technically, is a form of government, but often defined by its lack of one. You arguably have small governments all over the world where that's how it works, but there's pretty clean lines when discussing these things.
Hell technically it's not a government unless it's running a state which is where a lot of this stems from.
> 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 the majority 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) where people who can't currently afford to live in (and therefore can't vote in) that locality are the ones who need it.
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 or crony managed to have pushed through that one time become easier to get rid of.
The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did so and so 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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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!"
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.
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.
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 or a so-called ministerial process.
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.
California is especially bad for multiple reasons. First is CEQA, which allows literally anyone in the state to erect legal hurdles to any project (modulo some very recent carve outs). Second is home-rule principles enshrined in the state constitution, which makes it difficult for Sacramento to force municipalities to behave a certain way or even abide many mandatory state regulations--the state often has to rely on indirect means, such as contingent funding, to cajole cities. Third is California Supreme Court procedural principles that demand state courts entertain law suits in a way that allows interlopers to drag out court cases, e.g. CEQA cases, for long periods of time.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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 blown up by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in, pretended to be a movement-aligned mediator, and then proceeded to torpedo the drafted neighborhood deal. This same director later went on to be hired by the same private firm for a six-figure job.
The rot is real and rarely gets reported. David Simon was a rare one in his coverage of Baltimore, not all cities have skeptics like him who dig deep.
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 built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations. Residents using transparently bullshit environmental and walking/biking infrastructure "concerns" as just another way to block things.
I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.
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.
"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.
There are many ways to stop what happened with urban renewal, and we've chosen pretty much the worst one.
Community process results in bad outcomes for the community, it is inherently undemocratic, yet it's been put on a pedestal as the goal of all planning.
Take for example this ridiculous article from a transit planner bemoaning how Amsterdam may have wonderful transit outcomes, far more fair and equitable than anything in the US, but dangit where's all the process??
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:
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.
If I hadn't seen corporate lawyers representing multi-billion dollar investment firms regularly advocating my City Council with just this piece of rhetoric almost verbatim, sure.
But it's been ten years since I've been involved with local community organizing and I know a dogwhistle when I see one. Whether or not the original poster intended it to be a dogwhistle or just formed that opinion memetically after uncritically absorbing astroturfed 'drain the swamp' rhetoric, it all leads to the same place where private equity and other investors get to run rampant with little regulatory oversight.
That's a false dichotomy. One possible solution to the problem being bad doesn't mean that the status quo is actually good or that there aren't workable possibilities that are reasonable.
A broken clock is right twice a day and all that. Regardless of who you witnessed parroting the rhetoric and to what end that doesn't necessarily mean the rhetoric is wrong in and if itself. In this case I'd say it's quite obviously correct.
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.
You might consider that many many more places than Atlanta have this same baggage, all because of Robert Moses's advice.
I grew up in Nashville and it also had a vibrant black neighborhood split in half by a highway. It was explicitly how Moses told planners across the country to get highways built it happened everywhere.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I've been to city hearings for a new condo development in an area with high levels of substance abuse and a lot of social spending generated by that, 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, so this dominance by private developers wasn't my experience.
Also worth mentioning architects have spent so long intentionally designing ugly modernist crap that the public reflexively assumes anything new will be an eyesore.
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"
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.
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.
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.
In other words, both the old way and the new way have value. The perfect ideal system is probably a synthesis of both, but in lieu of that, we can have both separately.
Just because its heavily regulated doesn't mean it is centrally planned. Housing isn't decided at the federal level. Even city and county commissions that largely decide fate of large, new projects have to abide by state laws or executive orders from governors that sometimes overrule them. And as long as you propose a project that fits zoning rules on the specific parcel you own, you get a permit to build your dream house.
And if one city, county or state says no to your commercial or industrial venture, it's nice that you can shop other states that might love to have you.
Centrally planned at the municipal level. Every municipality's city council doubles as a mini-Gosplan which passes edicts down to the plebs about how much housing is to be allowed in their town. What's that, you say? More people want to move in than Gosplan thought? Too bad for them and the housing market.
>And as long as you propose a project that fits zoning rules on the specific parcel you own, you get a permit to build your dream house.
Yes, after the central planners decided that a plot of land is to have a single-family dwelling (subject to restrictions on the number of bedrooms, lot coverage, lot frontage, generous buffers on all 4 sides, building height, etc etc), then you are of course free to build exactly that kind of single family dwelling and no other.
>And if one city, county or state says no to your commercial or industrial venture, it's nice that you can shop other states that might love to have you.
It's also nice for the homeowners to see their property values artificially inflated by artificial scarcity brought about by their little local central planning committee. No one claims a centrally planned economy is bad for everyone. In this case, it's great for the rich and the incumbents.
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...
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.
“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.
The biggest lie we were all sold is that there were only two options: capitalist vs. communist. It turns out that at the extremes, neither is good, or democratic. My lived experience taught me that it's like a horseshoe, not a left-right straight line. This is not only a theory.
I happen to have lived through both of those theoretical systems. I watched my uncle pass bricks in a giant line, man-to-man, to build their commie block. A year later, my mom and I escaped to 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. Well, Moscow is still being imperialist and murderous, so not that long gone I suppose.
I would like to point out that whatever the USA might be today, it is no longer a democracy. It is certainly not the country we came to. I would argue that after Citizens United, the USA is now finally a "Capitalism" - both economic and governmental system. In more recent times, the USA is now authoritarian - it's kinda getting modern Russified in the USA. Call it "unitary executive" or whatever, it's the same damn thing.
> But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.
Prospective residents and transit riders are harmed.
Rules and hearings overwhelmingly favor existing residents. If an existing resident opposes construction nearby due to noise, traffic, etc., the city will probably grant his wish.
Because that piece of land is off limits for denser housing, now prospective residents face a smaller housing supply, higher prices, and longer commutes.
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.
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.
This is a particularly Western democratic trend. Japan and Singapore both have their own models for democracy. Each builds differently, in their own way, 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.
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.
> No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained.
I spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.
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?
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.
Is this a necessary hypothesis when we can explain the situation simply enough by cutting straight to "politicians [are] lazy, incompetent, or corrupt"?
Particularly if we define or replace "corrupt" by "extracting funds in every practicable way," which is observable behavior (regardless of reason or motivation) and which is _not_ covered in your explanation?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.
> 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.
> 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.
Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?
Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.
I'm pretty sure you just said "If you make a place nicer to live, then more people will want to live there, so we should stop making places nicer to live."
Anyway, nobody who has ever been to a major French city believes that they've tried to increase core density. They famously have building height restrictions all over the place. Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.
>Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.
And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and an incredibly pleasant place to live. This should be a good lesson to everyone that "high density" does not have to be synonymous with reams of skyscrapers.
Paris actually isn't that dense compared to some US cities. NYC for example has far more people in the same space as Paris. Not that that is a goal to shoot for but there you go. That being said, at the moment Paris isn't a very nice place to be with all the smoke and looting and all.
That's not really true. Paris (intra-muros) has ~53,000 people per square mile[1] which is quite high. Manhattan is a fair bit denser at ~74,000 per square mile[2] but NYC's next densest borough of Brooklyn has only ~39,000[3]. And nothing else in the US comes anywhere close; the next densest city is SF which only hits ~18,000[4]
Even if you go beyond the city proper, a number of the Paris banlieues are similarly dense and I think most of the most populous ones are like twice as dense as SF (which, again, is America's second-densest city).
Supply and demand. If you don’t want to increase supply, then you can reduce prices by turning the city into the kind of place that nobody wants to live in.
I repeated the same argument here many times. But the reality is that density creates a vicious cycle of price increases. Higher density provides easier access to talent for companies, so they concentrate in urban cores. This in turn results in the only desirable jobs (and housing) being within the commute distance from the cores. So more people move in, resulting in even greater advantage for companies. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Think about this: EVERY large European city now has a "housing crisis". And nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free. In Japan it's often _literally_ free.
Want an example of a city that doesn't have a housing crisis and is comparable in population to Paris or Berlin? Houston, TX.
No, it doesn't. The rent growth has been mostly stable over the last 2 decades and generally followed the inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1ZPQy And it increased only slightly recently (attributable to increased density as Houston relaxed the minimum lot requirements in 2014, btw).
You're still just saying "If you make a place nicer to live, then more people will want to live there."
Density is not the thing making the prices go up. Local supply lagging behind local demand is what does that. Your two choices are either build more or make living there less desirable compared to somewhere else. There's no third choice.
> nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free
If nobody wants to live there then tautologically people have decided that they aren't nice.
Dense cities are not nice places to live, especially for less well-off people. Just look at the number of children per capita. You are just _forced_ to live there by economic forces, whether you like it or not.
Japan is really illustrative there. You HAVE to live in Tokyo or other large cities if you want to achieve anything. Yet a young person will not be able to afford anything decent. And forget about families.
Oh, and the construction capacity in and around Tokyo is maxxed out. Parts of the city are literally permanent giant construction zones. They're building housing as fast as possible. Yet the prices are _skyrocketing_.
> Your two choices are either build more or make living there less desirable compared to somewhere else.
You don't have that choice. The construction rate in large cities can't keep with demand if the city is growing.
You can try to streamline permitting (like in Japan), prohibit foreign ownership and/or investment (Vancouver), regulate the rents (NYC), dance around naked under the full Moon - and nothing will work.
> There's no third choice.
False. There is one: make other places nicer by promoting remote work and incentivizing companies to open new offices in smaller cities.
Houston is a great example. It's pretty much the only large city in the US that doesn't have a housing crisis. And it did that (on accident) by not having a real consolidated urban core. Instead, it's a collection of smaller cities, each one with its own business core.
And how do you build more land for single-family houses? Around 80% of people in the US would prefer to live in a SFH.
But even putting that quip aside, you physically can't keep up with the demand. Large cities physically can't grow fast enough to keep up with the demand.
A typical apartment unit now requires about 2 work-years of labor to build. So if you're growing your city by 5% a year, then 10% of the city will be apartment construction workers! And then you'll need to keep upgrading the infrastructure, and this is usually exorbitantly expensive.
To give some perspective: one mile of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway.
"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.)
High density urban housing, coupled with public transportation, would reduce traffic by removing cars from roads and the distance commuted. I like low density too, but not car culture.
I don't even think (most) proponents of high density are saying low density should be banned, they just want to have both options. Low-density living always comes along with long commutes by geometric necessity, so that's one reason some people would prefer high-density living.
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.
Local communities should not have plenary authority over what gets built, otherwise society devolves to a series of gated communities designed to keep new residents out. Gated communities are probably fine in exurbs, but when they're in the inner rings of cities, benefiting from urban economic opportunity, they're a pathology.
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
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.
I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork.
I think that's a charitable read, and I submit that starting slow and ramping up is vital not just from a UX and usability standpoint but to imbibe a sense of panic later on.
The contrast from simple and slow to complex and rapid and the buildup between is what produces the emotion, a cluttered and busy UI is just a cluttered and busy UI.
Also : a city planners' job is still fairly serialized and procedural even if it is busy and back-and-fourth; a cluttered UI does little to convey 'busy-ness and conflict'.
Give the player a set of AI-powered department heads that manage the day-to-day decisions. The player only gets to write "policy documents" that steer those department, who implement the policies (or not!).
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 tons of controls 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.
To the creator - this is cool, you're certainly barking up the right tree subject-wise. The best thing you can do now is identify the specific learning goals and sequence, and the magic moments you think are possible along the way, and radically simplify the approach. Fork the project and take a different angle on it. I bet there's solid foundations here but if you want to influence you gotta refine.
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 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.
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.
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.
I checked under "Data Views", but couldn't find a simple zoning overlay (i.e. that just shows colors based on the underlying zoning category residential, industrial, commercial, etc).
Also it would be nice if popular menu options (like Street, etc) showed keyboard shortcuts.
And, is anyone else having trouble demolishing recently built streets?
It complains that my screen is too small and "a tablet or computer shows the whole city hall", whatever the city hall is, which I obviously don't know yet. But I am on a tablet. I think what it means is "you must hold your tablet in portrait", otherwise the data views button gets hidden underneath the end of the other toolbar.
Further gripes: I don't understand what I'm seeing. The first "data view" shows a heat map of population, but which are the dense parts? Is beige denser than blue which is denser than icy grey? Where's the actual population figure for that tile, is it "district population"? That seems to be per-tile, so is a building a district? Why does the park have a population of 49, and why do the 49 people living in the park give me a mayoral approval rating of 56%?
Can this be tweaked to model an actual city or town, akin to the digital twin model? Imagine our policymakers running a simulation or backtesting on historic data. If someone optimised quality of life at this scale, that could do some good.
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 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.
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
Is there the opposite side of the problem of too much permitting? Unpermitted rapid growth with bad construction controls -- so the supply of stock becomes dilapidated or the building goes bananas and you have an oversupply of junky condos nobody wants?
I recommend reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. This permitting we have today is in response to very real problems of unrestricted growth in the past. It led to horrible pollution and squalor.
The pendulum has swung so far we cannot build anymore. We can't solve the problems of today because our regulations that are responding to the problems of yesterday. I'm hopeful there's a better way but I haven't seen it yet.
In an open market, you can only have so much oversupply of any product, before people stop investing in building more, or too little supply before investment increases. There's some lag between demand and production, from the time it takes to produce any given good, but for houses, not counting permitting delays, it only takes a few months to build one.
When zoning regulations first started, it wasn't uncommon for people to drink unfiltered surface water and drain their sewage into an open pit. This heavily limits density, and was what zoning was targeting. There are areas in the US, especially in the south, where permitting and zoning are much weaker than in the rest of the country, but high-quality housing is just as prevalent.
One of the biggest shortcomings of our current modality of housing planning is that our grandchildren / great grandchildren don't have any representation at these zoning meetings.
I really don't get why zoning didn't solve this. Isn't this the point of having zoning that it dictates what types of things can be built and what they can be used for? I don't know why I need separate approvals if I'm building within the rules that zoning allows. There should be no discretionary objections allowed - if you buy a house next to a commercial lot then you know what you're getting yourself into.
Not sure what the "this" is that you think zoning didn't "solve" exactly. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia), I think zoning does work pretty effectively. Industry builds in industrial zones, houses and apartments get built in residential zones. Fortunately (I think) the government is generally on the side of increasing the density and changing the rules to make it possible, so we don't have a San Francisco type situation where no one can build anything because the residental lobbies are so powerful.
The pain points for us are to do with attempting to increase the density of the city, which means building apartment buildings where there used to be just single story houses with backyards - something those residents don't like. Or the complexities of big projects like new train lines, that impact an awful lot of stuff around them.
But in general, a lot of stuff is getting built, it's just expensive.
What you're talking about is called ministerial approval. Some zone regulations do require it, but many are specifically written to prevent it, giving every opportunity possible for anyone who disagrees to delay any project for any reason.
zoning was designed to keep undesirables out, not to set clear ground rules. because that was its goal, we’ve also intentionally let local control laws and appeal rights/systems inflate to act as secondary/tertiary controls on development. most land use law exists only to protect incumbents
The experience was quite overwhelming, but in a learning experience way. I couldn't believe my contractors were bombarding my emails about residents not understanding how a 4-way stop sign works...also trying to think about what I want to build and then someone emails me about what to name a raccoon they found in the attic. So much responsibility just to make everyone happy, it's pretty much impossible. It really did a good job of presenting that.
I loved SimCity 2000. But the game became nonsense (for me at least) when it came down to the pipes under the city. That stuff never made any sense to me and so I moved on to other stuff. Maybe I was just not doing good? Who knows such things.
First, it is always important to remember that representative democracy has known fundamental scaling problems from a game-theoretic perspective, and we can enjoy the consequences globally across the developed world today. Establishments and incumbents getting back to old good populism and enforcement, no matter left, right, or center. Representation works as a bootstrap mechanism, but it should be treated as something to be transformed into efficient direct democracy, otherwise we are doomed. And here we come to the practical "efficiency" of governing local communities. It seems especially important to discuss possible solutions here on HN, because much of the solution space clearly lies in tech.
So all in all, small communities do not fail because online participation is impossible. They fail because obstruction is cheap and accountability is absent: one person can repeatedly delay a decision, while everyone who supported a controversial decision simply moves on.
I think we are in that point in history where participation could be dramatically improved by LLM in pipeline (and there are real works behind it
https://github.com/AIObjectives/tttc-light-jshttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq2852)
- Chat and voice messages becomes a source-linked with signed summaries (llm definitely can help most ppl structure their thoughts into words)
- disputes are classified as factual, distributive, value-based, procedural, or rights-related
- it becomes more real to agree on explicit success (or dealbreaking) criteria for every decision
- votes and objections also accounted as "prediction market" bets of their voting power.
- evidence is more reviewable with LLM
- and what's most important the outcome updates domain-specific reputation that weakens future vote weights of those who sabotaged, or joined to crowd for populist decisions proved to be failure.
If a blinded LLM assessment and the community votes agree, the decision proceeds. If they disagree, at least it is much rare occasion and interesting to consider the causes.
The key innovation is an auditable path from messy discussion to decisions, evidence, outcomes, and consequences. Reputation becomes the non-monetary cost of being confidently wrong or strategically obstructive.
I hope to see more of such platforms and survive experiments. Current situation feels like desperation
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
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.
It’s interesting how all of these problems are due to misaligned incentives.
Unpopular opinion: cities should be private, for-profit corporations. Leasing land from the government and charging subscription fees. Like a very big hotel.
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.
It's missing a few critical "features" that make it even more realistic. Redlining, block busting, eminent domain, mortgage discrimination, public-housing segregation and siting, and restrictive covenants mechanisms.
I think I read somewhere that they kept that type of thing out of SimCity to make it fun.
And TBH they were right! I watch a bunch of city meetings that Boulder posts online (https://www.youtube.com/@CityofBoulderGov/videos) and it's exhausting the amount of back and forth nitpicking and NIMBYism that goes on. It's surprising anything gets done at all. The cynic in me thinks the rich get their way because they can pay people to keep fighting for them - everybody else gets fed up with it and stops participating.
With all respect intended to the author, point taken! Within 60 seconds I realized that this game is less enjoyable than most people's actual work. Trying to please a bunch of random jackasses, many of which have made it their sole purpose in life to fight with another faction of the population, some of which are willfully ignorant, and the rest of which are apathetic. Any accomplishments you might have, a significant group would consider a bad thing and attack you. I would not want to be a mayor.
In the footer: Permit Pending is not a joke. Is this a joke to you?
Love it, I hope this becomes the most popular game on the internet so folks get to experience the Byzantine level of complexity we've made doing business in industries with physical stuff.
I gave a solid laugh. I heard in Saw XI , they're going to make them play this. It honestly for a certain type of ppl is probably actually insanely fun. For me I like some rules and regs, but gall dang, I might have had a minor stroke when the side panel popped up.
So, when I start the game - I don't understand what my purpose even is. That is, what do I want to be doing? Even if I choose an implicit goal - increase my apporval percentage for example - the best I have is some vague metric of cocerns, and the main concern is "neighborhood change", when: (1) I haven't changed anything yet! and (2) The only thing I can even do is propose more neighborhood change. And I'm not even sure the thing to is aim for increasing my approval rating. So, I feel stumped before ever have taken a single action.
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.
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.
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.
That said, after playing it for a while 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 too irrelevant). And the text in them is sometimes "off" in a fashion that feels like it was written by AI (though I'm not sure if it was). The news articles and such in SimCity felt more hand-curated, concise and clever - thus more entertaining.
This is how real life works when when your proposed development doesn't fit the vision some random unaccountable bureaucrats and/or institutions you have to go through have for the vibe of the community.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
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'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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
Tada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller%E2%80%93pilot_data_...
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.
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.
You can list it's the actual negatives, but its not a whatsapp group with no laws.
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).
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.
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).
Heck, even roving bandits in the absence of any government proper are a government of a sort. Just a really bad one.
Very experienced players eventually come to realize most governments eventually devolve to not be much different than non-roving, entrenched bandits. :-)
This is not a reflection on any type of wording of group activities, rather human nature.
Both democracy and anarchy are a belief system based on the assumption that their ideal state is good enough to be self-replicating.
Theres so much anarchist writing on this exact topic lmao. It's even the core theme of Le Guin's Dispossessed, with the anarchists replacing a state with an internalised social hierarchy, even while worrying that certain elements of their organisation layer are going to become the government, they rebuild the government.
No anarchist I have ever met has ever thought that one day they turn the government off and thats the end of the job.
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.
There's your problem. You are requiring unanimous agreement? Republics (et al.) were invented for a reason.
You don't strictly need a mandate from the people; authoritarian governments can be legitimate despite not having such a mandate. However, it's an impossible trilemma: successful action needs at least one of unanimity (parent commenter's approach), threat of coercion (government), or tolerance of free-riding (charity).
If you require unanimity then everyone has veto power over every decision which is difficult to manage even with 40 people. If you select 5 or even 3 people out of that group of 40 then it become much easier to make a decision. If everyone can nominate and vote for their representatives then they should feel it is fair when they have to abide by their decisions. At such a small scale you have very direct access to your elected representatives so you should feel that they have heard everyone's opinions and will hopefully do their best to accommodate them and if they don't then you should not elect the same people again.
At this scale you really can't call it threat of coercion, the land isn't owned by a separate entity so individuals could choose not to participate and all participants have direct access as well as a significant weight to their vote. It is a self-binding agreement if you choose a representative.
In the case of the 40 people, if a few of them consider whatever proposal stupid they can ignore it (e.g. not pay their share of something).
If they organize a republican government and have 4 representatives, some of the citizens could still refuse to pay (even if they accepted at first the election of the Street Senators). Coercion is what makes, say, Rhode Island, different than that person's street because if a few Rhode Islanders decide property taxes are stupid and refuse to pay, eventually all their land will be confiscated and they'll be dragged off of it by armed police.
Where do you think governments come from?
The oldest Epos we have, Gilgamesh (from the top of my head):
"We came early in the morning. Anyone opposing, we killed. We took everything.
...
until they learned it was better to submit to us."
The rest is how he became then a king, but got bored and now thought, might as well be a good king (but that too got booring, so he got onto adventures angering the gods).
So this is the founding mythos of Babylon. Often considered the root of civilisation.
" Gilgamesh is an asshole, a liability, but the text seems to know that."
Kind of? It is not really condemned I think. He is still their powerful (god)king and might is right. (So he had the right to be an asshole).
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".
You actually have a slow government and are complaining about it. You have not experienced any alternative to slow government.
"What a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy" - Lee Kwan Yue
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.
You don't have to have the monopoly on violence to be the government, but it's often a defining feature, and where their authority stems from. A bunch of people together is just a community, and has no legal or other form or authority. If one of them decides to start stealing from the others, the appropriate retribution is mostly going to depend on who caught them.
At that point you're closer to libertarian/anarchy which, technically, is a form of government, but often defined by its lack of one. You arguably have small governments all over the world where that's how it works, but there's pretty clean lines when discussing these things.
Hell technically it's not a government unless it's running a state which is where a lot of this stems from.
Where do you get that idea?
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 the majority 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) where people who can't currently afford to live in (and therefore can't vote in) that locality are the ones who need it.
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 or crony managed to have pushed through that one time become easier to get rid of.
"Nuance gets lost" well with centralized politics, the whole damn point gets lost.
A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144005
You're literally describing a government
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
California is especially bad for multiple reasons. First is CEQA, which allows literally anyone in the state to erect legal hurdles to any project (modulo some very recent carve outs). Second is home-rule principles enshrined in the state constitution, which makes it difficult for Sacramento to force municipalities to behave a certain way or even abide many mandatory state regulations--the state often has to rely on indirect means, such as contingent funding, to cajole cities. Third is California Supreme Court procedural principles that demand state courts entertain law suits in a way that allows interlopers to drag out court cases, e.g. CEQA cases, for long periods of time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He is not really quite what you would get if zoning, &c, were handled at the state level.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 blown up by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in, pretended to be a movement-aligned mediator, and then proceeded to torpedo the drafted neighborhood deal. This same director later went on to be hired by the same private firm for a six-figure job.
The rot is real and rarely gets reported. David Simon was a rare one in his coverage of Baltimore, not all cities have skeptics like him who dig deep.
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 built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations. Residents using transparently bullshit environmental and walking/biking infrastructure "concerns" as just another way to block things.
I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.
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.
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...
Community process results in bad outcomes for the community, it is inherently undemocratic, yet it's been put on a pedestal as the goal of all planning.
Take for example this ridiculous article from a transit planner bemoaning how Amsterdam may have wonderful transit outcomes, far more fair and equitable than anything in the US, but dangit where's all the process??
https://mass.streetsblog.org/2022/08/10/guest-column-europes...
It's self-parody.
https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
But it's been ten years since I've been involved with local community organizing and I know a dogwhistle when I see one. Whether or not the original poster intended it to be a dogwhistle or just formed that opinion memetically after uncritically absorbing astroturfed 'drain the swamp' rhetoric, it all leads to the same place where private equity and other investors get to run rampant with little regulatory oversight.
A broken clock is right twice a day and all that. Regardless of who you witnessed parroting the rhetoric and to what end that doesn't necessarily mean the rhetoric is wrong in and if itself. In this case I'd say it's quite obviously correct.
I grew up in Nashville and it also had a vibrant black neighborhood split in half by a highway. It was explicitly how Moses told planners across the country to get highways built it happened everywhere.
>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...
> 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
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.
No he's reacting to an accusation that anyone wants to go back to that
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
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/07/23/berkeley-zoning-has-...
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.
And in terms of the black communities that were disrupted, there were many more black communities that were helped by the improved logistics.
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"
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.
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.
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.
In other words, both the old way and the new way have value. The perfect ideal system is probably a synthesis of both, but in lieu of that, we can have both separately.
And if one city, county or state says no to your commercial or industrial venture, it's nice that you can shop other states that might love to have you.
>And as long as you propose a project that fits zoning rules on the specific parcel you own, you get a permit to build your dream house.
Yes, after the central planners decided that a plot of land is to have a single-family dwelling (subject to restrictions on the number of bedrooms, lot coverage, lot frontage, generous buffers on all 4 sides, building height, etc etc), then you are of course free to build exactly that kind of single family dwelling and no other.
>And if one city, county or state says no to your commercial or industrial venture, it's nice that you can shop other states that might love to have you.
It's also nice for the homeowners to see their property values artificially inflated by artificial scarcity brought about by their little local central planning committee. No one claims a centrally planned economy is bad for everyone. In this case, it's great for the rich and the incumbents.
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...
“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.
I happen to have lived through both of those theoretical systems. I watched my uncle pass bricks in a giant line, man-to-man, to build their commie block. A year later, my mom and I escaped to 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. Well, Moscow is still being imperialist and murderous, so not that long gone I suppose.
I would like to point out that whatever the USA might be today, it is no longer a democracy. It is certainly not the country we came to. I would argue that after Citizens United, the USA is now finally a "Capitalism" - both economic and governmental system. In more recent times, the USA is now authoritarian - it's kinda getting modern Russified in the USA. Call it "unitary executive" or whatever, it's the same damn thing.
We are certainly living in interesting times.
Prospective residents and transit riders are harmed.
Rules and hearings overwhelmingly favor existing residents. If an existing resident opposes construction nearby due to noise, traffic, etc., the city will probably grant his wish. Because that piece of land is off limits for denser housing, now prospective residents face a smaller housing supply, higher prices, and longer commutes.
> [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...
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 spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.
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?
Particularly if we define or replace "corrupt" by "extracting funds in every practicable way," which is observable behavior (regardless of reason or motivation) and which is _not_ covered in your explanation?
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?
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’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.
Seems pretty earned in a lot of ways
We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.
"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....
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.
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.
Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?
Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.
Anyway, nobody who has ever been to a major French city believes that they've tried to increase core density. They famously have building height restrictions all over the place. Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.
And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and an incredibly pleasant place to live. This should be a good lesson to everyone that "high density" does not have to be synonymous with reams of skyscrapers.
Even if you go beyond the city proper, a number of the Paris banlieues are similarly dense and I think most of the most populous ones are like twice as dense as SF (which, again, is America's second-densest city).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
Think about this: EVERY large European city now has a "housing crisis". And nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free. In Japan it's often _literally_ free.
Want an example of a city that doesn't have a housing crisis and is comparable in population to Paris or Berlin? Houston, TX.
They aren't building enough rental housing so rents are going through the roof.
Here is the REAL horror show: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1ZPRl
Houston is still the second most affordable large metro area in the US. And the per capita square footage is about two times that in NYC.
Density is not the thing making the prices go up. Local supply lagging behind local demand is what does that. Your two choices are either build more or make living there less desirable compared to somewhere else. There's no third choice.
> nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free
If nobody wants to live there then tautologically people have decided that they aren't nice.
Dense cities are not nice places to live, especially for less well-off people. Just look at the number of children per capita. You are just _forced_ to live there by economic forces, whether you like it or not.
Japan is really illustrative there. You HAVE to live in Tokyo or other large cities if you want to achieve anything. Yet a young person will not be able to afford anything decent. And forget about families.
Oh, and the construction capacity in and around Tokyo is maxxed out. Parts of the city are literally permanent giant construction zones. They're building housing as fast as possible. Yet the prices are _skyrocketing_.
> Your two choices are either build more or make living there less desirable compared to somewhere else.
You don't have that choice. The construction rate in large cities can't keep with demand if the city is growing.
You can try to streamline permitting (like in Japan), prohibit foreign ownership and/or investment (Vancouver), regulate the rents (NYC), dance around naked under the full Moon - and nothing will work.
> There's no third choice.
False. There is one: make other places nicer by promoting remote work and incentivizing companies to open new offices in smaller cities.
Houston is a great example. It's pretty much the only large city in the US that doesn't have a housing crisis. And it did that (on accident) by not having a real consolidated urban core. Instead, it's a collection of smaller cities, each one with its own business core.
Density doesn’t cause housing shortage. A housing shortage creates motivation to increase density.
Wow, that's a new one
Hell, there are even consulting companies that provide guidance on how to upzone the city to squeeze most taxes out of new density.
increased density and transit increases demand for that area. high demand != shortage.
What are you suggesting exactly? low density and car-dependency is the solution to our housing problems?
Yes, it just means higher costs.
Just build more of the thing that people want!
And how do you build more land for single-family houses? Around 80% of people in the US would prefer to live in a SFH.
But even putting that quip aside, you physically can't keep up with the demand. Large cities physically can't grow fast enough to keep up with the demand.
A typical apartment unit now requires about 2 work-years of labor to build. So if you're growing your city by 5% a year, then 10% of the city will be apartment construction workers! And then you'll need to keep upgrading the infrastructure, and this is usually exorbitantly expensive.
To give some perspective: one mile of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway.
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.
With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!
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
Songs of Syx is closer but still too micro
The contrast from simple and slow to complex and rapid and the buildup between is what produces the emotion, a cluttered and busy UI is just a cluttered and busy UI.
Also : a city planners' job is still fairly serialized and procedural even if it is busy and back-and-fourth; a cluttered UI does little to convey 'busy-ness and conflict'.
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 tons of controls 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.
To the creator - this is cool, you're certainly barking up the right tree subject-wise. The best thing you can do now is identify the specific learning goals and sequence, and the magic moments you think are possible along the way, and radically simplify the approach. Fork the project and take a different angle on it. I bet there's solid foundations here but if you want to influence you gotta refine.
Thanks for taking the time to take a look and give thoughtful feedback!
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.
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.
Also it would be nice if popular menu options (like Street, etc) showed keyboard shortcuts.
And, is anyone else having trouble demolishing recently built streets?
Further gripes: I don't understand what I'm seeing. The first "data view" shows a heat map of population, but which are the dense parts? Is beige denser than blue which is denser than icy grey? Where's the actual population figure for that tile, is it "district population"? That seems to be per-tile, so is a building a district? Why does the park have a population of 49, and why do the 49 people living in the park give me a mayoral approval rating of 56%?
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 minor bugs so far.
Permit Pending error report Code: PP-SIM-F99D Step: running the simulation Error: Error: The simulation could not start. Build: 2e99342ba03e Time: 2026-10-20T21:37:28.780Z Page: https://permit.petercai.com/play/ Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Machine: screen 1920x1080, window 1920x911, pixel ratio 2 memory 16 GB, cores 16 touch points 0 game screen menu, map quality setting AUTO, drawn at ?
Graphics: api WEBGL2 renderer ANGLE (NVIDIA, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (0x00002184) Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0, D3D11) tier high MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE 16384 MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE 16384 MAX_SAMPLES 8 EXT_color_buffer_float yes EXT_color_buffer_half_float yes OES_texture_float_linear yes
Stack: Error: The simulation could not start. at e.onerror (https://permit.petercai.com/assets/play-DYe3blxS.js:10:25790...)
Recent log: 21:37:28 failed to load script https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vce70182... 21:37:28 error Error: The simulation could not start.
found the problem
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)
For those wondering. I haven't played, nor am I planning to. I already suck at vanilla Factorio, tyvm.
This is beautiful rage bait of a game.
The pendulum has swung so far we cannot build anymore. We can't solve the problems of today because our regulations that are responding to the problems of yesterday. I'm hopeful there's a better way but I haven't seen it yet.
[0] : https://www.americanprogress.org/article/unprotecting-americ...
When zoning regulations first started, it wasn't uncommon for people to drink unfiltered surface water and drain their sewage into an open pit. This heavily limits density, and was what zoning was targeting. There are areas in the US, especially in the south, where permitting and zoning are much weaker than in the rest of the country, but high-quality housing is just as prevalent.
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347552/north-berkeley
The pain points for us are to do with attempting to increase the density of the city, which means building apartment buildings where there used to be just single story houses with backyards - something those residents don't like. Or the complexities of big projects like new train lines, that impact an awful lot of stuff around them.
But in general, a lot of stuff is getting built, it's just expensive.
So all in all, small communities do not fail because online participation is impossible. They fail because obstruction is cheap and accountability is absent: one person can repeatedly delay a decision, while everyone who supported a controversial decision simply moves on. I think we are in that point in history where participation could be dramatically improved by LLM in pipeline (and there are real works behind it https://github.com/AIObjectives/tttc-light-js https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq2852)
- Chat and voice messages becomes a source-linked with signed summaries (llm definitely can help most ppl structure their thoughts into words)
- disputes are classified as factual, distributive, value-based, procedural, or rights-related
- it becomes more real to agree on explicit success (or dealbreaking) criteria for every decision
- votes and objections also accounted as "prediction market" bets of their voting power.
- evidence is more reviewable with LLM
- and what's most important the outcome updates domain-specific reputation that weakens future vote weights of those who sabotaged, or joined to crowd for populist decisions proved to be failure.
If a blinded LLM assessment and the community votes agree, the decision proceeds. If they disagree, at least it is much rare occasion and interesting to consider the causes. The key innovation is an auditable path from messy discussion to decisions, evidence, outcomes, and consequences. Reputation becomes the non-monetary cost of being confidently wrong or strategically obstructive. I hope to see more of such platforms and survive experiments. Current situation feels like desperation
My observation is, that whenever residents have little say in how their area develops they dissociate. Trash on the streets and decay and follow.
One of the soviets great problems was people not caring about property, as they did not own it.
And because LLMs are making love cheaper.
I can't tell if this is a real error or satire, lol
Unpopular opinion: cities should be private, for-profit corporations. Leasing land from the government and charging subscription fees. Like a very big hotel.
https://github.com/adityaravishankar/command-and-conquer
I’m aiming for a specific mood so the others are going in the backlog until i can do them uhh tastefully
And TBH they were right! I watch a bunch of city meetings that Boulder posts online (https://www.youtube.com/@CityofBoulderGov/videos) and it's exhausting the amount of back and forth nitpicking and NIMBYism that goes on. It's surprising anything gets done at all. The cynic in me thinks the rich get their way because they can pay people to keep fighting for them - everybody else gets fed up with it and stops participating.
Love it, I hope this becomes the most popular game on the internet so folks get to experience the Byzantine level of complexity we've made doing business in industries with physical stuff.
its all gucci
Both are similarly unplayable, but I guess it's the thought that counts.
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.
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.