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.
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 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.
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.
The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did do and do get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
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:
Fun fact! What would be an illegal bribe to a city employee (eg planning/permitting department) isn't illegal if it's an HOA instead. No wonder they're popping up everywhere!
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.
"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.
I've been to city hearings for new condo developments and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected.
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.
Every single real estate fortune in this country is built on theft, corruption and lies. I've worked for a couple of them and seen it at the highest levels. The most recent places I worked had lists of zip codes they were targeting, dip into those stats a bit and you see a pattern.
Hell this country is founded on the practice of stealing and reallocating land ownership on the basis of race. Its our favorite tradition.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Also worth mentioning architects have spent so long intentionally designing ugly modernist crap that the public reflexively assumes anything new will be an eyesore.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
“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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.
But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.
This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.
I think the bigger reason the original "EPCOT as a city" didn't happen is that once Walt passed, everyone else in the company looked at the plan and knew it would be a bottomless money pit from day 1.
I think EPCOT could have been quite successful. The Villages, Florida was centrally planned and designed by many Disney architects (among others) and it is hugely successful and profitable.
Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.
I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.
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?"
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 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 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.
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.
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%?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you are trying to DIY a government but with no prior experience? Sounds like a nightmare.
Huh? I'm not trying to do anything per se. But the 40 people in the community are trying to create a safe and clean neighborhood environment.
Well, everybody says that all governments in the world are absolutely incompetent, so it couldn't possibly be worse... or could it?
Somehow the anarchists never seem to expect people to use their newfound freedom to erect a new government in place of the old.
> impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something
There's your problem. You are requiring unanimous agreement? Republics (et al.) were invented for a reason.
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.
You're going down a slippery slope... a few more ideas like that and you will be creating... a government.
Isn't the alternative to government being slow government being fast? It's just that it can be fast by disregarding democracy, which is bad.
You actually have a slow government and are complaining about it. You have not experienced any alternative to slow government.
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.
Government is community
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.
The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did do and do get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144005
Fun fact! What would be an illegal bribe to a city employee (eg planning/permitting department) isn't illegal if it's an HOA instead. No wonder they're popping up everywhere!
You still have "democracy"/governance there in your neighborhood in Costa Rica.
> People complain about governments being slow
You're literally describing a government
Payola
Yep, this. Consensus isn't as powerful as cash and favors.
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.
"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.
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...
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??
https://mass.streetsblog.org/2022/08/10/guest-column-europes...
It's self-parody.
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:
https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
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.
I've been to city hearings for new condo developments and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected.
Have you considered that not all places have the emotional baggage like your Atlanta?
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.
Have you considered there are other countries in the world?
That's probably why the specifically called out USA anticipating this lame question
Mesa, Arizona
I googled "Mesa Arizona redlining" and the AI results were just a summary of this article but the salient point was
>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...
Every single real estate fortune in this country is built on theft, corruption and lies. I've worked for a couple of them and seen it at the highest levels. The most recent places I worked had lists of zip codes they were targeting, dip into those stats a bit and you see a pattern.
Hell this country is founded on the practice of stealing and reallocating land ownership on the basis of race. Its our favorite tradition.
them: "hey this is a problem"
> 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.
If you're going to be mad, at least be mad on main. Say it with your whole chest and not on a throwaway :)
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.
1. https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-l...
2. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55
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.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/07/23/berkeley-zoning-has-...
> 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.
but again, do you think those affected residents of the predominantly Black and low income communities would have gotten very far in civil court?
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.
https://iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#StrawMan
Unironically yes Moses is a national hero who created some of the greatest public infrastructure in this country
Also worth mentioning architects have spent so long intentionally designing ugly modernist crap that the public reflexively assumes anything new will be an eyesore.
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.
Maybe we would be better off in the US if zoning, permitting, &c was hoisted up to the state level.
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.
> Building more housing undermines it's value.
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.
> 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.
They're often terrible at knowing what helps or hurts values though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many states operate that way, and many other states have rules that limit what the local governments can do.
That has been the recent trend in California with several laws restricting local development power.
This is all backlash from the eminent domain seizures of the 70s when they built those stupid highways through the middle of everyone city
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.
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.
Most of what you are saying about Germany is not true, misleading, or gross hyperbole. Do you have any sources whatsoever to back that up.
> I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.
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?
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"
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.
> But yay, democracy?
“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.
In the US we have insane bureaucracy as well as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt politicians. Never let them say you can't have both
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?
Morocco's high speed rail line opened in 2018.
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...
And a centrally planned housing economy in the self-described capitalist free-market paradise.
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.
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.
That would be chaos. Imagine needing to sign a 10, 20 or 30 year agreement 6 months before a law expires.
> to set a 20 year expiration on laws
Wait, do we need to pass a law for this?
This might be a good idea for marriages, too.
And driver's license
This is like cryptocurrencies.
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.
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.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
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.
[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...
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
It's not just democracy, but also huge population growth and population clustering. People moving from the country to the city as jobs increasingly moved into the city.
I guess you prefer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triumphal_Arch
> 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?
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.
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.
Or when things get done it is because of corruption? And the constraints are put in place to protect $, aka not democracy but actually plutocracy.
We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.
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.
Yeah well you can imagine it would be a problem if I built a 20 story shed in my suburban backyard.
Indeed. I have a much harder time imagining the problem if you built one that was, say, an 11ft cube.
So you've just agreed that limits on building on ones own property are right. Say again what the issue is you're trying to object to?
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.
> 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.
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.
AKA the gunshots theory of rent control. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/firing-gunshots-to-keep-rent-...
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.
Houston, TX has a housing crisis. https://abc13.com/post/more-half-houston-renters-struggle-ho...
They aren't building enough rental housing so rents are going through the roof.
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.
> If you make a place nicer to live
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 increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages.
Density doesn’t cause housing shortage. A housing shortage creates motivation to increase density.
> Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages.
Wow, that's a new one
Not really. Urbanists admit it, they just don't like to talk about it.
Hell, there are even consulting companies that provide guidance on how to upzone the city to squeeze most taxes out of new density.
that seems like complete BS claim. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence
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?
> high demand != shortage.
Yes, it just means higher costs.
again, higher costs != shortage. It just means "desirable"
Just build more of the thing that people want!
"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!
That makes no sense. The most expensive property in the world is in high density cities.
Personally I want no traffic but also little parking. Car infrastructure is a general blight on public spaces.
Encouraging no parking without a robust public transit system is like punching a disabled person for not walking fast enough.
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.)
Yes. Which is why it's so much cheaper to live in Manhattan than in the suburbs.
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 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.
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.
Disney (the company) did eventually make a kind of Epcot - Celebration, Florida[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
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.
Monorail? Monorail!
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?"
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864
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.
Alternatively, AI.
Occam's razor strikes again!
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.
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...
> 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.
Error when loading a new game:
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.
I’m sorry you ran into this! Taking a quick look.
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.
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?
This is beautiful rage bait of a game.
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.
It’s not really a pendulum because it never really swings back.
Yet. I'm sure Rome had a bureaucracy that stifled growth and impeded action, too.
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%?
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!
SimDwarfCity, basically.
I've heard the soviet one is closer to what you're looking for - https://www.sovietrepublic.net
Dwarf City
Songs of Syx is closer but still too micro
Screen turns largely black after a short bit of loading the city with these errors:
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.
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.
What city is everyone thinking of when they read the description?
For those who are curious, this is what I could gather:
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.
I’m able to scroll but the submit button is behind the address bar so I can’t press it.
Same issue, can't scroll nor locate a button to play.
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.
It’s interesting to see so many people demanding that home owners have less influence.
My observation is, that whenever residents have little say in how their area develops they dissociate. Trash on the streets and decay and follow.
Perhaps we hn-ers tend to be rule followers? So we'd naturally fall into thinking "well, just make a rule that you can't dump trash", problem solved!
All I get is "City Hall can't load here. Error loading the game: PP-LOAD-1C59."
I can't tell if this is a real error or satire, lol
Reminds me of the North Berkeley board game [1]
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347552/north-berkeley
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
"free, because you are loved"
And because LLMs are making love cheaper.
Ah yeah, AI, the digital fleshlight...
Idea, digitize a town/city and apply all current codes, permits restrictions etc, and then run simulations based on permitting changes
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.
Why is it that many of these games have continuous popups. I get enough approval fatigue during the day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo
Am i missing something? How do you add power poles?
Was it inspired by this?
https://housing.over.pizza/
They should add a LA mode where you spend $9,000 in permits for a home extension only to have it burn down in a wildfire.
Parks and rec, the video game
I'm on month 3 of getting my permit approved for a...fence
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.
Great, now could someone revive the old Command and Conquer Javascript project to life?
https://github.com/adityaravishankar/command-and-conquer
We had another person vibecode a very similar thing few weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864
Both are similarly unplayable, but I guess it's the thought that counts.
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.
How do I turn off the music?
New game scroll broken on mobile safari
Guys please just add a line to your Claude.md "never use bordered cards" to avoid the vibe look
seriously
Brilliant idea. Welcome to the real world and your annoying neighbours.
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.
Cool project!
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.