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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

News from 2029:

Skylynr, the 'Uber of nanoassembled highrises', last night replaced 44 San Francisco Victorians with apartment buildings.

Reached for comment, SF's Planning Department said the overnight construction violates a city moratorium, to study displacement issues, now in its 14th year.

The Board of Supervisors plans to address the issue in an emergency session next Tuesday. A Skylynr spokesperson says over 4,000 new residents, in the nearly 2,000 new apartments, will be registered as voters on the San Francisco Department of Elections blockchain before that meeting.

By November, over half the city's voters may be residents of the on-demand skyscrapers popping up across the city, most built by Skylynr or its competitors Instatower and Zipartments.

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Of course, of the 4,000 new residents, only 12% voted. The postage requirement was still required, and nearly all the new residents didn't bother to send in their ballots.

And half of those got confused and voted to increase the "affordable housing" requirement to 50% of new housing stock, making non-Skylynr housing prohibitively expensive to build, and requiring citizen approval (by referendum) of all new developments in the Historic Market Street Corridor, including all areas east of Golden Gate Park.

Perhaps you put this in the future to make the overnight construction possible.

But in some parts of the world, the same fait accompli can be achieved the old fashioned way. Just make sure the official enforcing the moratorium has a wife or nephew or someone with a large stake in Skylynr. With such tricks, we will soon house all the world's urban poor. Pity that California is not yet so "advanced".

I love this. Both for it's tongue and cheek attitude, and for it's not unlikely depiction of the future.

I believe William Gibson described something similar to the self-building towers in his book Idoru[1]. I think they were called nanotech buildings[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru [2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83

Additionally Neal Stephenson describes vertically extruded nanotech buildings in "The Diamond Age".

I haven't read a sci-fi/cyberpunk book in a long time, I think I'm going to pick this up. Been meaning to read more of Stephenson's novels

One of my favorite authors! Reading The Diamond Age right now as a matter of fact. Favorite of his is probably Anathem or Seveneves.

All of those have been in my kindle over a year. Need time to read.

Find a hammock in Nicaragua. Worked great for me. :)

“We lived in the Portland Avenue Stacks, a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes rusting on the shores of I-40, just west of Oklahoma City’s decaying skyscraper core.”

― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

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