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Comment by owenwil | Hacker News Reader

I know the average Torontonian wasn't into this, but I live nearby and was really excited about what it could have been, even though it was fraught with missteps.

This area is a concrete wasteland–just car-parks and abandoned lots–that's now going to be portioned off to more giant, glass condo buildings, and while Sidewalk's proposal had problems, it was focused on building something very different, community-oriented, without prioritizing roads.

Sidewalk really pushed the technology angle way too hard, and it was a clear overstep– most of it wasn't necessary for any sort of quality of life improvements, but many of the ideas like wooden 'skyscrapers' and de-prioritizing roads were exciting, now lost.

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You can still advocate for such urban redevelopment and community planning without Big Tech behind it.

You can but change is measured in decades and even then often doesn't happen.

Starting "fresh" with a single leading implementer is really how it needs to be done.

Take San Francisco. There's the planning board, the planning department, environmental lawsuits, HOAs, abusing "historic landmarks" designations, political showmanship, developers, affordable housing, community meetings, unions, community groups (the cycling people are borderline militant) etc. etc.

All of those can bring any change to its knees. And they have, repeatedly. There are good parts of this process and people shouldn't not have input, but I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.

It's still managed by Waterfront Toronto, the goal is still for it to be pre-planned in a smart way. However, I didn't see much in Sidewalk Labs that was so innovative. You talk of "without prioritizing road" but there was still zero dollar allocated for any kind of transit project, 2.5 years into it. Not that it's all Google's fault, but really for me lack of concrete plans for transit in development showed me it wasn't serious.

San Francisco has changed immensely in just the last decade.

It may not be noticeable if you live there because you only see the incremental day by day changes, but as someone who only sporadically visits the Bay Area: it's nothing like it was in 2010. It's significantly more built up (and out), more skyscrapers, more apartments, more condos, more everything.

Housing prices would tell you there is actually less of everything, relatively. Demand has surged, sufficient supply has yet to be constructed, queue housing crisis. Not enough housing is being built in California's cities.

14 new residential high rises were built in SoMA in the past 5 years. 3 more are going up as we speak and opening in the next few months. That's a LOT of residential construction in a very short amount of time.

(Mind you that's just a 15 block area in East Cut/SoMA - I'm not even talking about ALL of Mission Bay which didn't exist 10 years ago or the Van Ness corridor or Mid-Market.)

The problem here is we only started building about 10 years ago (with One Rincon being the first major new building in a long time) and the rest of the Bay Area (for example, Brisbane notoriously) is nowhere near doing its fair share of building.

How does the number of new units stack up to what was being built in the 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, etc.?

Less of everything on a relative basis, but more of everything on an absolute basis.

It's a game of moving goal posts.

This type of mentality is exactly what led to "urban renewal" in the 1960s and the complete destruction of American inner cities to be replaced with 18-lane freeways and grimy concrete housing projects that concentrated poverty and sent crime rates skyrocketing.

Because planners' hubris, similar to the insane technocratic Silicon Valley hubris these days, led to them making terrible decisions with zero community input and a team of yes-men around them.

> I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.

Ironic a culture that fetishizes free markets and an open marketplace of ideas favors totalitarianism because they find the idea of being part of a larger human community with all its flaws icky. Step away from the keyboard some more and maybe, I dunno, go outside and talk to people? Problems like these are never solved with Docker.

Local HOAs and similar have loud voices against these kind of projects. It might take another big voice (like Sidewalk Labs) to counter.

I've tried calling my local reps to support walkable community projects and have been told, nearly verbatim, that if the HOA doesn't like it, they won't be voting for it. Then when big tech offices started moving in, the redevelopment projects finally started too.

Sure, but it would have been really interesting to see what Sidewalk could have done here, especially given that it was a blighted area.

you can, but big tech had big tech money.

Unless you've got a few billion to throw away you're going to have a hard time convincing any developers to build something other than the most economically productive building. and for that location, that's a big glass condo building that looks like every other big glass condo building and doesn't benefit anybody other than the people who can afford to live in big glass condo buildings.

You can, but its difficult without an 800-pound gorilla on your team.

I was intrigued until they started getting into wanting legal jurisdiction over the region. Even beyond the assumed privacy implications that was the real hard line for me. They did back down off of that as far as I'm aware.

I hope we can see the experimentation with wooden skyscrapers, etc, though.

> Sidewalk really pushed the technology angle way too hard, and it was a clear overstep– most of it wasn't necessary for any sort of quality of life improvements, but many of the ideas like wooden 'skyscrapers' and de-prioritizing roads were exciting, now lost.

These ideas are not lost.

The City of Toronto has already approved several wooden “skyscrapers”. This idea wasn’t unique to Google by any stretch of the imagination.

De-prioritizing roads also was not unique to this Google development. In fact, just walking distance from Google’s smart-city proposal are two significantly larger developments (Portland’s and Unilever) that lean heavily on the shared streets/woonerf concept.

> that's now going to be portioned off to more giant, glass condo buildings

I hope it's something a bit different. Looks like Waterfront Toronto will turn back to the community for new ideas for Quayside.

https://waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/water...

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