Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

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I am a fan of city building games, and one thing that greatly annoys me is the fact that all of them use the USA-only model of "Euclidean" zoning (named after Euclid, Ohio, that sued on the supreme court to be allowed to implement that kind of zoning now popular in USA).

These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp. Some guy bought the swamp, and started to build offices on it, a ton of them. The construction workers then started to build their homes on the farm, back then intended to be temporary homes while they built the offices, but today the ex-farm is a full blown dense residential neighbourhood in the middle of downtown, and the swamp is a place full of towering glassy high-rises. Meanwhile in another area, a neighbourhood that was USA suburb-style full of big houses, that formerly belonged to wealthy farmers of the region, people realized that place was very easy to reach compared to some others, so perfect for offices, slowly the houses became offices, then torn down to have proper office buildings, then those got torn down and turned into towers, and then some towers had residential apartments built on them so people could live closer to work.

None of that would been possible in US model.

This probably has more to do with gameplay mechanics and the influence of the original sim city than anything else.

This style of zoning allows a good middle ground where the player has input into the usage of the city without having to micromanage every building.

A city builder that lacked that concept entirely would be interesting, but you'd have to come up with some other abstraction that feels vaguely reminiscent of city planning and also is engaging from a gameplay perspective.

If I ever retire early to build city building games, I think it’d be nice to step back from the “series of rectangular lots” model and instead model the house, garage, driveways, and the like, as objects that a constraint solver can place. Then zoning becomes a series of specific rules: setbacks, fire codes, parking, accessibility, and the like. Bundle up zoning rules and apply them as you will. Make your agents look for a place that meets their needs, or renovate their own property. Have actual landlords, offer rent control if you dare… build civic capital with community organizations so that displacing people or gentrifying the neighborhood too quickly means a loss of stability, and urban conflict …

Mind you, this is a boatload of work.

I would absolutely love to work on building a simulation at this level of fidelity, but I feel like making it actually fun to play would be the largest challenge. Maybe if the scale of it was at a neighborhood scope it would be possible to make it engaging - somewhere between The Sims and Sim City in scale and granularity

Sim HOA?

There are some people who just love to be up in everybody's business.

Your fence color is not on the approved list - repaint or incur a fine!

> These games will never recreate brazillian cities for example... São Paulo, it has a neighbourhood that was a farm, and another that was a swamp.

The neighborhood I grew up in in Louisiana used to be a swamp before it was landfilled. My current neighborhood used to be a public dump. Most of Silicon Valley used to be farmland.

I'm not sure where the claim that changing zoning or use is completely impossible in the US comes from.

Not all US locations have those zoning laws. Houston, for example, doesn't.

That's more Texas-marketing than anything else. It has a lot of things that smell a lot like zoning, they just don't call it that.

Deed restrictions to a lot of the work. There are also density restrictions.The city steers where it wants things with tax policy, a big chunk of the city is governed by airport (federal) rules, and then add in historic preservation, buffering ordinances, lot size restrictions and so on, and there is little surprise Houston looks just like everywhere else in the US.

In some parts of the country - dunno about Houston specifically - a high percentage of the housing stock is governed by HOAs which make zoning boards look like anarchists by comparison.

They still had minimum parking requirements last I checked.

Very interesting discussion about exactly that misconception in this interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54

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