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.
The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did so and so get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
This sounds really efficient actually compared to the alternative in many developed countries where new houses simply do not get built at all after spending a lot of money on admin fees for nothing.
"Nuance gets lost" well with centralized politics, the whole damn point gets lost.
> People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission:
There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.
At least in North America if you build something, it exists. In Germany they have a system where the government will bulldoze a completed skyscraper if you did the paperwork wrong. As a result it takes years to start construction because they don't want that risk.
Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere.
I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.
A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper
The irony is our reaction to the Urban Renewal era was to introduce so many veto points and red tape to projects (both public infrastructure and private property) that we are nearly incapable of fixing the problems that era introduced.
When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.
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??
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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...
I've been to city hearings for a new condo development in an area with high levels of substance abuse and a lot of social spending generated by that, and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected, so this dominance by private developers wasn't my experience.
Also worth mentioning architects have spent so long intentionally designing ugly modernist crap that the public reflexively assumes anything new will be an eyesore.
I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws.
Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.
Yeup. People often like to conflate things that aren't directly related. Doesn't mean their observations or experiences aren't valid, but it does also lead to lots of going in circles.
It doesn't help that buildings are likely to be the most expensive thing a person will create or own, and they have a very high impact and demand. You need electricity, water, sewage, access to make it usable, then you need to make sure all of that was done right to make it safe, and then you want to make sure it's not put in a spot that'll just piss people off... and so on.
Obviously we do tend to come up with similar solutions for these systems because I don't think there's some clear and obvious "well just do that" living out there. Yes it's better in communities that are small with lots of space, lots of funds, and like minded members, but the moment everyone wants to live on the beach in the 70-80F weather you're going to start running into lots of issues.
It's unfortunate because people like to imagine it's just "Them" doing it. "Them" being the perfect mental image of an adversary who we all have 100% dealt with. The petty neighbor breaking out technicalities to stop you from getting something you'd like for no better reason than "fuck you". Unfortunately it's hard to design systems with that kind of person in mind, because when you're dealing with 100/1,000/10,000 people, it's a lot harder to just say "you're just being an asshole, no one cares if you're correct, you lose"
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Is this a necessary hypothesis when we can explain the situation simply enough by cutting straight to "politicians [are] lazy, incompetent, or corrupt"?
Particularly if we define or replace "corrupt" by "extracting funds in every practicable way," which is observable behavior (regardless of reason or motivation) and which is _not_ covered in your explanation?
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.
> 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?
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’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.
"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.
Democracy never handles situations well where one side of an issue is a small highly motivated group, and the other side is a larger group that kinda-cares.
It's the reason we subsidize farmers. It's the reason our tax code remains so complicated. It's also why it's hard to get anything built: Existing owners are highly motivated to block development, and the potential beneficiaries (people who might someday live there, etc.) are too diffuse to mount a defense against them.
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.
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.
It's not the result of 100 years of democracy: it's the result of Euclid v Ambler and the subsequent cases that support it. Exclusionary zoning baring residential zoning outright is a taking and should be treated as such. Filthy poors are a nuisance:
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite . . ." Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)
If you think this kind of over-abundance of laws and regulations is exclusive to democracies, early 18th century France would like a word. It’s a problem that plagues most places. Laws compound upon themselves as time goes on. It is less about keeping everyone happy so much as it is about keeping stakeholders happy. If it wasn’t a democracy, those stakes holders would just be oligarchs, nobles, the military, etc.
Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.
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.
> Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
You're talking like this is the same group of people that want no traffic, less density, low noise, etc and then are complaining about housing shortages and public transport.
These are two distinct people. The former group is going to be mostly homeowners. People who bought property in a place are mostly happy with how it was when they bought it so if the public transport is bad they don't mind by selection bias. Obviously they don't really care about housing supply.
Non-homeowners, on the other hand, are usually looking for their golidilocks neighborhood (no blame on them, that's why looking for a home is so difficult and why people who find them are protective of them). They are the ones who found a place they can afford but the commute is too long and public transport is bad or they can't afford a place near their work because it's all low density and in high demand, etc.
Importantly, I think the groups of people with gripes about the housing market are pretty distinct sets of people who really don't agree with each other. There are people who are price out of home ownership (always with the caveat of "in the place they want to live") and there are people who are priced out of living where they want to live, even renting. One group wants density and one group wants those SFH and low density, just cheaper.
The SFH crowd can't be satisfied. It's just reality that highly desirable places are more expensive. The high density folks could be satisfied but at the expense of all the people who chose to live in the neighborhood they do. I find it hard to sympathize with people who don't live in a place and want to change it to suit their needs, at the expense of people who do.
> But yay, democracy?
Yes, working as intended.
As a mildly related aside, It's funny to me how "NIMBY" has gone from someone who wants something, in general, but not near them (homeless shelters, for instance) to someone who just doesn't want a thing at all while still carrying the same stigma. Certainly the people who live in a place should have more of a say as to what goes on there than the people who don't.
> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
I only blame the politicians who make promises they know they can't keep. They're typically not lazy, incompetent or corrupt, they just lied to get elected.
> We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?
Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.
I'm pretty sure you just said "If you make a place nicer to live, then more people will want to live there, so we should stop making places nicer to live."
Anyway, nobody who has ever been to a major French city believes that they've tried to increase core density. They famously have building height restrictions all over the place. Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.
"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.
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.
The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.
But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.
This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.
There are fully planned and built cities, like around here so called "Garden Cities": Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes.
I've been in several and they actually feel okay to live in, to run errands, to shop.
It only sounds funny if it's cranked up to the extreme -- like abusive housing associations, a cancer growing on the corpse of the old communities which just wanted some quiet evenings and the bins to not be overflowing, but it can be done well.
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.
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.
Yeah I was excited to try this right up until I looked at the toolbar and inspected a property and got the AI wall of text.
The subject area is great (teach actual civics) but this fails in execution. It could really use a strong pass on UX and learning curve, because right now its a product that everyone is just going to bounce off of.
Whether or not the topic is complex is beside the point. The point of this project, as far as I can see it, is get to teach this subject through experience to as many people as possible. Walls of text and buttons fundamentally undermine that purpose. Teaching complexity comes by removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary and arranging the complexity in a form that introduces it in compelling bite-sized chunks, so the player is always engaged.
I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork.
I think that's a charitable read, and I submit that starting slow and ramping up is vital not just from a UX and usability standpoint but to imbibe a sense of panic later on.
The contrast from simple and slow to complex and rapid and the buildup between is what produces the emotion, a cluttered and busy UI is just a cluttered and busy UI.
Also : a city planners' job is still fairly serialized and procedural even if it is busy and back-and-fourth; a cluttered UI does little to convey 'busy-ness and conflict'.
Kind of like this one[1] which made the rounds on HN a few weeks ago. Looks like the social commentary from them are similar: "Real life is worse than SimCity because of rules and the public getting a say." and/or "Why can't we in real life let the mayor use the Bulldozer Tool to just wipe out any property he doesn't like and put up whatever property he likes in its place?"
I 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.
Thanks so much for your feedback! I originally started with a pretty diverse corpus of prewritten story arcs for diversity, and went back to retrofit them into the engine once I started customizing stories and details for the city. It looks like I missed a few spots, sorry about that!
And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought
I 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.
One of the biggest shortcomings of our current modality of housing planning is that our grandchildren / great grandchildren don't have any representation at these zoning meetings.
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 loved SimCity 2000. But the game became nonsense (for me at least) when it came down to the pipes under the city. That stuff never made any sense to me and so I moved on to other stuff. Maybe I was just not doing good? Who knows such things.
I really don't get why zoning didn't solve this. Isn't this the point of having zoning that it dictates what types of things can be built and what they can be used for? I don't know why I need separate approvals if I'm building within the rules that zoning allows. There should be no discretionary objections allowed - if you buy a house next to a commercial lot then you know what you're getting yourself into.
Not sure what the "this" is that you think zoning didn't "solve" exactly. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia), I think zoning does work pretty effectively. Industry builds in industrial zones, houses and apartments get built in residential zones. Fortunately (I think) the government is generally on the side of increasing the density and changing the rules to make it possible, so we don't have a San Francisco type situation where no one can build anything because the residental lobbies are so powerful.
The pain points for us are to do with attempting to increase the density of the city, which means building apartment buildings where there used to be just single story houses with backyards - something those residents don't like. Or the complexities of big projects like new train lines, that impact an awful lot of stuff around them.
But in general, a lot of stuff is getting built, it's just expensive.
zoning was designed to keep undesirables out, not to set clear ground rules. because that was its goal, we’ve also intentionally let local control laws and appeal rights/systems inflate to act as secondary/tertiary controls on development. most land use law exists only to protect incumbents
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
With all respect intended to the author, point taken! Within 60 seconds I realized that this game is less enjoyable than most people's actual work. Trying to please a bunch of random jackasses, many of which have made it their sole purpose in life to fight with another faction of the population, some of which are willfully ignorant, and the rest of which are apathetic. Any accomplishments you might have, a significant group would consider a bad thing and attack you. I would not want to be a mayor.
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.
There's no need for it, archive.org, myabandonware all have [play] on your browser support via emulation, C&C isn't there because of copyright reasons, and also you can do an AI recompilation which means most of the code should be thrown out.
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.
It's missing a few critical "features" that make it even more realistic. Redlining, block busting, eminent domain, mortgage discrimination, public-housing segregation and siting, and restrictive covenants mechanisms.
I gave a solid laugh. I heard in Saw XI , they're going to make them play this. It honestly for a certain type of ppl is probably actually insanely fun. For me I like some rules and regs, but gall dang, I might have had a minor stroke when the side panel popped up.
So, when I start the game - I don't understand what my purpose even is. That is, what do I want to be doing? Even if I choose an implicit goal - increase my apporval percentage for example - the best I have is some vague metric of cocerns, and the main concern is "neighborhood change", when: (1) I haven't changed anything yet! and (2) The only thing I can even do is propose more neighborhood change. And I'm not even sure the thing to is aim for increasing my approval rating. So, I feel stumped before ever have taken a single action.
Please god stop making the x to close windows on the middle or the left. Majority of people who using computers are using Linux or Windows where it's on the upper right and it's a muscle memory. You aren't being clever or helping. I get that in some cases you may want people to read the information you have and pause a bit more, but it just irritates me and does not make me want to engage with whatever it is if I have to waste so much more time closing every window as a result. It literally wastes an exponential amount of time.
If this was an installable, moddable game, this would be cool. Further, I'm not sure why they could not add this as an existing module or feature within SimCity 3000 itself. It's a nice little wanna be clone. But playing a browser game just doesn't feel like a game.
Tangential: Elon was tweeting recently about how he blames bureaucracy for the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor's failure (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2112102304782680107). Whether that is ignoring other major problems with the plan or not, there's been bi-partisan criticism of how the traditional western democracy has severely slowed down infrastructure investment (see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...). I see a lot of people going to China after being oblivious to it for years mostly due to western propaganda and being in awe with how fast the country has advanced its industry and public infrastructure with superior high speed rail, power grid, and other investments. I wonder if the west will ever find a way to adapt the dynamism that an autocracy affords to its system of government (which sadly has been increasingly described as an aristocracy/plutocracy/corporatocracy/kleptocracy).
If you wanna talk about abundance, talk about abundance, but mixing that with the disaster of yet another snake oil Musk project being stalled is not something to blame it for but to be thankful for.
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.
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> 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.
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I guess it depends where that is. Are you specifically in an community of expats? Guanacaste? I had notably better experience in Uvita/Manuel Antonio.
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.
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The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did so and so get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
This sounds really efficient actually compared to the alternative in many developed countries where new houses simply do not get built at all after spending a lot of money on admin fees for nothing.
"Nuance gets lost" well with centralized politics, the whole damn point gets lost.
> People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144005
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You still have "democracy"/governance there in your neighborhood in Costa Rica.
> People complain about governments being slow
You're literally describing a government
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Payola
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Have you considered that not all places have the emotional baggage like your Atlanta?
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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
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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.
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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...
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I've been to city hearings for a new condo development in an area with high levels of substance abuse and a lot of social spending generated by that, and it was dominated by NGOs who received a significant fraction of their operating income from the government and they almost unanimously opposed the development and the development eventually got rejected, so this dominance by private developers wasn't my experience.
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.
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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"
> 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.
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In the US we have insane bureaucracy as well as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt politicians. Never let them say you can't have both
And a centrally planned housing economy in the self-described capitalist free-market paradise.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Smell like spaghetti code, due to refractor.
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.
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...
> 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.
Is this a necessary hypothesis when we can explain the situation simply enough by cutting straight to "politicians [are] lazy, incompetent, or corrupt"?
Particularly if we define or replace "corrupt" by "extracting funds in every practicable way," which is observable behavior (regardless of reason or motivation) and which is _not_ covered in your explanation?
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.
> 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?
> 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?
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.
> so low density please
I’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.
"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.
Democracy never handles situations well where one side of an issue is a small highly motivated group, and the other side is a larger group that kinda-cares.
It's the reason we subsidize farmers. It's the reason our tax code remains so complicated. It's also why it's hard to get anything built: Existing owners are highly motivated to block development, and the potential beneficiaries (people who might someday live there, etc.) are too diffuse to mount a defense against them.
I guess you prefer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triumphal_Arch
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.
> we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt
Seems pretty earned in a lot of ways
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.
It's not the result of 100 years of democracy: it's the result of Euclid v Ambler and the subsequent cases that support it. Exclusionary zoning baring residential zoning outright is a taking and should be treated as such. Filthy poors are a nuisance:
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite . . ." Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)
>suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.
Yeah how awful that a government system works for its people....
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
If you think this kind of over-abundance of laws and regulations is exclusive to democracies, early 18th century France would like a word. It’s a problem that plagues most places. Laws compound upon themselves as time goes on. It is less about keeping everyone happy so much as it is about keeping stakeholders happy. If it wasn’t a democracy, those stakes holders would just be oligarchs, nobles, the military, etc.
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.
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.
Yeah well you can imagine it would be a problem if I built a 20 story shed in my suburban backyard.
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> But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.
USA harms a lot under the orange clown. So first that term you use must be defined - what IS a democracy?
Russia and North Korea also claim to have some kind of democracy some sorts.
There are just too many differences in the term here.
> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
Many are corrupt. Many are incompetent. Many are lazy.
By the way, at best you describe indirect democracy. This one has more limits than democracy, which - conversely - requires more effort.
> Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
You're talking like this is the same group of people that want no traffic, less density, low noise, etc and then are complaining about housing shortages and public transport.
These are two distinct people. The former group is going to be mostly homeowners. People who bought property in a place are mostly happy with how it was when they bought it so if the public transport is bad they don't mind by selection bias. Obviously they don't really care about housing supply.
Non-homeowners, on the other hand, are usually looking for their golidilocks neighborhood (no blame on them, that's why looking for a home is so difficult and why people who find them are protective of them). They are the ones who found a place they can afford but the commute is too long and public transport is bad or they can't afford a place near their work because it's all low density and in high demand, etc.
Importantly, I think the groups of people with gripes about the housing market are pretty distinct sets of people who really don't agree with each other. There are people who are price out of home ownership (always with the caveat of "in the place they want to live") and there are people who are priced out of living where they want to live, even renting. One group wants density and one group wants those SFH and low density, just cheaper.
The SFH crowd can't be satisfied. It's just reality that highly desirable places are more expensive. The high density folks could be satisfied but at the expense of all the people who chose to live in the neighborhood they do. I find it hard to sympathize with people who don't live in a place and want to change it to suit their needs, at the expense of people who do.
> But yay, democracy?
Yes, working as intended.
As a mildly related aside, It's funny to me how "NIMBY" has gone from someone who wants something, in general, but not near them (homeless shelters, for instance) to someone who just doesn't want a thing at all while still carrying the same stigma. Certainly the people who live in a place should have more of a say as to what goes on there than the people who don't.
> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.
I only blame the politicians who make promises they know they can't keep. They're typically not lazy, incompetent or corrupt, they just lied to get elected.
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> 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.
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> 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
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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?
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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
There are fully planned and built cities, like around here so called "Garden Cities": Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes.
I've been in several and they actually feel okay to live in, to run errands, to shop.
It only sounds funny if it's cranked up to the extreme -- like abusive housing associations, a cancer growing on the corpse of the old communities which just wanted some quiet evenings and the bins to not be overflowing, but it can be done well.
scrolled down like 100 posts to find one that actually referenced the op's game directly.
I'm pretty sure the point of the game was to make a statement and make people think/talk and boy-howdy op you did a great job.
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.
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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.
Yeah I was excited to try this right up until I looked at the toolbar and inspected a property and got the AI wall of text.
The subject area is great (teach actual civics) but this fails in execution. It could really use a strong pass on UX and learning curve, because right now its a product that everyone is just going to bounce off of.
Whether or not the topic is complex is beside the point. The point of this project, as far as I can see it, is get to teach this subject through experience to as many people as possible. Walls of text and buttons fundamentally undermine that purpose. Teaching complexity comes by removing everything that isn't absolutely necessary and arranging the complexity in a form that introduces it in compelling bite-sized chunks, so the player is always engaged.
I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork.
I think that's a charitable read, and I submit that starting slow and ramping up is vital not just from a UX and usability standpoint but to imbibe a sense of panic later on.
The contrast from simple and slow to complex and rapid and the buildup between is what produces the emotion, a cluttered and busy UI is just a cluttered and busy UI.
Also : a city planners' job is still fairly serialized and procedural even if it is busy and back-and-fourth; a cluttered UI does little to convey 'busy-ness and conflict'.
Alternatively, AI.
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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
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.
The various decisions/petitions that pop up can break the immersion by mentioning details that don't fit the city(petitions with signatures from >250% of the town population, traffic issues at the "4-way intersection in front of the feed store" when no such place exists, or the new building causing shadows when there's nothing around it). It would be great if more text was turned into templates that pull game data for accuracy, and if the simulation were able to feed definitive descriptions of the town layout into generative AI prompts to make the text talk about scenarios reflected in the game.
Thanks so much for your feedback! I originally started with a pretty diverse corpus of prewritten story arcs for diversity, and went back to retrofit them into the engine once I started customizing stories and details for the city. It looks like I missed a few spots, sorry about that!
And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought
I 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.
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.
> NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
found the problem
What's wrong with that ?
I’m sorry you ran into this! Taking a quick look.
When (20??) they finetune GPT to be running a government this will be the most saught after dataset for training.
One of the biggest shortcomings of our current modality of housing planning is that our grandchildren / great grandchildren don't have any representation at these zoning meetings.
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 loved SimCity 2000. But the game became nonsense (for me at least) when it came down to the pipes under the city. That stuff never made any sense to me and so I moved on to other stuff. Maybe I was just not doing good? Who knows such things.
I really don't get why zoning didn't solve this. Isn't this the point of having zoning that it dictates what types of things can be built and what they can be used for? I don't know why I need separate approvals if I'm building within the rules that zoning allows. There should be no discretionary objections allowed - if you buy a house next to a commercial lot then you know what you're getting yourself into.
Not sure what the "this" is that you think zoning didn't "solve" exactly. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia), I think zoning does work pretty effectively. Industry builds in industrial zones, houses and apartments get built in residential zones. Fortunately (I think) the government is generally on the side of increasing the density and changing the rules to make it possible, so we don't have a San Francisco type situation where no one can build anything because the residental lobbies are so powerful.
The pain points for us are to do with attempting to increase the density of the city, which means building apartment buildings where there used to be just single story houses with backyards - something those residents don't like. Or the complexities of big projects like new train lines, that impact an awful lot of stuff around them.
But in general, a lot of stuff is getting built, it's just expensive.
zoning was designed to keep undesirables out, not to set clear ground rules. because that was its goal, we’ve also intentionally let local control laws and appeal rights/systems inflate to act as secondary/tertiary controls on development. most land use law exists only to protect incumbents
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.
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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.
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For those who are curious, this is what I could gather:
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.
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.
What city is everyone thinking of when they read the description?
My immediate thought: "Ah, SimSeattleProcess"
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!
Reminds me of the North Berkeley board game [1]
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347552/north-berkeley
With all respect intended to the author, point taken! Within 60 seconds I realized that this game is less enjoyable than most people's actual work. Trying to please a bunch of random jackasses, many of which have made it their sole purpose in life to fight with another faction of the population, some of which are willfully ignorant, and the rest of which are apathetic. Any accomplishments you might have, a significant group would consider a bad thing and attack you. I would not want to be a mayor.
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
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
"free, because you are loved"
And because LLMs are making love cheaper.
Ah yeah, AI, the digital fleshlight...
fine by me
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo
Am i missing something? How do you add power poles?
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Great, now could someone revive the old Command and Conquer Javascript project to life?
https://github.com/adityaravishankar/command-and-conquer
There's no need for it, archive.org, myabandonware all have [play] on your browser support via emulation, C&C isn't there because of copyright reasons, and also you can do an AI recompilation which means most of the code should be thrown out.
It's probably much easier via OpenRA , there seems to be a webassembly port albeit not sure of it's state.
Why is it that many of these games have continuous popups. I get enough approval fatigue during the day!
Was it inspired by this?
https://housing.over.pizza/
I've never seen this, but this is amazing!
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.
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.
Guys please just add a line to your Claude.md "never use bordered cards" to avoid the vibe look
seriously
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.
Parks and rec, the video game
It's missing a few critical "features" that make it even more realistic. Redlining, block busting, eminent domain, mortgage discrimination, public-housing segregation and siting, and restrictive covenants mechanisms.
How do I turn off the music?
I gave a solid laugh. I heard in Saw XI , they're going to make them play this. It honestly for a certain type of ppl is probably actually insanely fun. For me I like some rules and regs, but gall dang, I might have had a minor stroke when the side panel popped up.
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.
something like this not built for mobile should be a sin. Just spend a few tokens to improve usability, geez.
New game scroll broken on mobile safari
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.
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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).
If you wanna talk about abundance, talk about abundance, but mixing that with the disaster of yet another snake oil Musk project being stalled is not something to blame it for but to be thankful for.
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.
Wasn't a train line in California cancelled because Musk's Hyperloop was going to do it? What ever happened to that?
My impression so far is that hyperloop is simply a scam.
For whoever cares to learn more, watch Adamsomething on youtube and his many takedowns on how stupid the entire project is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tryzj05cpX0