Hacker News

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

I guess you prefer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triumphal_Arch

> 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?

In the US we have insane bureaucracy as well as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt politicians. Never let them say you can't have both

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.

Everyone wants to be the one with the power to remake the world according to their own designs. Everyone also doesn't want to be the one being remade according to the designs of others.

> But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.

Prospective residents and transit riders are harmed.

Rules and hearings overwhelmingly favor existing residents. If an existing resident opposes construction nearby due to noise, traffic, etc., the city will probably grant his wish. Because that piece of land is off limits for denser housing, now prospective residents face a smaller housing supply, higher prices, and longer commutes.

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.

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.

> 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.

The point is to slow things down, so only the things that truly matter get done. Otherwise growth for growth's sake leads to chaotic hellscapes where no one is at rest, everyone is confused and scared. Slower is better.

Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.

Or when things get done it is because of corruption? And the constraints are put in place to protect $, aka not democracy but actually plutocracy.

We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.

It's really weird that in "the last of the free" it's considered completely normal for the government to tell you that you can't build a shed bigger than a certain size.

> 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.

"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!

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.

Disney (the company) did eventually make a kind of Epcot - Celebration, Florida[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

I think the bigger reason the original "EPCOT as a city" didn't happen is that once Walt passed, everyone else in the company looked at the plan and knew it would be a bottomless money pit from day 1.

I think 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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

Ah yeah, AI, the digital fleshlight...

seriously

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.