As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved.
Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house?
If Google, or any other company, wants to make this kind of development, they should be regulated as a public utility and be accountable as such
My big problem from the beginning was that the money flow made no sense. Why should Toronto be paying for a Google experiment? Google benefitted far more than any other party involved, and that felt slimy.
I think Toronto should deffinitely pay for new more efficiently built housing.
In my opinion it's better to let Google benefit than random offshore entities that are hoarding the majority of the empty new apartments in the city.
Also, this was housing for meant their employees, most of which will have high salaries and be in high tax brackets.
So not only did we loose a few thousand housing units, now we also lost a few thousand future employees each of which would be paying $20 - 40 000 CAD in taxes to us every single year.
Did money flow from the city to Alphabet? My understanding was that it was hugely in the opposite direction, with sidewalk investing alphabet money into the project.
Google bought 12 acres of waterfront property and was working on development. Aside from the usual level of involvement (meetings, permitting, etc) the city had no skin in the game.
They bought the land at a heavy discount, continued to stretch their proposal far beyond the scope of the original RFP, demanded further city investment into transit/land development in order to facilitate their idea, and proposed low-income housing that was frankly a crap deal. In the end Google would've been reaping all the profits of the development deal while the city pays to clean up the mess.
It basically boiled down to somewhere between a mediocre and a pretty bad deal for the local economy, instead of letting a local developer do their thing. I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up costing (especially if you add in the land discount and subsidies) taxpayers well over a billion dollars. The whole thing reeked of a PR stunt for the Gov working with Big Tech, but I don't know of a single citizen who thought it was a good idea.
Next time, follow a fair RFP process. I'd rather have Amazon try and develop the waterfront.
The only difference here is that is has Google's name on it instead of AvalonBay, Greystar, Hines, Simon, Westfield, ProLogis, etc.
People have an opinion about Google, but they have never heard of any of the other companies that would have done the exact same thing, just with shittier neighborhood wifi.
They all get discounted land from the city, modify the original RFP scope to fit their vision, push the city to create an attractive level of services, drop in a token number of low income houses, and flip the houses for a profit.
I am acutely aware of active REITs/development firms in Toronto, and I have a lot more respect for their process than for what Sidewalk did.
We don't need neighborhood WiFi -- Fiber is widely available within the city and it's a lot cheaper than what I saw in the US.
Due to COVID-19, there has been far more innovation in the city, mostly top-down from the government, than what we saw with Sidewalk. Who cares if they can reconfigure the street? Let people ride their bikes, build community spaces, etc.
Sidewalk garnered negative public opinion because they tried to overreach what people are comfortable with from a real estate developer. Look at what Amazon did in Seattle over the last decade, and maybe take a page out of their book, instead of hand-waving about self-driving cars you're dreaming of sprinkling around the neighbourhood.
This is like complaining that the city sold a chunk of land to a theme park and you didn't like any of the rides they put in.
For the most part the experiment was confined to the land they legally purchased. At no point did they represent the project as anything other than an experiment. If the land was sold below market, you should have spoken up at the time about that.
That would be a fair assessment, but did you miss the part where Google got a discount based on an agreement, then changed the agreement and started demanding additional concessions?
It is perfectly fair for the people of Toronto to push back and re-evaluate the value proposition of the deal if the other party is attempting to renegotiate.
Yep, I've been saying for ages that the big companies need to have their banning policies be public overseen and accountable if they plan on having any significant impact on our lives in this way.
The last public number was that Twitter was banning 10 fake bots per second. How exactly do you plan to have a public oversight process for fighting fraud and abuse at scale?
Well if those bots are able to login and prove they're real people, it wouldn't be a problem. I suspect, though, with bots, they'll just create new accounts and not even bother with any sort of appeals process.
Since Google hates passwords, I can't imagine that they would support plain old metal keys for doors. Neither can I imagine how unlocking a Google door wouldn't involve an arbitrarily closable Google account. Other incidents have shown that once your Google account is closed, Google won't talk to you.
It can be shockingly difficult to get Google to talk to you while you have an account too. Unless you are a paying Google customer, it is challenging to get support.
As the relationship advice goes "when someone shows you who they are believe them." Plenty documented examples of Googling acting in the stated way across various products. No reason to assume they won't act the same in this case sooner or latter.
A fingerprint is essentially a password printed on your fingertip. And the second link is more about determining whether someone is who they say they are beyond passwords provided.
As someone who lives in Toronto, I'm disappointed we couldn't even have this as an experiment with smart city technologies. "It's time to build" and all that.
Agreed that it is unfortunate we could not have this experiment, but perhaps Waterfront Toronto can go back to the drawing board and do the experiment with local companies and homegrown technology.
I would doubt that any company would take such a bet now. If not Google, then why would, say, Shopify stand a better chance? I'm an entrepreneur from Toronto and I won't bet the next three years on my life on a municipal government that has shown a bias against action again and again.
Not even sure that data privacy killed this project. It was probably the bias against action that plagues every branch of government nowadays.
I disagree with that, i think the various mix of cheap insecure IP-cameras present on any small store and elsewhere poses a far greater privacy risk than a well managed and frequently audited system one would expect from google.
The cheap security cameras are relatively trivial to gain access too at scale and you can run facial recognitioning on their video with zero accountability.
At least with google and facebook you get a non-zero level of accountability.You can still summon their CEO in front of the public somewhere for questioning.
Or if you're an EU citizen you can demand you data be wiped off.
You can't practically do that with an insecure patchwork of security cameras. This is why I think the privacy concerns for this project were quite misguided.
In my opinion it's better to go with a single choice of where security video with identifiable faces is going instead of having no clue who's tracking you.
I'm not personally happy that that choice is Google given their screwup with nest and with 3rd-party dev access to gmail, however I think the practical outcome is a lot worse when not choosing anything at all.
The project was killed for the right reasons; the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it.
If smart cities are inevitable, then a mega-corporation like Google with all the resources in the world should be jumping at the opportunity to build a new settlement where none currently exists. Shouldering the cost of such a project should not be a hindrance for them considering the potential economic benefits for themselves.
Let them create their own proof of concept and incentivize people to live and work there. The shift to remote work in the Covid age makes this much more feasible now than in the past.
No need to glom their surveillance technology on to an existing metropolis where people are already settled and don't have the option to opt out to any meaningful degree.
> the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it.
When I lived in San Francisco proper this was the same reason I didn't have high speed fiber. NIMBYs didn't want a little green can out front of their houses.
Sometimes progress has to be made despite the residents so they can ultimately reap the benefits.
All NIMBY power derives from the fact that authority is vested exclusively in the people who already live somewhere, and none is given over to people who could live there, or would like to, if policies could be changed.
The only thing that has eroded NIMBY power in California in my lifetime has been state laws, and only very recently, and only just barely.
NIMBY power is vested in those who vote. As long as its mostly older white homeowners voting in local elections, that will continue to be the only demographic local politicians cater to, without fail. If you want to fight NIMBYism, fight to make it easier for renters to be educated about local issues and vote in local elections. There really is no other way.
Interesting framing, because the history of anti-development is using government powers to take away private property rights. As an example I own an empty lot that is zoned for, say, up to four unit apartment building and then the voters all decide to reduce my zoning such that I can only build 1 house. This is a taking, right? That's NIMBYs taking what I have because they want something else.
Another example is a bunch of old ladies get together and have my house designated as a "historically significant" structure, thereby robbing me of my ability to build anything else, or even repaint the window sashes. You wouldn't believe that in Berkeley, California, this is perfectly legal without the agreement of the owner, right? In fact it's legal to do this without even _notifying_ the owner.
Finally, there's a pretty strong moral and ethical argument to be made that if I'm born and raised in a town and I live there my whole life but due to a housing crisis I am forced to move elsewhere, I should have had some input into the government of the original place. We shouldn't be saying that we divest our children in favor of their parents, just because they are the incumbents. That's just wrong.
Direct democracy yes. But direct democracy is a horrible way to govern (think: Prop 13) and something the US explicitly avoided at the national level
> Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.
> [...]
> [A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Democracy means you have to contend with the whole community. It's not just the rich who get to vote on tax policy, not just the manufacturers who get to vote on environmental regulation, etc.
Well, company towns are probably a bad idea too, if for different reasons.
But there's probably room for smart cities created by the public sector where no personal data is collected and the goal is livability rather than profit.
Sidewalk would collect more personal, identifiable data on pass-through commuters than governments and companies already do? Maybe, and if so it's a valid point. But I'd bet (money) not. No facial recognition would be used. Doubt they'd track you in a bus. They were well aware of privacy concerns and their data collection would be under intense scrutiny. Data wouldn't be used outside Sidewalk without consent, de-identified by default, etc. (And many of the technologies they were developing had nothing to do with data collection.)
Your first sentence is exactly what I was speaking to.
As for the rest, I'm not much of a gambler.
Alphabet's current policies on data collection are typically opt-out, so I didn't hold out much hope when I largely saw a lot of hand-waving surrounding data policies until the project was pressed by the public about it. That cost me a lot of confidence the project.
And I come from the place of following the project eagerly at the start. Even looked for jobs with them at one point.
If they wanted to do mass device fingerprinting (minimally, de-identified by default, not shared, etc.) they could do that already without a smart city so that's completely orthogonal.
There is no counter argument. It's just a fact. They don't currently operate a dragnet. Barrier for entry for setting up physical sensors in a currently functioning urban setting is high which is why they were looking to build their own neighbourhood from scratch.
Actually they were already collecting data and people easily set up outdoor sensors all the time. But maybe there'd be more incentive to collect within a smart city project.
I'm not sure if this is a serious question or a dig given the previous tones, but there are any number of ways being that the majority of Torontonians carry mobile devices. SWL was designed to be a data dragnet for the purposes of influencing urban civic design so outside of regulatory pressure one would assume they would gather every bit of data they can, including fingerprint and tracking unique devices and their movement patterns in their region.
I don't know why people are surprised at the "failure" of these ambitious projects. Complex systems of technology, culture, and political consent do not get built from the ground up in a few years.
If you bypass political consent, and the only culture that matters is the culture inside a hierarchical controlling organization, then of course you can impose anything and call it a success. It's frightening that Google (let's not get distracted by corporate name games) expected this, but perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. It's what they get from their users every day. All they wanted was to do in physical space what they did on the web: set up a system of technological surveillance and have people embrace it for the conveniences they could build on top.
The prospect of handing off city data to further product development for an American corporation to then sell it back to said Canadian city sounded and still sounds pretty dubious no? I mean we didn’t say no to smart cities, we just said no to alphabet. Great call imo.
Watching this unfold as a resident of the next-neighbourhood-over was fascinating. At first everyone was excited that a big, American company would choose Toronto for this sort of project. The initial RFP from Waterfront Toronto had very clearly been put together with them in mind.
But development takes a long time, and between the initial agreement and the plan being released, public opinion had turned strongly against big-tech. Those Waterfront Toronto board members were basically fired for not foreseeing the change in public opinion.
I'm not quite sure how this is portrayed as NIMBYism.
As a Toronto resident there was more than enough news about how well reasoned arguments from Privacy experts weren't addressed very well by Sidewalk labs.
It isn't a very trivial thing when high profile people like Ann Cavoukian resigns from the project.
Portraying it as a case of NIMBYism gone too far is just revisionist history.
Agreed. Most people I know were at least curious/interested about the project, but also had serious reservations about Google's privacy and data collection and wanted stricter oversight on how their personal data would be used.
>>stricter oversight on how their personal data would be used.
Beyond that, how many would have opted for "don't collect let alone use anything about me". I have never met anyone who actually wants their physical movement to be tracked by advertisers, not for infinite starbucks discounts. Most hesitate at the idea of employers or even family members tracking them 24/7.
Basing this off a few very interesting people I've interacted with in the Information Security field wrt Healthcare) as coop student then some contract work.
Usually they tended to be either Law or Infosec folks who ended up in roles where they did consulting or setting up policies for companies. Then with experience becoming SMEs with regards to Privacy and either operating as independent consultants or working with governments/companies as Privacy officers/commissioners etc...
As far as I know most of them didn't have much in common as far as certs or specific educational background it was mostly a mix of similar work experiences as well as being in the same conference circuits.
Someone with more experience should probably address this :)
Well, NIMBYism + privacy paranoia. Torontonians who were never going to live there, hadn't attended the open houses, and weren't willing to even try it as a small-scale experiment apparently had veto power over what Sidewalk could do with their own property.
Privacy paranoia? Under what pretense should Canadians presume Google a good faith actor? Their business model has been to incrementally make the web their walled-garden fiefdom.
Why shouldn't we think that their Toronto project was anything less but an attempt to expand their iron grip into the physical world?
Ceding that much power, to a foreign entity no less, is a question of sovereignty.
Privacy is very important to some people, but I don't think it's a good argument against the project. Their collection and use of data would have been under great scrutiny. And if you don't like it, just don't move there. It was a small experiment not a takeover of the city.
AFAIK it wasn't going to be a condo-like development, with restricted access to residents-only, so anyone could walk within the Sidewalk area, and potentially be tracked, willingly or not.
Big tech has pretty consistently failed to deliver on the rosy vision for the future they've been promising for decades. I can't imagine trusting Google to commit to building part of a city when they can't even stick to a mobile phone for a few years. If it went tits up I'm sure they'd just leave Toronto to foot the bill.
What? Google updates old pixel phones. They are way better than the other manufacturers that give up supporting their phones after a few months. I don’t your point, who would buy a new phone thst was made multiple years ago? This project wasn’t even killed by Google, it was killed by everyone else.
It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city. The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well).
I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the start—so many things that would be difficult to add to a city that already exists (an underground tube system for transporting food and packages??). I guess the economic and individual incentives just aren’t there. Even if you built it, would people come?
New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions. Brasilia is a good example of the sort of planned city that would be built. Widespread availability of cars positioned them as the symbols of modernity and so the city was designed around the car, resulting in an entirely unwalkable city that segregates the classes. See also Chandigarh. Barcelona is the main counter example that springs to mind for me.
Every time this is brought up I fail to understand how people think that this time would be any different. Cities are agglomerations of patterns at every scale and the emergent beauty that arises is absolutely impossible to design in any sort of masterplan way. Organic cities are resilient in ways that we can't every really understand, and that's the important element in making a place that is livable for the longer term.
The planned parts of DC and SLC are the old parts of the city. The rest of those cities were not planned in the same way, and it shows in the haphazard geography and zoning. (For example: why does SLC have 24/7 factories a block from housing?)
It's been talked about for so long now, often proposed by the wealthiest, most powerful people and corporations in the world. So it seems like it won't happen?
Ex: EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was originally supposed to be this in the 60s[1]. And was in a place exactly like what you propose (a large uninhabited tract of land).
After Walt died they just made it a theme park of the future envisioned by giant corporations like Exxon.
The problem is the "smart" part of it - if it's smart in the sense that it was properly planned around something other than the automobile, then sure, I think you can get a lot of people on board. All the stuff in your comment sounds great.
The problem is when you start adding cameras and electronics. It's obvious Sidewalk Labs is just an arm of the Google data collection funnel. I don't want any part of that in my life.
I think the cameras and electronics are great. A good way to reduce crime as opposed to adding more police. It's worked well in London to the best of my knowledge and I think we could use more of that in general.
What I object to is Google being the one entrusted with this data, with no oversight, and cross-referencing it with all the other data they have on me.
I'm having difficulty finding the article, but there was a news story that the single most data request from the London Crime cameras being.. flat managers requesting footage of people who didn't clean up after their dogs.
Cameras don't prevent crime. They may shift crime (if you have cameras and your neighbor doesn't, guess whose house is going to get burgled first?) and they may make crime easier to prosecute after, but they do not stop crime in any meaningful way.
And more than likely, the people who are spending a lot of money to buy and monitor those cameras don't really care about the shoplifters and graffiti artists - those crimes don't cost very much of society and stopping them is a low priority. Serious crimes like murders and home invasions are.. actually pretty rare and cameras generally don't catch them.
If you're spending millions to install cameras, record them constantly, and store all that footage in a way that's searchable.. it has nothing to do with crime. It has everything to do with monitoring your population.
I did some research, because I had trouble believing that the cameras don't deter crime. They do deter some kinds of crime (e.g. theft in the areas with the cameras) but not violent crime.
I'm really quite surprised, you'd imagine having a bigger chance of getting caught would make people stop and think.
Probably the reason is, as you say, that those types of crime take place where the cameras mostly aren't, like indoors.
Genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science and urban design. 11/10 chance the technology elements would have gone the way of the Google Grave yard after 10years, but at least it will leave a set of interesting buildings to draw lessons from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with generic condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google branding and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help. Simultaneously, the inability for western societies to at least entertain rapid urban experiments is going to backfire. I'm not a big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and at least tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode well for anyone else.
Greed and Avarice mixed with cupidity blended with terminal nimbyism pretty much sums it all up.
Google was seen as a monster cash cow, and blood-suckers lined up to drill for gold.
Property costs (not values) have ramped up in much the same way as if San Francisco, driven by height limits, density limits and the huge ramp up of properties bought and rented for income. (aka rent seeking).
Often highly leveraged with 80%+ mortgages. the owners lice in fear of a market decline. Rogue AirBNB owners infest the market, even when precluded from doing that, they rent and litigate.
So I think the smell of the terminal cupidity they detected drove them away.
Personally, I don't want a smart city, I already have a smart phone and that's enough for me. When I walk outside my apartment, I want to be escaping from my technology as much as possible, rather than being exposed to more of it. Give me trees, bike paths, and metal benches, not more screens and automation. And a lot of the automation they talked about sounds like it would be taking away low skilled jobs, which we are going to need more of unless someone implements UBI.
Maybe I'm just getting old though, it's all downhill once you hit your 20s.
As a Torontonian, the problem with it has always been with both the data sovereignty and overall control by a non-Canadian entity. The problem of technology, foreign control, and what we give up is especially acute when someone like Jim Balsillie points it out in the wake of technological blowups like RIM and Nortel.
I especially didn't like the fact that the Sidewalk Labs employees were primarily New York-based with very little understanding or familiarity with the nuances of our city/province/country. Why are you remotely experimenting with our city instead of sending your teams here to develop it? Wouldn't familiarity with the surrounding neighbourhoods be an important factor in how you make a deep impact into the local environment?
Doctoroff managed to not address any of Balsillie's primary concerns. And I imagine most Americans are wilfully blind of the local issues when they come here. (Just look at how ownership of sports teams like the Montreal Expos turned out).
In May, the company announced it was abandoning the project, citing economic infeasibility. But what wasn’t mentioned was that the project had also become politically infeasible.
Google’s incompetence was multivalent. But that’s the nature of Dunning-Kruger incompetence. Toronto is not a bigger version of the bedroom communities it is familiar with. The site wasn’t lacking pie-in-the-sky planning exercises. Nor interest from deep pockets. The biggest incompetence was pitching the project as “what we want to do will finally put Toronto on the map.”
In real estate development, fanfare is to provide cover for fait accompli. Publicity before the ducks are rowed is amateur. Steamrollering opposition first requires a steamroller.
The best part about new 21st century cities being built from scratch is kindergarten for tenure with primary services.
Resetting tenure for a new century solves 99% of the problems with trying to build on-top of inefficiency (schools, public utilities, local government, etc).
Toronto would have been better off with a sister city, developing a DFW-like economic area for the future instead of accelerating urban rot.
Sorry I missed this, but am on a first-time trip to a rain forest in America, so my perspective may be temporarily biased (the air is phenomenal and the ASMR soundtrack is better than atmos fwiw).
Instead of "condescending", its probably just a clean canvas imbued with natural growth cycles (hence kindergarten, with nothing in-place to resist).
Saying "We the People have evolved" may be a stretch, but tenure and bad math are basic components of the rot-ops/rot-optics of prior innovations.
This project was dead once the backlash against Big Tech picked up in 2017. A project like this requires the feds to be totally on board, have the power to green light everything quickly, and have tons of capital to deploy. Unfortunately for Sidewalk Labs, it's not possible for an Alphabet company to build in Saudi Arabia or China.
Holy bike shedding batman. I can't comprehend our inability to focus on the important things. Toronto's Port Lands need to be revitalized [1]:
> Waterfront Toronto has received $1.25 billion to clean up and protect the Port Lands. Federal, Provincial and City financial contributions cover the total costs.
> ...nearly a century ago the Don Valley became heavily industrialized and the river was re-routed to enter the lake into a concrete channel. The new project is intended to create a new opening for the Don River.
Spend some time in Google Maps [2] and explain to me why this revitalization project has to be framed in terms of smart neighbourhoods, affordable housing, and digital privacy. The plan only has to be slightly smarter than 100% condos which seems to be the default for Toronto waterfront development.
> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings
Guess Toronto got its crap back.
> Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she said, as an example.
It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way consumer prices declined in the last two decades has been through ads and data - by selling ad inventory inside apps and websites, and buying ads to reach targeted people more affordably.
Regardless of how you feel about data and surveillance and privacy or whatever, at least ad targeting has a long proven track record of actually delivering low real prices to consumers.
The only other thing I can think of that is as effective at reducing prices is software and media piracy. So maybe prices are a reductive lens. Then it should be obvious that affordability of housing is too a reductive lens. It can’t be both ways.
> Regardless of how you feel about data and surveillance and privacy or whatever, at least ad targeting has a long proven track record of actually delivering low real prices to consumers.
That really depends on how you define "real price", doesn't it? It's a price I'm not willing to pay.
I just feel like people keep talking about the "price" of privacy in abstract, and we've had decades for someone to make a case for material damages. It's so intellectually dishonest.
We've had the Equifax hack, it isn't even a problem with ads, just data gathering generally, and we're all looking around for real damages there, just people who hypothesize that something something a meaningless form of speculative identity theft may have led to some abstract damage. I hate Equifax, and I hate the data gathering they do, but I'm not going to be a blowhard and say, "there were unobservable damages here and they must pay random suckers."
The BP Horizon oil spill put oil on the shores of Lousiana, there's real mispricing of environmental damage. But that shit is real, oil and pollution are real, they inhabit the literal real world. Your website browsing history is imaginary.
Time and time again people have been given the opportunity to pay for an e-mail client or a search engine. Dozens of software services. Ads are so obviously the superior way for the average end user to pay for networked services, trading your imaginary data that is basically only valuable in aggregate and has been very successfully sold anonymously-in-aggregate in exchange for not paying $10/mo for every single little software service you need. And then, because everyone has free e-mail and search, the surplus is enjoyed by society as a whole, instead of some kleptocratic corporation. If anything Google should be making so much more money!
You're paying the price. You choose to pay the price literally every day, it's ridiculous. Every one of these activists pays the price, they are walking-talking hypocrites. It's so intellectually dishonest to say you're not willing to pay it. You use the Internet, you're paying the price, don't use the Internet if you don't want to pay the price. You do, and you will, and there's nothing you can do about it.
The Sidewalk Labs people are the best positioned to provide below-market housing to meet the demand for it. Generally, the people doing innovative stuff with housing will actually succeed to meet demands for things the status quo will not provide. This is not saying much! We should be arguing for more innovative uses of land and architecture. Nobody would force you to live in the Sidewalk Labs complex!
> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings
That statement wasn't totally accurate. Waterfront Toronto already had a parklands plan drawn up to beautify the area, add usable space, and provide flooding relief waterways.
The rest of the area actually has a large number of businesses operating—many in the music and film industries. It's not a total wasteland. It's just cut off—one of the reasons the film industry has access to large lands down there.
I worked there for about 5 years so I'm not sure which foundations of demolished buildings they're talking about except for maybe The Hearn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearn_Generating_Station) which has been preserved as derelict so far for film and other shoots. Similarly with the "desolate parking lots". They were filled with trailers for shoots or Cirque du Soleil more often than not.
Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at around the same rate as cars.
If you think the price of housing has anything to do with the craft and materials involved, versus zoning, mortgage policy, the race to get into “good” school districts…well, I have a bridge that goes to the newly available land in the Portlands area of Toronto to sell you.
(The absolute drama that involves building anything in Toronto would drive you mad. Gaze upon the NIMBYs fighting tooth and nail to prevent high-density housing on the Danforth and despair.)
>Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend.
Do you think people would be willing to buy a house for cheap with the trade off being that Google and Facebook get to collect data on everything you did inside the house, and then got to display ads inside the house?
If people wanted affordable housing, they are more likely to achieve it by letting some company monetize frankly meaningless, actually worthless data about urban living than by taxing people who don’t live there.
In the very least, the economic forces discounting the rents in the former scenario have a chance to scale massively, while tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere in market real estate cities.
The status quo of compelling developers to make below market housing while simultaneously reducing public housing units is on net reducing affordable housing units per capita everywhere.
Sidewalk Labs never advocated this though. They wanted to build essentially luxury developments. Maybe they would be a little cheaper than otherwise. People want to live in luxury apartments and not public housing!
The issue is not simple nor black and white. It’s just that the activists had an opportunity with Sidewalk Labs, who could have simply offered lower rents in exchange for data collection, that they will not have with any other alternative real estate developer, who have no positive ROI reason to offer below market housing.
> tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere
This is the main reason for the housing crisis. Toronto has one of the lowest property tax rates in Canada; by bringing it closer to that of other cities we could fund a lot of public housing.
Some people want to live in luxury apartments. Many people just want to live indoors. Building more luxury condos for speculators to keep empty as investments doesn't really help make the city affordable to live in.
Ads don't lower prices, they shift when you pay the price and potentially who pays the price. If they didn't then no one would pay for them as they wouldn't give a return on investment. You don't pay $1 for the app but instead you pay $100 for a brand name blender.
I’m confident that brand name blenders are the cheapest they have ever been, in the history of the world. There’s just no evidence that actually substantiates what you’re saying, and it’s exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty I am talking about.
Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house?
If Google, or any other company, wants to make this kind of development, they should be regulated as a public utility and be accountable as such