> 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.
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.