Transit-oriented development is great but not quite radical enough. It’s usually focused at rail nodes and if you take Oakland, as an example, you would barely move the needle on housing supply. One problem is that there is already some dense housing around these, and other nodes, in the Bay Area. The other is that these locations can only accommodate so much of the area’s housing supply. To address the housing crunch, there needs to be ubiquitous up-zoning of any — no EVERY — parcel, in any zoning category — by right. What that means is if you own a burger stand by the lake (using Oakland as an example again) and that burger stand is a one-story building with a big lot out front that is 90-percent empty virtually 100% of the time (if my memory serves me correctly) and you want to sell your lot to me and I can justify 50 units based on precedent of adjacency alone, then I should be able to supply those 50 dwelling units (60 with an affordable density bonus, 150 with a high rise even) and not have to litigate the local NIMBYISM for 5 years to do it. The cost of land in Oakland (my example again) is not that high on a per-unit, land basis cost. The issue is that people will come out of the woodwork (read: other parts of the Bay) to fight you and then the cost to litigate, the time value of money and the entitlement fees kill the desire to even start a project. If you could up-zone every single family lot to 3-flats, you could dramatically increase supply. Hell, you can focus on just one and two-story neighborhood commercial and rapidly decrease price pressure. And SV is not approaching $1500/sf without all the barriers to redevelopment of underutilized land (parking lots or otherwise).
To be fair, not everyone wants Manhattan so density, and even change, can be terrifying. But, to be fair, there were special and specific circumstances that created Manhattan that just don’t exist in SV or Oakland. So, that fear may not be justified. Still, is a step in the right direction...
This isn’t a “master planned community” in a traditional sense. The intent matters. I worked for KBHome and Toll Brothers. The builder’s intent determines the outcome - Bill Gates didn’t buy that many acres to master-plan a community 45 miles from downtown Phoenix - not with 3500 acres of office space. No, this is something much more.
Perspective: CA is expensive. Seattle is expensive. Phx is not... this is a big deal. Perhaps more so than Google in Toronto.
MVP sans the third-party frameworks works pretty well and is easy to read, maintain and test. I prefer it to MVC, for sure, but if you really wanted to... you could still write lightweight view controllers using a lot of abstraction (and don’t forget to inject your dependencies). I have nothing against VIPER, et al, but I think the author makes some really good points on complexity and the inability to understand your system when you have to rely on some of these architectural patterns.
Speaking for Chicago: f*ck yeah! I imagine your issues with Amazon evolve around traffic congestion and competition for housing... Chicago is a much larger city and one that experienced years of decline. Adding an Amazon will speed up the redevelopment of whatever part of the city they enter. Chicago is already second behind Seattle in construction cranes and building condos like crazy. Still, notwithstanding the tax breaks and cheap land coming Amazon’s way, there’s almost nothing but upside for this city, because the infrastructure here is that good. Perhaps some would argue against that notion, given that we have traffic too. I’d argue that past patterns of suburban development caused that. That’s why the city is sucking all the corporate jobs right back into the city (McDs, Motorola, et al).
Every city in the country has the potential to "SF'ed" - zoning laws make it so. If there is one place we would actually benefit from deregulation (as a country) it would be in eliminating zoning regulation. The places that need it most are the places that attract tech-boomification [sic] (Oakland is another example). A solution would be to encourage even growth across a city through targeting neighborhoods with inclusive development from a fungible pot of funds from the new revenues. This, coupled with expedited approvals and (not-yet-create) anti-NIMBY laws could make shit awesome for every one.
Serial has its issues too. We are using a serial port over BTLE and when you need to do anything with debuffering/buffering and online data... you no longer have a UI because the transmission is so slow.
Cities like LA will become denser over time. It might seem counterintuitive but increasing density alleviate traffic (people walk).
You can't clean a hotel or flip a burger remote.
Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
Cycling... in LA...
I don't think the Boring Company is trying to solve the gridlock. They will, however, provide an option for those who can afford to pop down into a Teslalane [sic] for a trip to the airport. And that's fine. It's [Teslalanes] infrastructure that ultimately helps the city thrive until the time that the land use patterns rebalance. There will always be traffic - but it won't always have the same overall impact.
>Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
I take objection to this because, aside from other cities where public transit is the norm, the interurban system in LA [0] was dismantled, partially because it was forced out by cars that increased congestion to the point that streetcars could no longer run on time, and partially because of car companies advocating that buses could replace the streetcars (they didn't).
Things don't exist in a vacuum, and LA decided to make itself a city where you could only be comfortable getting from place to place inside a car.
> Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
So the question here really is "which would improve LA more: tunnels that carry trains, or tunnels that carry carts that hold single cars?"
There is plenty of strong evidence that shows adding additional road capacity increases overall traffic. I'm not sure that adding ways to move cars around faster wouldn't have the same impact, versus a train.
If the boring company solves issues with personal travel then cities like LS will become less dense. There's a reason urban sprawl didn't exist before the car.
Edit: You can't just replace White with Chinese: unless Chinese people enslaved and murdered a race of people for hundreds of years, then segregated them in tiny ghettos while charging higher rents than other 'Chinese' had to pay, to finally - allow - them to leave the ghetto only to "redline" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) any community that crossed the color line, outlaw discrimination - after - poverty had set in... (not to mention Chinese-flight, I mean, white-flight from communities that reached a tipping point of racial integration.)
The issues of race in American are legacy issues that won't just dissolve in time. And full dissolution cannot take place if the underlying issues of poverty are not corrected (read: aggressively attacked). This is but a small step in that direction.
It is an accomplishment. I, too, am self-taught. It means being self-motivated, even more committed and thorough. I think it sounds awesome and so do the recruiters that I hear from.
I started late (38, 41 this year) and I couldn't imagine jumping from Ruby to Rust to whatever new hotness arrives when it's clear that there are handful of technologies that go deep (enough) and that are being used to solve problems that require someone to be more than a coder or even a dev.
I'm in the connected-car space and the only question I'm asking myself right now is: will my current skill set (mostly iOS in Swift/Obj-C/C) allow me to build for the future of augemented reality in vehicles or will going down the path of C++ -only- allow me to grow as a "software scientist" (perhaps a third way...)? Honestly I don't know, but I do know that I won't/can't find out if I jump into every HN rabbit holes that opens.
To be fair, not everyone wants Manhattan so density, and even change, can be terrifying. But, to be fair, there were special and specific circumstances that created Manhattan that just don’t exist in SV or Oakland. So, that fear may not be justified. Still, is a step in the right direction...