The people who want to increase housing don't ever bring up either the infrastructure of the city or the effect of urban density on communities. They just want to live close to work.
Soon, I'm sure, the capacity will increase and in 20 years all of the articles will be about how to move tech companies to a nicer, less urban city.
Living close to work has a drastically smaller infrastructure footprint than living far from work. Arguing against an urban development on traffic grounds is essentially always in bad faith: if the potential residents can’t take up space in your neighborhood, they will take up space on your freeway. Neighborhoods can scale; roads can’t.
Every third sentence out of the YIMBY camp is about the effect of urban density in communities: how complete streets, walkable businesses, public space, etc. bring us both physically and socially closer together, walking back the hyperatomization of drive-alone commuting and automobile-scaled environments.
I'm not the tone police, but I don't see how that is a de facto bad faith point. I think your "potential residents .. will take up space on your freeway" as being way too reductionist. First, there's light rail which has a global and domestic track record of mitigating this. Second, "potential" residents can move elsewhere. There is no law or ethical principle that a city has to make housing available to all comers at the price they want.
I think your second paragraph has great points about what makes a good/livable community, and is closer to what I think zoning should take into account.
>There is no law or ethical principle that a city has to make housing available to all comers at the price they want.
That's essentially what's being litigated in this debate. YIMBYism argues that there is such an ethical principal: society ought to be inclusive, the playing field ought to be level, haves ought not to have too much power over have-nots, etc. We contend that they apply just as much to urban land use as to healthcare, immigration, and tax policy.
Modern zoning is a deployment of state power to help reinforce and grow the asset values of a small group who were in the right place at the right time, valuing their aesthetic enjoyment above others' ability to make a living. Maybe we don't have a positive obligation to create an unlimited amount of affordable housing, but we at least have the obligation not to use the power of the state this way.
Good. You can't always fix housing demand with increase in supply. The streets and sidewalks and parking don't increase when the buildings get taller. After living in NYC for 11 years, I can tell you that just adding housing makes the real city: which is everything at street level worse.
I know that many people that want to increase housing in SF just want to commute to their tech jobs, but that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland: too many people in a single area can't form a cohesive community. The people who already live in SF understand this, I think.
Why would you want streets and parking increased? Here's an idea: put the roads on diets, eliminate not-really-free (publicly subsidized) parking, and add density to the moon.
That's what makes NYC an enthralling network of neighborhoods and communities.
Someone who lived in NYC just said "that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland"
Since you say it's an enthralling network of neighborhoods and communities, can I ask whether you actually live in NYC?
I've been to big cities like NYC and others, and it definitely gets too crowded for me. There's clearly a desire on HN to densify, but why is that the case? Is the goal of humanity to increase demand in any particular city? Is the goal to put as many people into SF's existing area as possible?
> There's clearly a desire on HN to densify, but why is that the case? Is the goal of humanity to increase demand in any particular city? Is the goal to put as many people into SF's existing area as possible?
That’s a good question though. I don’t actually have any skin in the game regarding San Francisco, I didn’t like SF even before the social boom.
But for those that do, I imagine it’s because: they don’t want their jobs to leave; they want to spend their internet riches on something other than rent; they want the other income tiers to have a decent quality of life; and they want to make San Francisco more livable.
Neighborhoods and community, to me, means not being separated from people by water guzzling lawns, and not moving from place to place in hermetically sealed bubbles.
Coincidentally, a feature was published today on my apartment building. There's roughly 100 units in it and I know nearly everybody. It's heaven and I wish there were more places where one could have an experience like this. https://www.freundevonfreunden.com/features/475-kent-brookly...
Yes. Seven years, it's the best place I've ever lived, completely ruined me for the rest of America. I only wish I could find a similar place with more tolerable winters.
people wouldn't need so much darn parking if they could live near work. This idea that people must buy housing 50 miles a way and commute over 3 hours a day must end: it's terrible for the environment and terrible for people's lives, not to mention very expensive.
Sure, adding a little more supply only helps a little. But you gotta start somewhere. It's like trying to reverse CO2 polution, it takes time, but it's worth it and in the long term it is reversable. We need to keep adding more and more and more supply for the next 40 years until it gets back to a normal level. We owe this to future generations for screwing things up so terribly.
You make a lot of strong assertions that don't seem obvious to me whatsoever.
> but that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland: too many people in a single area can't form a cohesive community
Can you elaborate what you mean by 'hellish wasteland'? What specific aspects of NYC (or even Manhattan) do you find to be a hellish wasteland?
And how do you define 'too many people in a single area'?
What some people call heaven (a nice small friendly residential neighborhood where everyone knows each others) others call hell (a small community where everyone watches each others, and that enforces a conformist lifestyle). Some people love the anonymity of NYC.
Lol, NYC doesn't have enough housing either. Have you seen their rent prices?
It would be wonderful if there was an actual city out there where everyone decided "hey, let's drive rent prices in the freaking ground by actually allowing high density building EVERYWHERE".
No developers would be building if that were the case. Ever notice how every new apartment building is a "luxury" building? That's because construction costs are so high it only makes sense for developers to build if they can charge top dollar for rental prices. If the rental prices were low they wouldn't build.
Construction costs aren't much higher than they have been historically. Slightly higher because of demand for things with inelastic supplies (like tower cranes), but we're talking average cost change by a few percent at most.
And yes they would keep building. Land owners are the ones who gain/lose by fluctuations in demand, not developers. If demand drops and rental prices drop, land owners lower their prices that they sell to developers. This has been proven so substantially by Housing Economists that it's basically considered consensus by now. Spend some time with the Journal of Housing Economics if you would like to learn more.
The real reason why developers only build luxury buildings is that they can't build enough to satisfy all demand, so the few buildings that they can build will obviously go to the types with the highest margins. If we allowed for more development, developers would still build luxury buildings as long as there was unsatiated demand for them, but they'd also build normal and affordable housing as well.
Exactly. Then building more does not solve the housing issue. More people will just cram into the newly built spaces. Housing is still expensive. Witness NYC.
NYC really is the perfect comparable to see the potential future of SF. NYC has a housing glut, but a it's all luxury housing. No developer will ever build new "affordable housing" because the economics don't make sense. Increasing the housing supply should decrease prices in theory, but in reality more people will just show up and pay the current asking price (or more). Price per sqft in NYC is pushing 2-3k+ while SF is typically around 1200 per sqft in the nicer neighborhoods like Noe. Pacific Heights is still the priciest at around 1500-1600 per sqft, but still nothing compared to a lot of NYC. This is my clearly my own opinion and it likely won't be popular, but I'm a little surprised that SF is still as "affordable" as it currently is, and it's my view that it will never again be priced any lower (except for short term trends such as recessions).
But... Why are those people moving in? Is it perhaps possibly because these people LIKE to live in high density spaces?
If people keep moving in that means that high density is by definition desirable. We as a society should be building the stuff that people want, and your argument proves that what people want is high density living.
The fact that high density living attracts new buyers is even MORE reason to make more of the type of living that people love.
Do all these seem low contrast? I find it hard to believe that he painted down in value like this constantly. He'd have to mix every color with grey. It seems much more likely to be a weird photography setup.
Technical difficulties will be much greater. The brain is still a single point of failure. The "expansion" approach allows gradual increase of intelligence thru intermediate exocortex stage, boosting the progress, while studying which information processes/something else corresponds to conscious subjective experiences, paving the way for relocation of consciousness locus outside of the brain or resorting to other measures in a case of impossibility.
We need to stop basing education on submission and obedience. Asians are successful students, but they struggle to build startup cultures in their countries.
Edit: Downvote me all you want. I'm an educator who has toured schools in Asia to build international educational relationships. Their students are perfect automatons who will never take the risks necessary to change the world.
I think it's the Europeans who are failing to build successful startups (no need to talk about whether they are building a "startup culture"). People can quibble, but perhaps China has outpaced the US with regards to startups, and presumably China has a different cultural environment for business.
This article defines stereotypes as "unfair" categorization. That is far different than knowing the fact that groups have traits, and that categorization comes from these observed traits. Of course individuals stand out, that doesn't make the generalization a less useful tool for quick analysis.
This reads like an onion article. I'll take free market capitalism and any government over socialism. These people represent a kind of "democracy" that wants to threaten Capitalism, which is the real danger.
The road to Sausalito is littered with the corpses of AutoCAD challengers.
Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down.
I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them.
There's a zillion others I no longer remember.
Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible.
I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance. Conventional wisdom is control the file format. There were so many efforts to open up DWG/DXF. But I don't know that interop ever mattered.
I think it's just been inertia. Nothing since Generic CADD has been enough better to warrant the switchover costs.
I think people get into the habit of presenting their software as uniquely capable. And wrapping up their own skills in that particular software. It is similar to a young programmer assuming that Perl (for example) is uniquely capable. In truth talent tends to transcend packages and other factors like ecosystem come in to play.
A talented CAD technician would be useful using pen and a drawing board. We are just not very good at selling those more inate qualities. It is just easier to just sell yourself as an AutoCAD driver.
Of course these sort of packages take a long time to learn, and you are much more productive using something you know. And people adapt their mental model to a particular package. So there is often little obvious point in changing software.
What about Intellicad (https://www.intellicad.org/ )? It seems to be pretty popular among engineers. It reads DWG/DXF (AutoCad format) pretty well.
The software itself goes by various names, because Intellicad itself is a consortium. For a nominal fee, you get access to the codebase and can release your own version with your own brand. The thing is shared source, so as a consortium member you need to contribute your changes to the core back to the shared codebase. However this is closed-source.
Ya. You reminded me that any Excel clone (or interop) has to reproduce Excel's bugs too.
No fun.
Ages ago, I was buddies with a guy (Dale?) who reverse engineered DWG, which I think became the code dump for the Open DWG Alliance, which may be this group today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance, though I don't see McNeel & Assoc listed (Rhino3D).
Dale worked for a graphics card company, Appian?, writing drivers and file viewers. He'd reversed DWG to write a wicked fast viewer. Just like those guys from Atlanta (don't remember their names).
I now dimly recall that Dale's team had to also reproduce AutoCAD's rendering bugs.
> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance
Network effects. Once you reach a certain level of dominance in the kind of market they are in, the fact that it easier to find staff that know the product and the people you exchange days with are using the product, the cost of unfamiliarity and potential data exchange errors means anything else has a very high barrier to overcome even to be considered. An incremental improvement isn't enough, you have to either be wordshatteringly better or have near infinite runway and some non-feature advantages to leverage (the latter is how Excel and Word dethroned 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, but who is going to play 1980s Microsoft to dethrone AutoCAD?)
> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance.
Joel Spolsky explained it: most users use only 20% of the app. But each user uses a DIFFERENT 20%. Thus you won't go nowhere until you are almost at feature parity, because everybody will have one little thing you didn't implement, but which is critical for them.
Often it doesn't help even if you are way beyond feature parity. More often than not, it is a simple inertia, not some rational thought enumerating features.
Sadly I have to work in one of the sectors. It is very common for geometric design of roadways. I think it is a result of State Departments of Transportation buying into the system and never wanting to change.
The only way to change that- is to actually pretend alternatives are not used- meaning they have to mimick the output exactly- even the flaws. Then after 5 years or so- the department anounces- oh- and by the way, we completely replaced xyz.
My condolences. I'm still flabberghasted that semi-automated file repair skills was SOP for users, because the Bentley brothers couldn't figure out how to reliably save files.
Isn't that like people wishing for a more lightweight Excel not realizing the "80% of people only 20% of the features" is true but it's not the same 20%? Could you even come up with a financially viable lightweight enough Autocad competitor?
I don't know if it's any cleaner internally but Dassault produces the free (2d focused) DraftSight which is very much on the level of like AutoCAD circa 2000, don't know what the paid version is like or how well it integrates with Solidworks.
That's the catch, I think. The market is not so large for 3D modeling tools.
The second hurdle is the ridiculous amount of inertia DWG has in the AEC industry. Any solution that would topple Autocad would need to likely provide DWG and/or Revit interoperability to even have a shot at the market.
There are no good options for Revit at the moment so, that's a deep vendor lock in. For DWG there is at least Teigha library from ODA which is based on reverse engineering the DWG format and offers reading and writing of it.
It would be a long shot. But until something changes, Autodesk is just going to keep layering tools, buttons, and menus on top of each other. It's such a rubber band ball now, they would have to start over to make something efficient. But there's no real competition, because even though it's incredibly cludgy, it will work if you learn it's labyrinth.
I've been perfectly happy using Google Sheets for 10+ years even though I'm sure it's no substitute for someone in finance. (I don't think CAD software has the same wide appeal, though)
I know there's plugins and I don't know what the pro version is like but for instance free Sketch Up doesn't even have the ability to draw an arc from three points and while it did have two points+tangent it made some internal and opaque decision on whether it would ever snap to that tangent.
If you're making 2D things, like blueprints for a human to make something, SketchUp isn't as useful. I admit, I haven't tried it in a few years, but when I did before its fundamental purpose was almost polar opposite to my needs.
Well AutoCAD has some tools for drawing 3D but their actual 3D program is called 3D-MAX. This is derived from the old 3D-Studio program that they bought from Kinnetix years ago.
Funny thing is in the shop environment 3DMAX is not used. It is the bastard child of Autodesk.
Solidworks is predominately used in machine shops these days.They have a SolidCAM that works well for generating G code for CNC usage.
Autodesk also has a newer product called Revit. I have not used it.
Autocad's main customer base is the AEC industry, while 3D-MAX is used in video game and visual production. Solidworks, on the other hand, is used for modeling mechanically detailed structures - like you would produce in a machine shop.
Revit, on the other hand, is used for building information modeling. It's main domain is designing buildings.
Except for Revit and Autocad, which are somewhat interchangeable within their users' domain, none of these products really serve each others core userbase well. Hence, they are not really comparable. It's like saying Word is a bit like Excel since you can compose tables of numbers in each.
If you were to offer one to the core user of the other they would complain as much as if you were giving a steak for a vetenarian to cook.
Sketchup is intended as a 3D "sketching" tool. The post to go this through in detail would be quite long but the gist of it Sketchup does not scale very far in terms of model complexity. You can model e.g. a factory floor or a complex office building in Autocad while still being able to navigate the model. Not so much in Sketchup.
AutoCAD and Sketchup are very different. AutoCAD is vector based for starters. Zoom into a curve in Sketchup and you find that it is segmented. Solids in Sketchup are made up of triangles. In AutoCAD they can be actual solids.
Bricscad has everything AutoCAD has and more such as mechanical design (Inventor like) and sheetmetal and full BIM for things like Architecture and all are still just .dwg!
I have been developing on Bricscad for years and it is far faster with a much less buggy API as well.
Bootup times smash AutoCADs :)
Soon, I'm sure, the capacity will increase and in 20 years all of the articles will be about how to move tech companies to a nicer, less urban city.