@cshentrup@robgalanakis what am I missing here? I skimmed the hype and got to the part where they're going to help widen a freeway and give lip service to transit.
@robgalanakis@cshentrup well it's not unlike the template of culdesac.com, but just a drop or two of windshield bias is enough to ruin the whole barrel.
@cshentrup@robgalanakis sounds like a lot of money, but there are no gods, only monsters. Gated "walkable communities" will probably have good ROI but infill of actual cities would pay dividends (maybe should try that literally.) Short any that build parking.
@cshentrup@enobacon Saying people like Chris Dixon are the brightest minds in SV can mean "SV is filled with idiots, and these people are the kings of the idiots." Which is largely true- their fortunes were built on the rising fortunes of tech in the 90s/00s (those that survived the bubble, which was as much due to luck than wisdom, like if you needed to raise $ at the wrong time). They perpetuated based on speculation and self-dealing. It's hard to be wrong when you're in control
@cshentrup@enobacon Anyway, I'm not going to litigate the history of SV in your mentions, but the idea that these people have won betting against the system is ahistorical. As is that the consumer-facing companies they've backed have have operated to support a model like this, which would require value generation rather than extraction/tax/middlemanning.
@robgalanakis@enobacon I don't care about vague word salad like "against the system". there is a market for housing, particularly dense housing, that isn't being filled due to nimbyism. All that is needed is for capitalists to satisfy consumer demand here. they don't need to be altruists, they just need to fight the idiots blocking housing and preventing the market from working.
@cshentrup@enobacon They are the idiots blocking housing! https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/technology/nimby-housing-silicon-valley-atherton.html I don't see how this type of literal NIMBYism is going to yield positive results- there is too high a capacity and incentive for the relationship to become extractive (as almost all of their consumer-facing companies are). I also don't see how the model scales. This sort of centrally planned high-modernism has a terrible track record. It's not the first time it's been tried.
@robgalanakis@enobacon which of the investors I mentioned are cited in that article? there's a paywall but I'm going to take a guess the answer is zero.
it is nearly impossible for typical consumer companies to become extractive, in any meaningful sense of the word. what negative externalities or rents are you talking about?
@cshentrup@enobacon Andreesen (the 'it's time to build, America' guy, you know). Many other articles about the same letter.
Maybe I have a definition of 'extractive', but I consider companies like Lyft, Caviar, etc., extractive, with many of them creating a model based on abusing/flouting regulation, subsidizing prices, acquiring market share, then juicing prices. This has been the dominant and recommended venture model for well over a decade (though now changing maybe)
@cshentrup@enobacon And as far as brilliance, some of their loudest best, like Opendoor and crypto companies, have been disasters. They weren't just unforeseeable failures; the models were broken, people said they were broken, and they failed for the reasons everyone was saying.
@cshentrup@enobacon Look, I really hope I'm wrong and these work out great, and the model is replicated. But we should be extremely careful before hitching an urbanist wagon to them, or spending our time supporting them. There are a thousand ways for it to go wrong, and very few for it to go right. There are hundreds of failed similar projects, and AFAIK not a single successful one. Beware.
@cshentrup@enobacon I absolutely disagree and this is what I mean by being distracted. When you look at the numbers and timeline involved, it's going to be like a billion+ dollars of subsidy and 15 years to get tens of thousands of units built. This is favorable only to our current broken system. And it's best case (tabula rasa), filled with early adopters, and hard to replicate (capital and political work required). Effort spent on political reforms and incentives would be smarter money.
@robgalanakis@enobacon disagree but your objectively wrong. every data point in the history of this planet across every continent says you are wrong. just accept that you are wrong because you are wrong. You can sit around with your hope while the world burns or you can do something that actually has a chance of working.
@robgalanakis@enobacon yeah buddy, cite any president anywhere in the world that you can get a city to repeal zoning or public parking. I desperately want to be proven wrong and move to that place. The only really impressive thing I have seen is what's happened in Paris over the last decade with bike lanes and even that is pretty modest given the scale of the crisis.
@cshentrup@enobacon We don't need presidents, we just need mayors and councils. Change has to happen bottom-up (this is why these centrally-planned, high-modernist mega-utopias don't plan out, too). Instead of moving to that place, you can work to build it. The upside is you make your environment better for everyone; the downside is it's hard. If you're looking for a savior (from SV no less), and it doesn't pan out, you have no options. It's like Pascal's Wager!
@cshentrup@enobacon I am an urbanist and believe in urbanism because I think most people are pretty awesome. It's a bet on people over everything else. Our car-dominance is a product of the same top-down, capital-based decision-making being advocated here. If you really believe most people are "idiots," I don't see why cities would work as well as they do. It's a strange pair of beliefs I've seen others hold as well. I don't understand it, they seem at odds.
@robgalanakis@cshentrup I'm kinda both-and on this, people are individually and collectively idiots in many ways, but mostly just want to be led, sense of belonging etc, we're just lacking leaders who lead from the front or need the electeds to get out of the way. Progress in Portland is slow right now due to thumbs on scales and bureaucratic inertia, but the adopted policies are five or ten years ahead of anything that's getting done on the street.
@robgalanakis@enobacon this doesn't work because it's a prisoner's dilemma. I've had so many conversations with people in Berkeley and Portland and Olympia, who claim to be progressive and then act like you're a capitalist goon if you propose building apartments in their neighborhood. or taking away their parking. You can't make the transition because they can't picture what the other side of that change looks like. You have to go build that thing from scratch.
@cshentrup@enobacon This is changing rapidly. I've seen it in my own life. What has been need not always be. The change happens slowly and then all at once. It's sad to see smart people despairing and foregoing the tools they have, rather than fighting for their future and hoping for saviors. You can't really do anything to make California Forever a success, and each week we forego incremental change we can affect locally is a week no progress is made.
@robgalanakis@enobacon I think the way it changes rapidly is just like every big change that happens especially in the technology space. You create the new model and people switch to it.
I was the 11th engineer at zendesk and the founders told me about how they tried to propose web-based help desk software to their employer, which sold a boxed help desk software. they were uninterested.
@robgalanakis@enobacon it's also just so much more efficient. You can dial everything up to an 11 and hire people like Jeff speck to come advise like they did at cul-de-sac. cul-de-sac is the best proof I can imagine of this model. it's just brilliant.
@cshentrup@robgalanakis the freeway widening is largely coming from the state machinery, where the popular opinion in the city is definitely against it but also pretty clueless about parking and zoning policy or the layers of crap developers have to wade through, or why we can't competently manage transportation or housing, but 20 culdesac projects at around 800 units each, vs Portland's 1908(or was it 12) plan was for 3M residents (entire population of metro area) between the river and 82nd.
@enobacon@robgalanakis okay but I don't see us doing apprecially better on streets. where is the parking spot removal? where are the protected bike lanes? why is Sandy four lanes?
@cshentrup@robgalanakis#SandyBlvd is scheduled for a repaving but they need to make it a bus-and-turn-only lane diet or popup protected bikeways before they tear it up, & then ask people what they think, adjust the design, repave it & put a next iteration of the separation down &c. We have this capital projects machinery trying to move public opinion of stuff ppl have never seen function, wanting obscene amounts of money to accomplish very little since it won't connect to a usable network...
@cshentrup@robgalanakis this is just a question of management, process, and institutional competency to deliver the level of service that people walking and biking need from a transportation dept. It's simple everyday stuff and a functioning network at a very local level, that the cars-everywhere-always-and-fuck-you-and-drivers-too machine, that is our DOTs' design and capital projects process, simply can't address. And the "public outreach" process would actually reach people at that level.
@cshentrup@robgalanakis I'm just pointing out a handy number for scale, that the city with streetcars running out Belmont and Hawthorne and Barbur and so forth had at one point been building towards before the whole #CarsRuinCities thing.
@cshentrup@enobacon That explains a lot. This is wildly ahistorical- on the consumer side, SV's success has been based heavily on regulatory capture and public market dumping, not 'switching to a better model.' Ie exactly the reason we have car dominance. There are definitely exceptions, and the business software side is a different beast. Not sure why SV engineers think SV software is so special and doesn't engage in the same abuses.
@robgalanakis@enobacon That's a radically flawed analogy. the value of a code base accrues to the company's bottom line which is beneficial to all who have an equity stake in the company. cities are affected by market failures. most obviously, the people who would live in the new apartment aren't there yet to vote on it. If you took a vote to demolish an existing apartment building, they would of course vote against it so there's an asymmetry. very basic game theory.
@robgalanakis@enobacon I mean, there is just objective reality all around you going back over the course of decades. The model I'm proposing empirically works and yours empirically does not.
@robgalanakis@enobacon You could have made a fairly plausible argument before cul-de-sac came along. I would have still said the evidence is massive that you're wrong but you could have at least made the argument. But that ship has sailed.
@cshentrup@enobacon Glad you have everything figured out and one not-yet-opened heavily-subsidized speculative community has confirmed your priors to the exclusion of even being able to listen to an argument against it. You seem like a pleasure. Bye!
@robgalanakis@enobacon You're not listening. I don't know how this project will turn out. I'm only saying that the odds of success are greater than zero where is the odds of success of your proposal are literally zero.
@cshentrup@enobacon I don't know why people who have had such good fortune and gotten so much from society at large, repay that back to society with such disdain, negativity, and despair. I would have thought we owe it to everyone else to keep working but 🤷 I'd suggest you really consider your place, privilege, and responsibility in the things you complain about. Maybe you'll feel differently one day; don't foreclose on the possibility.
Add comment