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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

This article is very strange.

> Sidewalk Labs, which provides urban technology infrastructure, is planning a 4.9-acre smart city along Toronto’s harbor front, a project that has already faced opposition from locals over concerns of data privacy.

> [...]

> Sidewalk Labs outlined its project for a light railway transit, 2,500 homes where 40 percent would be below market price, and a tall-timber factory they project will create 4,000 jobs.

So is it a "smart city" or just a light railway, homes, and a factory? If it is the latter how does that invade privacy? If it is the former then the article is super light on details.

This article is just all over the place. Hard to form any kind of opinion on this without more facts.

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Torontonian here.

Lack of details and vagueness describes all the communication about sidewalk lab's project, not just this article.

If I had to guess the reporter doesn't really know and can't really find out.

Note that from the quotes in this article this most recent iteration seems to be a surprise to the city as well.

I'm not sure Google knows either. "Smarty city" just smacks of vague buzzwordy-ness idealism. What is it exactly? Are you just going build some condos and stick some wifi around? How is that really different than any other modern city?

This.

There's been a huge turnover this year, with people quitting the committee out of protest for an absolute lack of oversight into how Google will be using the "smart data" and piss-poor management by the city.

From what I can gather, some politicians want to add a "success" to their career with zero care about the long term consequences. I'd like to see every politician involved in this put their entire net worth into the project so that they have to care about the long-term success. People simply don't care about other people's money.

I'd have loved to see Kathleen Wynne go bankrupt over the hydro projects.

The impression I’ve always gotten is that it’s a combination company town (in the old, bad sense) and a testbed for massive surveillance. I think all of the rest is fluid to the point of insensibility.

"Company town" in the old, bad sense doesn't make sense. That's the sense in which the company owns all the land, the only stores are the companies, etc.

It's hard to get good numbers for a cities values, but City of Toronto property taxes are a 4.3 billion dollar line item in the budget and are probably less than 2% assessed value on average (it varies from 0.6 to 2.4 depending on building type). That's a pretty easy lower bound on the real estate in the city being worth 200 billion. Even Google can't afford that.

I’m not sure why you’re taking a discussion about a 4.9 acre “smart city” and conflating it with purchasing all of Toronto. The “company town” nature of the place doesn’t require it to be all of Toronto after all, if that’s where you live and work.

It does when the defining properties of a company town include not being able to easily go elsewhere, and it's trivial to walk/bike/drive/take public transit from the 4.9 acres currently under consideration to the rest of Toronto.

I thought the bad parts of company towns only work when the town is isolated and your paid in google points. If you can just drive 10 minutes to a non-company town store and paid in cash, where is the lock in?

The combination of your home and job, coupled with the surveillance and likely TOS aspects. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in some ways it’s even worse.

Proximity, convenience, habit and time generally incentivizes people to behave in certain ways. I have a supermarket that I go to only because it's 50m away from where I live. Its selection is marginally worse and if there were a better one right next to it, I'd go to that instead, but there isn't. The next one is just enough distance/time away from my regular route to work that I don't feel it's worth the effort unless there's something really specific that I need. This is the kind of calculus that everybody uses to decide where to buy groceries. In a Google "town" with conveniently placed Google markets with a sufficient selection to cover most or all demographics and even a marginally higher cost would manage to capture the vast majority of residents.

That isn't the economic trap of living in a company town, that is like living in the more expensive area of town. So the company town effect doesn't happen. They can only raise their prices too much before the cost of goods outweighs the cost of inconvenience.

I really doubt that any sort of real 'company town' effect will happen.

Google is not in the "smart city" business. They are in the monetize information business, everything else is just smoke and mirrors.

Why is revenue the normal way -- lease property -- insufficient such that they need a share of tax revenue also?

And how would that work in practice? The city cuts a deal to lower taxes for just that development? Or the treasury cuts a check to Google every year?

You're reading a wire summary of a report on a leaked document that hasn't been made publicly available, that's why it's so vague.

The original piece that reported the leaked presentation is paywalled, but here is the link: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/02/14/googles-sidewalk...

A non-paywalled but more detailed summary is here: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/15/news/alphabets-s...

Outline.com is able to access the star piece for no apparent reason: https://outline.com/BGYJSq

Thank you. The piece clarifies things, the financing mechanism is very common in the states (TIF), but the payee is always a public entity that may or may not (almost always it is) paying off bonds held by private parties.

Tax Increment Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_increment_financing

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