[HN Gopher] 2nd City Zoning
___________________________________________________________________
2nd City Zoning
Author : michaefe
Score : 217 points
Date : 2023-12-27 00:02 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (secondcityzoning.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (secondcityzoning.org)
| zbrozek wrote:
| Wow this is amazing. Clicking on zones is also more informative
| than I expected. Massive kudos. Also, it's nice touch to let me
| turn on SimCity music. Fantastic all around.
| ssgodderidge wrote:
| Here's the GitHub repo [1] for those who are code-curious.
|
| https://github.com/datamade/second-city-zoning
| burlesona wrote:
| Very cool visualization! A meta comment here is that you look at
| the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no real sense,
| except that they were applied as the best fit to whatever
| happened to be on each lot at the time the codes was adopted.
| It's sad how much our local governments main job is to try and
| freeze everything in place and prevent change.
| hammock wrote:
| >look at the shapes of the zoning districts and they make no
| real sense
|
| ???
|
| Commercial zoning aligns with the major streets of the grid,
| per design.
|
| Industrial zones along the Chicago River, where barges can
| access, and rail lines.
|
| Residential everywhere else.
|
| What doesn't make sense?
| csdvrx wrote:
| > It's sad how much our local governments main job is to try
| and freeze everything in place and prevent change.
|
| I wish we had mixed zoning outside the rare cities like NYC: it
| would offer at least one scalable option to reduce urban sprawl
| - say when lots are demolished.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Plenty of mixed zoning in New Orleans. Unsurprisingly for a
| French-founded city, the older areas (not just the French
| Quarter) use the traditional shops-on-ground-floor-living-
| quarters-above method. And they have a lot of small
| commercial streets within their neighborhoods, which are
| demarcated more by the larger divided streets (many of which
| had streetcar lines running down the space between - in most
| places, it's the "median", but in NO, it's the "neutral
| ground". No, I have no idea why they call it that - never
| lived there but go quite often).
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| The neutral ground was so named because it demarcated
| neighborhood boundaries between French (Acadian) and
| American neighborhoods.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| If you look at the north and south sides where there are large
| swathes of green residential neighborhoods, you can see they
| are regularly divided by blue commercial corridors along the
| cardinal directions. Chicago's grid design was adapted from the
| original Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into
| square mile sections. Those blue strips are one mile apart, and
| in denser neighborhoods an additional blue strip exists midway
| at the half mile mark. This organizing principle is what made
| Chicago a city of neighborhoods, since each section or quarter
| section is bounded by commercial thoroughfares on each side,
| and the neighborhood turns inward. The section line and half
| section line thoroughfares are wider roads which permit more
| traffic volume. I think it's a good compromise between
| facilitating traffic flow and also isolating it from the
| contained neighborhoods where the bulk of people live.
|
| As far as freezing the zoning in place, that's not really true
| as downtown areas were once like the neighborhoods and were
| subsequently upzoned as density and desirability increased. The
| original zoning plan is intact in the neighborhoods because
| there just hasn't been a desire or need to upzone them (yet).
| Chicago is known as a relatively pro-development city which is
| flexible on things other cities are inflexible on.
| chongli wrote:
| _It's sad how much our local governments main job is to try and
| freeze everything in place and prevent change._
|
| That's not really what the local government's main job is
| supposed to be. Local government is supposed to be a venue for
| regular people to participate in the kinds of everyday
| decisions that affect their lives. But then it ends up mainly
| representing local property owners and developers who are its
| most interested (in the sense of stake or investment, not
| curiosity) constituents. It is these special interests who try
| their hardest, not necessarily to prevent change, but to
| protect and grow their investments.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Local government is supposed to be a venue for regular
| people to participate in the kinds of everyday decisions that
| affect their lives.
|
| Because it takes time and energy to sit through public
| hearings, something most people working manual labor or
| evening/night jobs with variable schedules don't have (i.e.
| lower income/wealth people with few investments).
| alexb_ wrote:
| Plus, future people don't have a say. If something you do
| could help 400 new people live a happy life if they moved
| there, but it angers the 40 people who already live there,
| you're never going to get the popular vote of the 40 people
| who are there because _future people can 't be counted_.
| alexb_ wrote:
| The zoning makes a lot of sense. The place where white people
| live is zoned to have nice, single-family houses with a huge
| yard that takes up a ton of space and is given outsized say in
| local politics. The place where black people live is zoned to
| be as underfunded and crowded as possible on the other side of
| the highway.
|
| Mission accomplished for the local governments who decided how
| zoning should work.
| davidw wrote:
| This is sarcastic, but it's very much how it works in a lot
| of places, and it no accident.
|
| This book is a nice deep dive into how that came about:
| https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-
| kahlenber...
| alexb_ wrote:
| I'm being "sarcastic" in that I completely agree with you.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| Why is this modded down? It's absolutely the truth. The local
| governments here are doing exactly what their (more affluent
| and politically connected) constituents are demanding of
| them.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| There's a growing argument that most of the things we think
| zoning is protecting us from, it isn't really necessary for,
| and that without those risks there's no justification for
| government to have the power at all.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Political take: even if many people would like mixed zoning in
| dense urban centers (with commerce at the street level, and
| housing above), the familiarity of zoning from games like SimCity
| makes mixed zoning less legible.
|
| Laws mandating parking space and accessibility requirements add
| to the problem to make it unfixable: any relaxation (allowing
| mixed zoning at time t) could create future legal and social
| problems (not enough street parking at time t+N)
| aflag wrote:
| cities: skylines 2 has mixed zones and it's easy to visualise.
| Just a matter of picking a new colour.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| That is because American zoning is often use-prescriptive.
|
| Japanese zoning is pretty easy to visualize because all zoning
| types are defined by intensity level, where high intensity
| zones also allow all lower intensity uses. So rather than a
| series of venn diagrams, the structure is more like a pyramid.
| mminer237 wrote:
| American zoning is typically--though not always--cumulative
| (aka Euclidean) as well. I believe Chicago is an exception to
| the norm though. The problem is also that people just don't
| often want to live in a commercial or industrial zone even if
| they have the right.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Housing in less ideal places makes up the bedrock of
| affordable housing. The reality is that eventually a city
| becomes too large to house everyone in a house with a large
| yard on a cul-de-sac.
|
| The entire affordability crisis is driven by bougie tastes
| pricing people out by eliminating the entire bottom rung of
| the market. In many places the starter home simply doesn't
| exist anymore.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| To get to the root cause, you have to go one level
| further.
|
| People (broadly speaking) want to live near people at
| least at their socioeconomic level, or higher than
| themselves. People want to live away from people below
| their socioeconomic level. At least for the purposes of
| their kids' commingling in public schools.
|
| A society with greater differences between its members,
| whether it be due to skin tone, income, wealth,
| ethnicity, religion, language, etc, will result in more
| stratified development. Not necessarily, but apparently
| quite likely.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean there is a housing crisis in egalitarian
| Scandanavia as well. In fact aside from Japan every
| single developed country has a housing crisis.
| tptacek wrote:
| How does "not enough street parking" creating legal problems?
| Most of the north side of Chicago is mixed-use, medium-density,
| and street-parking reliant; it works fine (these are some of
| the most valuable and economically vital in the city).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| there is a common conception in America that there is a
| 'right' to parking availability, which is not really a thing
| anywhere else.
|
| in practice, 'not enough parking' often means 'not enough
| parking, that I am personally willing to pay for, in a
| location that I am willing to park in'. which could mean
| anything from 'all the spots are taken within a half mile' to
| 'I don't really want to pay for a $2 garage one block over
| because the street parking is free'
| toast0 wrote:
| There's some sort of idea that everyone has to like what I
| like. Personally, I dislike paying for parking, and I
| dislike being in a setting thick with people and
| buildings... So I'm going to be out in the suburbs or
| exurbs or semi-rural and not bother you all in the urbs.
|
| Sometimes there is some reason for me to go into the city,
| and I'll try not to drive the whole way, because it will
| upset me when I have to pay for parking when I get there.
| But if that works, I think that's part of the point.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I don't think this is an issue of everyone needing the
| same preferences so much as a straight forward economic
| one. In the US we dramatically subsidize cars.
|
| One of those subsidies is free parking. That preference
| might not even be obvious if you don't point out what are
| negative outcomes from that subsidy (for instance many
| progressives will demand parking mandates to get housing
| built, trading 1 real preference, equitable housing for
| one that they don't prefer, cheap ice ownership).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Taking parking minimums out of the zoning code is about
| not hoisting people's desire onto developers and people
| who buy or rent those units without using it, and
| requiring car owners to put their money where their mouth
| is.
| hibikir wrote:
| Zoning in other countries is easy to visualize, even though
| it's completely alien to the Sim City ways: I recall being
| disappointed in the first game, and SC2000, because there was
| no way to make my home city. Residential zoning? My hometown
| doesn't have such designation at all, apartment buildings have
| commercial underneath in almost all cases, and office buildings
| and apartments end up sharing walls.
|
| Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even remotely
| seriously: Even in modern city builders, nobody attempts to
| represent the amount of space dedicated to surface lots in the
| US, because it'd look awful. It's always a fun exercise to, go
| to Google Maps, take a picture of the downtown of, say, St
| Louis, and then coloring every surface parking, or multi-level
| building solely dedicated to housing cars for commuters and
| sports events attendees: It's well over 30% of the surface
| area. Then people wonder why the city is dead after 5 pm
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even
| remotely seriously
|
| Hilariously, it did:
| https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/9/4316222/simcity-lead-
| desig...
|
| > "Our game was going to be really boring if it was
| proportional in terms of parking lots," SimCity lead designer
| Stone Librande says
| silvestrov wrote:
| My favorite example of this is how much of Apple's old HQ
| that is taken up by parking:
|
| http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=loc:37.332+-122.02964
|
| Compare size of parking to the size of office buildings,
| which even includes a nice green area that most business
| buildings don't have.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Property must be really cheap there to not even consider
| underground parking.
| silvestrov wrote:
| There is also underground parking! There are two entrance
| and exits: one right of bottom building, the other is
| west of the south-west building, next to the store.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That link didn't work for me.
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/mpwhpRhxX8wFzG9g7?g_st=ic
| CrendKing wrote:
| Wait, so commercial zones are supposed to be only in strips and
| around street, and industrial zones are not actually far away
| from residential? Guess I always played SC2000 wrong back in the
| days.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The trick was to use railway and no roads!
| samstave wrote:
| What does Patchouli smell like in binary?
| spanktheuser wrote:
| Like foresight.
| vkou wrote:
| You want to keep your industrial zones away from nice
| residential ones. It's fine for the paupers to be breathing in
| zinc.
| hughesjj wrote:
| _industrial revolution intensifies_
|
| east sideeeee
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/12/blowing-
| wind-...
| Schiendelman wrote:
| And now, of course, we have industrial and residential often
| in the same building!
| db48x wrote:
| Putting industrial far away from your residential is a classic
| mistake that causes all kinds of traffic problems, but also the
| industrial in a real city is going to mostly be relatively
| innocuous. It'll be car dealerships, car repair, machine shops,
| furniture making, data centers, warehouses, etc, etc. In Sim
| City industrial was always giant factories with belching
| smokestacks, steel foundries, chemical plants, coal gas, and so
| on.
| rifty wrote:
| Something I enjoy in SimCity2000 is that you can avoid the
| traffic problems by not making a complete network of road
| connections between the residential and the jobs. This works
| because commuters can 'spawn' from a single residential tile
| despite pulling from the pool of residents on the entire map!
| So you can zone single residential tiles on isolated
| industrial road networks for minimal traffic issues.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Jokes on us, the mayor set all of the budgets to 50% and the
| transportation manager was right: we regret it.
| yreg wrote:
| Dismiss petitioner
| tptacek wrote:
| This is very neat. A thing that's a little crazymaking in all of
| these maps though: one of the most important things you're
| looking at in a zoning map is the distinction between single-
| family lots (exclusively for detached houses) and multi-family
| lots. You have to zoom in to the single-neighborhood level to see
| that distinction here (between paler green and darker green), and
| it's subtle.
|
| It's nowhere nearly as bad as my neighboring municipality's
| zoning map, though:
|
| https://www.oak-park.us/sites/default/files/zoning/2021-02-2...
|
| I'm convinced this map was colored specifically to obscure that
| distinction.
|
| The links to zoning variance documents in the planned development
| (red) zones are a really nice touch!
| db48x wrote:
| What's wrong with your neighborhood's zoning?
| devilbunny wrote:
| > car repair, machine shops, furniture making
|
| None of which is really unbearable to live somewhat near to
| (unlike heavy industrial, they do shut down at night), but
| they're often pretty locally polluting. Brake dust, metal
| shavings, wood finishes with VOC's, paints, and then all
| sorts of chemicals used as solvents for cleaning, rust
| removers, etc.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| I actually like to be able to walk home after dropping off
| the car for inspection at the shop. Those pollutants should
| be pretty contained, we're not in the 70es any more?
| db48x wrote:
| If there are enough solvents in use to be detectable off-
| site, then the industry is in the wrong zone.
| lostapathy wrote:
| What about those examples generates brake dust more than
| any other business? Mechanics replacing brakes doesn't
| generate new brake dust.
|
| How does it bother the outside world if there's metal
| shavings in a machine shop? They save and recycle those for
| - they aren't just dumping them in the street.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Mechanics replacing brakes clean up areas with lots of
| it.
| tptacek wrote:
| A lot, but my critique is of the map itself, not of the
| zoning.
| db48x wrote:
| Ah. I agree that the map is not amazing :). Color choices
| could be better too.
| tptacek wrote:
| Fun challenge: find the non-SFZ residential on that map.
| You're not allowed to use the eyedropper tool.
| cobertos wrote:
| What would you want more of our of that map? It looks like a
| lot of zoning maps I have seen but I can't think of any way to
| improve them other than consistency and a better viewing medium
| (not PDF)
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| It took me a moment but I think OP is trying to distinguish
| areas where single family homes are allowed/required from
| those where multi-family units are allowed.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Are you sure it's not just that there isn't enough gradients to
| tell?
|
| Within 1 block of my house there are townhomes, a mansion,
| single family homes, 2 parks, mid rises, a hotel, real
| commercial, a high rise, an sro and a school.
|
| The commercial, parks and hotel are accurately represented but
| only 1 set of townhouses are otherwise. And that's the set that
| takes up a whole block.
|
| Otherwise the mixed blocks all come up as single family. Which
| might just be a fidelity problem.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| The parks and school are ~mostly correct as well.
| tptacek wrote:
| Oh, the data is good, I just think there has to be a better
| color scheme for the residential areas (it needs to be green
| to fit the SimCity aesthetic, but there must be something
| else you can do).
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I'm not convinced the data is good. At least in my
| neighborhood the zoning requirements are address by address
| and I'd be easily convinced coming up with a coloring
| scheme that attributes everything correctly is a hard
| computer science problem.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm just saying, to look at this map, you'd think Beverly
| and Lincoln Park were comparably zoned.
| jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote:
| > _I'd be easily convinced coming up with a coloring
| scheme that attributes everything correctly is a hard
| computer science problem._
|
| It's not a computer science problem at all. It's
| literally just a matter of having a uniue color for each
| type of zone.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I looked it up this morning. The cities own map has
| accurate data for my area. They get around the color
| issue by overlaying the actual zoning code number over
| the zones.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| I like the idea of not using color to encode a high level
| of detail. SC2K breaks it down into dense and light zones
| (and changes the color accordingly) and that's it.
|
| There should be more detailed info in the tooltip for each
| parcel.
| arthurdenture wrote:
| Is it possible that many of those uses predate the current
| zoning? There are numerous buildings in Chicago that would
| not be permitted by their current zoning.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I just looked it up on Chicagos map and no, at least the
| half dozen things I checked were all properly zoned.
| lukas099 wrote:
| That's crazy to me that you have all that within a block of
| where you live. Are you in an East Coast city or something?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Chicago. My house is on this map.
| zappb wrote:
| Oak Park has a history behind the zoning. Not a pleasant one.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| So does all of Chicago.
| zappb wrote:
| Yeah it's kind of shameful to be honest.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I don't know what you're referring to, but I'm curious as I
| moved to Chicago relatively recently. Could you elaborate?
| martijnvds wrote:
| Most likely: racism/segregation.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Chicago was one of the places restricted covenants were
| first struck down in the US, so the city political
| machine used a combination of zoning & public works
| (notably highway construction & public housing) to keep
| the city segregated and to limit the political power of
| Black people.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Wild how often a viaduct or train track separates a Black
| neighborhood from a neighboring non-Black neighborhood.
| tptacek wrote:
| You don't want to get me started on this.
| nikanj wrote:
| The phrasing I liked the best was "the area colored pale green
| are reserved for families who qualify for a seven-digit
| mortage"
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would bet 90% of the properties in the pale green section
| of the linked map are worth much less than $1M (technically
| the bar would be $1.25M for a $1M mortgage at 20% down since
| it would be a jumbo).
|
| In Zillow, choosing recently sold houses only within last 60
| days shows mostly $300k to $600k detached single family
| houses, with a few $1M+ houses in the northeast section
| (I-90/94 seems to be the demarcation of most $1M+ homes).
| TMWNN wrote:
| A Reddit post by me:
|
| >A Detroit News columnist playing the city-management computer
| game SimCity "found that Godzilla attacking the city in the 1972
| Detroit scenario caused less destruction than the mayoralty of
| Coleman Young".
| <https://www.reddit.com/r/Detroit/comments/3r3dtl/a_detroit_n...>
| tptacek wrote:
| That's not really fair; he was mayor from the early 1970s all
| the way into the 1990s, a period that captured the peak of
| panic selling and white flight (not just in Detroit but across
| the midwest) _and_ the deindustrialization and hollowing-out of
| the Detroit auto industry.
| moduspol wrote:
| Was the mayor completely helpless to these phenomena?
|
| I mean it's only in hindsight that we can look back and say
| that these things happened. At the time, they were slowly
| happening over many years. Surely someone who served as mayor
| for decades may have had _some_ power to help stem "white
| flight" and deindustrialization.
|
| A pattern I've seen a lot especially in big US cities is
| hard-leaning leadership getting elected, leading to many
| people who are capable of leaving doing so. This makes it
| even easier to elect hard-leaning leadership, which then
| makes even more of the same people leave. It creates a self-
| reinforcing cycle, and then residents of these cities end up
| blaming their issues on anything other than what they voted
| for. As a result, I'm skeptical of claims like these.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, in both instances.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Where's the Disasters menu?
|
| I think I found Godzilla!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYNfFh24i4
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Dunno, but it looks like someone built an arcology at Marina
| City.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| This is something I've been meaning to do with my city to show
| how bad residential zoning is. Kudos to whoever made this.
| alexb_ wrote:
| https://gisapps.chicago.gov/mapchicago/ has more information.
| Your city probably also has a GIS page - just look up "gis
| <city>" and you will probably find it.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| In general, that link does have more information. But if one
| wants to learn about how individual blocks or areas are zoned,
| the OP's site (https://secondcityzoning.org) is much easier to
| use and seems to offer more information, too.
| resonantjacket5 wrote:
| Pretty nice website of chicagos zoning
|
| Fyi there's an initiative to create a nationwide (USA) zoning map
| https://www.zoningatlas.org/
| veucast wrote:
| wow, impressive. Colors could be better, but overall, it's pretty
| informative and cool.
| theogravity wrote:
| Search button doesn't work for me on mobile safari. Using the
| find me link does, but hard to tell if the map was centered
| around my address or not.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I thought so too but there just wasn't a visual indication that
| it did anything. The map definitely moved.
| theogravity wrote:
| Find me actually showed me the zoning, but not search.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The originally submitted title ('Chicago zoning in the style of
| SimCity' or words to that effect) was much more informative.
| sedatk wrote:
| To be fair, this is a great web site, but the it doesn't look
| like SimCity 2000 at all apart from some icons here and there.
| I'm glad that SimCity inspired the web site's creators, but
| nowhere near to call the web site "SimCity style". Maybe I'm
| missing something?
| k1t wrote:
| You're probably missing the fact that SimCity and SimCity
| 2000 are different games. In particular the original was a 2D
| overhead view (like TFA), but 2000 was a 3D isometric view.
|
| Surprisingly only 4 years apart though.
| sedatk wrote:
| The creators of the web site specifically mention SimCity
| 2000 flavor for their inspiration. But regardless, let's
| assume that they wanted to imitate the original SimCity:
| having a 2D street map doesn't make something automatically
| SimCity style. Otherwise, every map app would be SimCity
| style. Again, great site. I see some icons from SimCity,
| but I don't see a web page in SimCity style, hence my
| objection to mentioning "SimCity style" in the title.
| cmason wrote:
| Why are all the `y`s missing from the text in Chrome but not in
| Safari?
| pattle wrote:
| I've built something kind of similar to this for the UK which
| shows prices of post codes, so you can see what are the cheap /
| expensive areas in a town or city.
|
| https://postcodeprices.com/cambridgeshire/cambridge
| voicedYoda wrote:
| As a Chicagoan, i approve
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| "the color scheme: green for residential, blue for commercial and
| yellow for industrial."
|
| Meanwhile, a boatload of the map is red.
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(page generated 2023-12-27 23:02 UTC)