SimCity, but with Permits

https://permit.petercai.com/

106•pcai•1h ago

Comments

bruce511•36m ago

I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.

Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.

So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood.

But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.

And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.

cyberax•32m ago

> We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.

Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?

Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.

webdood90•29m ago

> Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages.

Wow, that's a new one

cyberax•1m ago

Not really. Urbanists admit it, they just don't like to talk about it.

Hell, there are even consulting companies that provide guidance on how to upzone the city to squeeze most taxes out of new density.

BugsJustFindMe•25m ago

I'm pretty sure you just said "If you make a place nicer to live, then more people will want to live there, so we should stop making places nicer to live."

Anyway, nobody who has ever been to a major French city believes that they've tried to increase core density. They famously have building height restrictions all over the place. Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.

clickety_clack•18m ago

Supply and demand. If you don’t want to increase supply, then you can reduce prices by turning the city into the kind of place that nobody wants to live in.

BugsJustFindMe•15m ago

AKA the gunshots theory of rent control. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/firing-gunshots-to-keep-rent-...

cyberax•4m ago

I repeated the same argument here many times. But the reality is that density creates a vicious cycle of price increases. Higher density provides easier access to talent for companies, so they concentrate in urban cores. This in turn results in the only desirable jobs (and housing) being within the commute distance from the cores. So more people move in, resulting in even greater advantage for companies. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Think about this: EVERY large European city now has a "housing crisis". And nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free. In Japan it's often _literally_ free.

Want an example of a city that doesn't have a housing crisis and is comparable in population to Paris or Berlin? Houston, TX.

scottious•16m ago

that seems like complete BS claim. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence

increased density and transit increases demand for that area. high demand != shortage.

What are you suggesting exactly? low density and car-dependency is the solution to our housing problems?

cyberax•3m ago

> high demand != shortage.

Yes, it just means higher costs.

sheikhnbake•31m ago

In the US we have insane bureaucracy as well as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt politicians. Never let them say you can't have both

kspacewalk2•22m ago

And a centrally planned housing economy in the self-described capitalist free-market paradise.

JumpCrisscross•9m ago

> the self-described capitalist free-market paradise

Americans have not even identified as this for at least a generation.

xnx•26m ago

It evolves. Laws, rules, regulations accrue but are very rarely re-evaluated to see if they serve their original purpose. It's easier for most lawmakers to leave things alone. Eventually, the state declines or fails under the weight of a century of well-intentioned (maybe) laws that have outlived their usefullness.

Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.

sdeframond•16m ago

> to set a 20 year expiration on laws

Wait, do we need to pass a law for this?

TedDoesntTalk•3m ago

This might be a good idea for marriages, too.

chrisco255•4m ago

That would be chaos. Imagine needing to sign a 10, 20 or 30 year agreement 6 months before a law expires.

kspacewalk2•25m ago

There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.

solidsnack9000•15m ago

Maybe we would be better off in the US if zoning, permitting, &c was hoisted up to the state level.

mixdup•1m ago

Fun fact, that's basically the case in large swaths of the country. Many states do not have home rule, which means counties can't set zoning rules. So in mostly rural areas of these states, it's wide open unless the state has decided to set rules or to be benevolent enough to grant the county the right to set zoning rules

weitendorf•23m ago

This is a particularly Western democratic trend. Japan and Singapore both have their own models for democracy (ish, functionally both are one-party states and it's dubious how democratic their electoral processes or fair their justice systems truly are by Western standards). Each builds things differently, and gets it done.

SimianSci•19m ago

Everyone wants to be the one with the power to remake the world according to their own designs. Everyone also doesn't want to be the one being remade according to the designs of others.

wat10000•14m ago

It's really weird that in "the last of the free" it's considered completely normal for the government to tell you that you can't build a shed bigger than a certain size.

blobbers•13m ago

Or when things get done it is because of corruption? And the constraints are put in place to protect $, aka not democracy but actually plutocracy.

We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.

paimapi•7m ago

Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere.

I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.

A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper

teeray•4m ago

[delayed]

JamesCoyne•34m ago

Am i missing something? How do you add power poles?

Nevermark•34m ago

I would actually love a Sim City designed for realistic economic experimentation. A population of 1000’s of professions all acting self-interestedly with their various characteristics, motives, social and economic arrangements.

With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!

2OEH8eoCRo0•28m ago

Dwarf City

Songs of Syx is closer but still too micro

bombcar•22m ago

SimDwarfCity, basically.

I've heard the soviet one is closer to what you're looking for - https://www.sovietrepublic.net

bob1029•33m ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo

sdellis•33m ago

This is brilliant, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend time playing it as a game. No one in my town wants to run for mayor since it is a thankless and impossible job that pays a fraction of the cost of living here. There is no fun or joy or escapism in being hated by everyone and not being able to please anyone.

jstummbillig•33m ago

"free, because you are loved"

And because LLMs are making love cheaper.

Angus_Sugna•31m ago

Brilliant idea. Welcome to the real world and your annoying neighbours.

solyin•31m ago

Couldn't get past the new city screen where I'm choosing "Blank Slate" or the other one. I assume theres a button to press odd I scroll down, but scrolling is locked. Fun idea tho. There's a Factorio Mod where the biters attack you with paperwork instead of trying to kill you directly that this makes me think of.

doublerabbit•8m ago

Same issue, can't scroll nor locate a button to play.

zamadatix•31m ago

Screen turns largely black after a short bit of loading the city with these errors:

  .WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_OPERATION: glRenderbufferStorageMultisample: Texture total allocation size is too large.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  228[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElementsInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  11[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElements: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  10[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArrays: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glBlitFramebuffer: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 WebGL: too many errors, no more errors will be reported to the console for this context.

BatmansMom•30m ago

A little too much going on all at once in the beginning. For a complex game like this I think you have to start small and slowly introduce functionality. Why are so many buttons available to me from minute 1? I'm not using them.

proggy•20m ago

I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork.

richardfey•29m ago

Was it inspired by this?

https://housing.over.pizza/

darksim905•29m ago

Please god stop making the x to close windows on the middle or the left. Majority of people who using computers are using Linux or Windows where it's on the upper right and it's a muscle memory. You aren't being clever or helping. I get that in some cases you may want people to read the information you have and pause a bit more, but it just irritates me and does not make me want to engage with whatever it is if I have to waste so much more time closing every window as a result. It literally wastes an exponential amount of time.

If this was an installable, moddable game, this would be cool. Further, I'm not sure why they could not add this as an existing module or feature within SimCity 3000 itself. It's a nice little wanna be clone. But playing a browser game just doesn't feel like a game.

zabriel_goss•27m ago

The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.

But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.

This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.

crooked-v•9m ago

I think the bigger reason the original "EPCOT as a city" didn't happen is that once Walt passed, everyone else in the company looked at the plan and knew it would be a bottomless money pit from day 1.

ramesh31•18m ago

Guys please just add a line to your Claude.md "never use bordered cards" to avoid the vibe look

ajkjk•16m ago

seriously

blobbers•18m ago

I haven't tried the game, but this is slightly hilarious and awesome.

I've often wondered about this kind of thing. When I go to an airport, it seems strange to me that each one is different with some of them having elaborate train systems, or multiple runways.

The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator?

Sim City was a fantastic simulation from the stand point of a game, but I'm curious; if you build a city simulator and let it grow organically (game of life style) can you put in sufficient regulation/parameters that get you to where we are today?

And if so, is there a simulation that shows us a way to get us to a better tomorrow?

nkrisc•15m ago

> The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator?

Optimistically, because each one has a different optimal solution given all the unique constraints for each airport project.

Also, airports aren't just built and then done. Often the cities around them will grow and the airports will need to expand and adapt to new constraints, sometimes many decades after they were first built.

pinevale•17m ago

We had another person vibecode a very similar thing few weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864

Both are similarly unplayable, but I guess it's the thought that counts.

Aboutplants•15m ago

Idea, digitize a town/city and apply all current codes, permits restrictions etc, and then run simulations based on permitting changes

rootlocus•13m ago

How do I turn off the music?

bel8•3m ago

For those who are curious, this is what I could gather:

    - Three.js for rendering
    - react 18+ UI built with Vite
    - charts are custom, no libs
    - main bundle size is a js file of 1MB (290KB gziped)
    - No router, no redux/zustand
    - saves using indexedDB + service-worker

chem83•2m ago

Cool project!

Tangential: Elon was tweeting recently about how he blames bureaucracy for the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor's failure (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2112102304782680107). Whether that is ignoring other major problems with the plan or not, there's been bi-partisan criticism of how the traditional western democracy has severely slowed down infrastructure investment (see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...). I see a lot of people going to China after being oblivious to it for years mostly due to western propaganda and being in awe with how fast the country has advanced its industry and public infrastructure with superior high speed rail, power grid, and other investments. I wonder if the west will ever find a way to adapt the dynamism that an autocracy affords to its system of government (which sadly has been increasingly described as an aristocracy/plutocracy/corporatocracy/kleptocracy).

Applied to my own company's job posting under a fake name. Rejected in 6 minutes

You can now enjoy TUI Radio with all the best features

Waste tsunami. Water and the hidden cost of AI data centres

Pac Learning Game (2025)

Show HN: qrsticks

Digital Freedom Across the World

Mouse against Opus 5.5 in an agent harness. 13x faster

Anthropic S-1 Shows Red-Hot Growth, Risks and Computing Costs

Upcoming Critical PHP Security Release

Building a Robot Owl with No Robotics Experience

A Framework for Peace in Ukraine

Ask HN: Is anyone using agents to test a better version of democracy?

GTA 6 Digital Pre-Orders Climb to 6.45M, PlayStation Holds 74% Share

Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?

Blanking Beavers: Results and Open Problems

Links Browser

GitHub Actions Feedback Survey

Does anyone else feel Spotify's UI is just frustrating?

Show HN: Modula-9, a Wirth-family language designed for auditing AI-written code

A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents

Trump administration holds up Patriot missile transfers for Ukraine

Show HN: Apple Reminders MCP – native read/write via ReminderKit

Coding.Snapsta – 430 free, zero-dependency HTML/CSS templates without signup

Must do's for your startup culture

I tell the IMF the Singularity has begun

List of Games Included with Windows

RDP to Your Mac

Microsoft Announces OneDrive CLI

Parano1d: Transparent Proof-Carrying State over Binary Tower Fields

Lego Engineered the Perfect Plaything