SimCity, but with Permits

https://permit.petercai.com/

158•pcai•1h ago

Comments

bruce511•1h 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•56m 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•52m ago

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

Wow, that's a new one

cyberax•25m 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•49m 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•42m 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•39m ago

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

cyberax•28m 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•40m 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•27m ago

> high demand != shortage.

Yes, it just means higher costs.

scottious•13m ago

again, higher costs != shortage. It just means "desirable"

Just build more of the thing that people want!

fortzi•14m ago

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

Density doesn’t cause housing shortage. A housing shortage creates motivation to increase density.

sheikhnbake•55m 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•46m ago

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

JumpCrisscross•32m ago

> the self-described capitalist free-market paradise

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

chrisco255•22m ago

Just because its heavily regulated doesn't mean it is centrally planned. Housing isn't decided at the federal level. Even city and county commissions that largely decide fate of large, new projects have to abide by state laws or executive orders from governors that sometimes overrule them. And as long as you propose a project that fits zoning rules on the specific parcel you own, you get a permit to build your dream house.

And if one city, county or state says no to your commercial or industrial venture, it's nice that you can shop other states that might love to have you.

xnx•50m 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•40m ago

> to set a 20 year expiration on laws

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

TedDoesntTalk•27m ago

This might be a good idea for marriages, too.

chrisco255•28m ago

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

kspacewalk2•49m 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•39m ago

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

mixdup•25m 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

scottious•20m ago

YES. I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.

People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.

All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings

The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".

This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.

weitendorf•46m 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.

cortesoft•15m ago

We still build lots of things here in the United States, too. While many people can point to examples of projects that couldn't get off the ground due to red tape, you can also look around and see a lot of projects that are being built.

SimianSci•43m 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•38m 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.

chrisco255•20m ago

Yeah well you can imagine it would be a problem if I built a 20 story shed in my suburban backyard.

blobbers•37m 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•31m 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

tqi•15m ago

but do you think restrictive zoning and onerous permitting requirements would have prevented that? It's not like laws against murder prevented lynchings, I think in most cases these rules would have just been ignored by municipalities because they largely exist to protect monied interests not vulnerable populations.

Gibbon1•12m ago

Also worth mentioning architects have spent so long intentionally designing ugly modernist crap that the public reflexively assumes anything new will be an eyesore.

teeray•28m ago

> No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained.

I spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.

Der_Einzige•20m ago

"but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport."

The only people who don't like low density are the poor, and this is why most of America is car culture, and owns their own houses. "Housing shortages" is another way of saying that existing home owners are earning strong equity.

Yeah, I do want no traffic and lots of parking, so low density please!

esafak•16m ago

High density urban housing, coupled with public transportation, would reduce traffic by removing cars from roads and the distance commuted. I like low density too, but not car culture.

alskdfqlkj•7m ago

That makes no sense. The most expensive property in the world is in high density cities.

Personally I want no traffic but also little parking. Car infrastructure is a general blight on public spaces.

JamesCoyne•58m ago

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

Nevermark•57m 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•52m ago

Dwarf City

Songs of Syx is closer but still too micro

bombcar•46m ago

SimDwarfCity, basically.

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

bob1029•57m ago

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

sdellis•57m 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•57m ago

"free, because you are loved"

And because LLMs are making love cheaper.

Angus_Sugna•55m ago

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

solyin•55m 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•32m ago

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

zamadatix•55m 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•54m 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•44m 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•53m ago

Was it inspired by this?

https://housing.over.pizza/

darksim905•53m 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•51m 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•33m 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.

chrisco255•13m ago

I think EPCOT could have been quite successful. The Villages, Florida was centrally planned and designed by many Disney architects (among others) and it is hugely successful and profitable.

Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.

I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.

ramesh31•42m ago

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

ajkjk•40m ago

seriously

blobbers•42m 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•39m 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•41m 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•39m ago

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

rootlocus•37m ago

How do I turn off the music?

bel8•27m 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•26m 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).

owenthejumper•17m ago

I'll get downvoted by the Musk fans, but the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor failed because Hyperloop doesn't work, is non existent, and that corridor is already served by the only profitable train line in the US, the Amtrak DC -> Boston train. It made no financial sense to do this. Bureaucracy is just an excuse for yet another Musk pipe dream to pump stock.

usern20260720•23m ago

I was daydreaming about building sandcastles on the beach or the playground but with heavy machinery, strong concrete foundations and, of course, permits. Signed by the townhall

goda90•20m ago

The various decisions/petitions that pop up can break the immersion by mentioning details that don't fit the city(petitions with signatures from >250% of the town population, traffic issues at the "4-way intersection in front of the feed store" when no such place exists, or the new building causing shadows when there's nothing around it). It would be great if more text was turned into templates that pull game data for accuracy, and if the simulation were able to feed definitive descriptions of the town layout into generative AI prompts to make the text talk about scenarios reflected in the game.

pat2man•17m ago

Reminds me of the North Berkeley board game [1]

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347552/north-berkeley

tomaytotomato•16m ago

Great, now could someone revive the old Command and Conquer Javascript project to life?

https://github.com/adityaravishankar/command-and-conquer

ryandrake•16m ago

Kind of like this one[1] which made the rounds on HN a few weeks ago. Looks like the social commentary from them are similar: "Real life is worse than SimCity because of rules and the public getting a say." and/or "Why can't we in real life let the mayor use the Bulldozer Tool to just wipe out any property he doesn't like and put up whatever property he likes in its place?"

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864

yieldcrv•14m ago

New game scroll broken on mobile safari

nodesocket•9m ago

They should add a LA mode where you spend $9,000 in permits for a home extension only to have it burn down in a wildfire.

Kim_Bruning•8m ago

Why is it that many of these games have continuous popups. I get enough approval fatigue during the day!

SimCity, but with Permits

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