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2nd City Zoning
- zbrozek 3y agoWow 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 3y agoHere’s the GitHub repo [1] for those who are code-curious. https://github.com/datamade/second-city-zoning https://github.com/datamade/second-city-zoning
- burlesona 3y agoVery 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 3y ago>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 3y ago> 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 3y agoPlenty 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 3y agoThe neutral ground was so named because it demarcated neighborhood boundaries between French (Acadian) and American neighborhoods.
- jackcosgrove 3y agoIf 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 3y agoIt’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 3y ago> 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_ 3y agoPlus, 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alexb_ 3y agoThe 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 3y agoThis 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-kahlenberg/excluded/9781541701465/?lens=publicaffairs https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-d-kahlenber...
- alexb_ 3y agoI'm being "sarcastic" in that I completely agree with you.
- shiroiuma 3y agoWhy 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 3y agoThere’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 3y agoPolitical 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 3y agocities: skylines 2 has mixed zones and it's easy to visualise. Just a matter of picking a new colour.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThat 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 3y agoAmerican 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 3y agoHousing 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.
- 3y ago
- CrendKing 3y agoWait, 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 3y agoThe trick was to use railway and no roads!
- samstave 3y agoWhat does Patchouli smell like in binary?
- spanktheuser 3y agoLike foresight.
- vkou 3y agoYou want to keep your industrial zones away from nice residential ones. It's fine for the paupers to be breathing in zinc.
- hughesjj 3y agoindustrial revolution intensifies east sideeeee https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/12/blowing-wind-cities-poor-east-ends https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/12/blowing-wind-...
- Schiendelman 3y agoAnd now, of course, we have industrial and residential often in the same building!
- db48x 3y agoPutting 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.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoJokes on us, the mayor set all of the budgets to 50% and the transportation manager was right: we regret it.
- yreg 3y agoDismiss petitioner
- tptacek 3y agoThis 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/2021-02-28-_amended-oak-park-zoning-map.pdf 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 3y agoWhat's wrong with your neighborhood’s zoning?
- devilbunny 3y ago> 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoIf there are enough solvents in use to be detectable off–site, then the industry is in the wrong zone.
- lostapathy 3y ago
- TMWNN 3y agoA 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_news_columnist_playing_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Detroit/comments/3r3dtl/a_detroit_n...>
- tptacek 3y agoThat'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 3y agoWas 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 3y agoYes, in both instances.
- moduspol 3y agoI guess that settles that. I may have to look into running for mayor. It seems like shrugging one's shoulders anytime a problem doesn't rest squarely within one's city limits allows for avoiding all accountability for one's own policies and actions (or lack thereof). And the tradition continues today.
- DonHopkins 3y agoWhere's the Disasters menu? I think I found Godzilla! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYNfFh24i4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYNfFh24i4
- jackcosgrove 3y agoDunno, but it looks like someone built an arcology at Marina City.
- DeIlliad 3y agoThis is something I've been meaning to do with my city to show how bad residential zoning is. Kudos to whoever made this.
- alexb_ 3y agohttps://gisapps.chicago.gov/mapchicago/ 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 3y agoIn 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 https://secondcityzoning.org) is much easier to use and seems to offer more information, too.
- resonantjacket5 3y agoPretty nice website of chicagos zoning Fyi there’s an initiative to create a nationwide (USA) zoning map https://www.zoningatlas.org/ https://www.zoningatlas.org/
- theogravity 3y agoSearch 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 3y agoI thought so too but there just wasn’t a visual indication that it did anything. The map definitely moved.
- theogravity 3y agoFind me actually showed me the zoning, but not search.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- veucast 3y agowow, impressive. Colors could be better, but overall, it's pretty informative and cool.
- anigbrowl 3y agoThe originally submitted title ('Chicago zoning in the style of SimCity' or words to that effect) was much more informative.
- sedatk 3y agoTo 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 3y agoYou'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 3y agoThe 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.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoThere's some code in there for a helicopter so I assume that there are some easter eggs that would bring a more SimCity vibe to the whole thing.
- cmason 3y agoWhy are all the `y`s missing from the text in Chrome but not in Safari?
- pattle 3y agoI'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 https://postcodeprices.com/cambridgeshire/cambridge
- voicedYoda 3y agoAs a Chicagoan, i approve
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago"the color scheme: green for residential, blue for commercial and yellow for industrial." Meanwhile, a boatload of the map is red.