What I am Thinking About?
A Select Statement View of Toronto
How is the city viewed from the perspective of a database (Seeing like a state):
- Government
- POLARIS (Province of Ontario Land Registration Information System) is the Electronic Land Registration System (ELRS) for Ontario, managed by Terranet, a portfolio company of OMERS (Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System), the pension fund for municipal workers 😂
- MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation), a crown corporation, determines the assessed value of all the properties in Ontario so that property taxes can be calculated
- What is the relationship between the various branches of the government and Terranet?
- How was Terranet created? How was POLARIS created? How was MPAC created?
- How were things done before POLARIS? And digitization?
- How is POLARIS structured from a technical perspective?
- Who are their customers? How do they use it? Can I use this data?
- Realtors
- TRREB is the professional association for real estate brokers and salespeople in the GTA, which manages the Toronto MLS (Multiple Listing Service) system
- What actually is MLS? What is the relationship between Toronto MLS and other MLS systems?
- TRREB vs. Competition Bureau and TRREB vs Mongohouse (scraping)
- How do realtors, their customers and the public gain access to this data? Both from a legal and technical perspective?
- How can I get access to the data?
- Other
- Are there other DBs that have interesting views of the city?
- Are there opportunities to create interesting DBs?
- With the existing data, what new views on real estate can be built?
- Here are some other views on Toronto
Interesting Land Tenure, Zoning and Municipal Governance
- Across Canada and the United States, there’s a lot of uniformity in the relationship between municipal governments and land use, but there are some interesting anomalies: I’ll add a “Why Notable” column explaining what makes each location interesting from a governance/development perspective:
Location | Why Notable |
---|---|
UBC University Endowment Lands | Special administrative district managed by BC government and UBC. UBC owns the land and controls the zoning. They have developed some of the land and sold leasehold condominiums |
Reedy Creek Improvement District | A special-purpose taxing district which has the same powers as a county government, controled by Disney overseeing the land around Disney World |
Universal City | Is an unincorporated area in LA County, owned mainly by Universal Pictures. Universal Studio directly integrates with the different levels of the government, and provides some the services normally provided by municipalities. |
City of Industry | Almost all of the city is industrial and commercial. See [Youtube Video()) |
The Villages | Massive retirement community in Florida with special district powers and unique governance |
Loudoun County | Data center hub with special zoning/tax arrangements, making it critical to global internet infrastructure |
Mobile City (Texas) | Tiny municipality (~200 people) known for permissive adult business regulations |
Houston | Largest U.S. city without traditional zoning laws, uses deed restrictions instead |
Sen̓áḵw | First Nations development on reserve land in Vancouver, exempt from city planning rules |
(The canceled) Sidewalk Toronto | Failed “smart city” project by Google’s Sidewalk Labs that raised governance questions |
Leasehold condominiums in Vancouver | Property ownership structure where land is leased long-term, common in Vancouver |
Public Facility Corporations in Texas | Special non-profit entities that can provide property tax exemptions for housing |
Towns associated with religious groups | Communities effectively controlled by religious groups through voting/governance |
Paradise, Nevada | Unincorporated area containing Las Vegas Strip, governed by Clark County not City of Las Vegas |
Ward’s Island and Algonquin Island in Toronto | Land trust communities with unique lease structure and governance |
Rosemont, Illinois | Village heavily dependent on convention/entertainment revenue, unusual governance structure |
Free Acres, New Jersey | Historic land trust community founded on Georgist single-tax principles |
Get more from data
- There are massive amounts of data which is being explicitly and implicitly created
- It is being constantly pumped out into the void, being forgotten, lost and overwritten
- It’s sitting there waiting to be saved, parsed, structured, cleaned, searched and visualized. To be made useful
- We have created great tools for sharing open-source code (Git, Github, PyPI, etc.), but how do we share open data?
- We have created easy-to-use tools for sharing documents (Google Drive, Jekyll, Cloudflare Pages, etc.), but what about indexing, searching and visualizing data?
- See:
Building perpetual websites
- The web is an evolving standard. A website that works today can break tomorrow because a browser vendor decides not to honour a standard
- How do you build websites that last forever? Not years, but decades
- It’s sad to see projects in which people put blood, sweat and tears (okay, probably not blood) break. It’s sad to see linkrot slowly, deteriorate away the web
- Initial Ideas:
- Static site generators
- HTML/CSS only websites
- Store in a public Github repo and host on GitHub Pages
- Save all links to the Internet Archive
- 10 year domain registration
Paradigms for one-person software projects
- For example, if 1000 people are working on a project, breaking that project up into microservices and multiple repos could reduce the coordination needed. But if only one person is working on the project, that might add unnecessary complexity
- How should a project be structured differently if the project manager, designer, marketer and engineer are the same person?
Startup of you
- There’s a lot of advice for investment portfolio management, career development, and personal finance
- There isn’t much personal finance advice that acknowledges that most people’s largest asset is the present value of expected future earnings