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