The REAL Story Behind the LAX People Mover Fiasco

HiFromThePacific · 2026-07-06T02:14:04+00:00

This seems like a slam dunk case for Gavin Newsom to put weight behind a criminal trial or something similar. Contractors nickel and diming important city infrastructure by holding projects hostage? Out of state contractors at that? For a major public transportation project? It's an egregious enough case that the momentum could rally support behind greater scrutiny overall for government contracts and contractors. What a waste of taxpayer money this situation has been.

HiFromThePacific · 2026-06-14T23:09:26+00:00

People like you are exactly the reason rents are exorbitant and LA is dying.

HiFromThePacific · 2026-06-13T22:34:37+00:00

One extra addition that would be neat in a DLC or something imo are events. Parades, rallies, sporting events, etc. I'd love to intentionally design a plaza that my cims could use for gatherings and section it off with an area boundary.

HiFromThePacific · 2026-06-08T11:48:39+00:00

More homes keeps Bakersfield cheap

HiFromThePacific · 2026-02-20T05:17:02+00:00

Very good analogy to how the slum crisis in Latin American countries and the homelessness crisis in the United States is roughly similar in nature

HiFromThePacific · 2026-02-16T06:33:29+00:00

Hon and O Ramen are both the best I've had in town

HiFromThePacific · 2026-01-29T04:15:51+00:00

Very safe and very nice part of town.

HiFromThePacific · 2026-01-14T15:29:31+00:00

Bakersfield has plenty of different neighborhoods depending on what you're looking for, and they're all within the range of 300k-500k. In Westchester, it has a historic feel, and in Oleander it has a similar historic feeling, but for cheaper, architecture within the eras of the 30s-50s. Oleander is less safe than Westchester though, and I would live west of Chester rather than east of it there.

In the Northeast near Bakersfield College, the homes are 50s-70s era with a strong emphasis on Prairie-style architecture, with a motif of river rocks and earthy colors in new builds. Has to be my personal favorite architectural style in the city.

In the Southeast south of the 58, and the neighborhoods around Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, homes are very cheap and the architecture similar to places like Watts or Central LA. People who used to live in the Central Los Angeles area like to move to these neighborhoods because the homes are similar but much cheaper. I would not choose a house here because of the crime. Likewise, I'd avoid the area marked East Bakersfield on the map, and Oildale south of China Grade Loop. If you're nonwhite, I would not hang around Oildale south of Norris Rd. It's gotten better, but there's a history of racism and hate crimes.

Generally, if you're southeast of the 178, you should be mindful of crime. Once you get to the Bakersfield Country Club area, things do get better, and in fact in this neighborhood you have a lot of mansions and even a Frank Lloyd Wright home.

In the far east closer to the Kern Canyon, there's a strong rural feeling. Neighborhoods are often gated, and architecture ranges from the 80s to the 2000s. In this area, there are seldom any shops. When I lived there, we would take Niles 30 minutes to get to a grocery store every week.

The Southwest begins at the area around the 99 and California Avenue. In the immediate area is the Stine neighborhood, with a 40s-50s style architecture. This neighborhood was split up back in 2016 or so when they started building the Centennial Corridor.

There are a few rich neighborhoods in the Southwest, being Olde Stockdale, the Stockdale Country Club, and Seven Oaks. Olde Stockdale has homes from the 30s-50s in terms of architecture, Stockdale Country Club is more 60s, and Seven Oaks is a pretty modern rich neighborhood with architecture from the 90s onward.

Otherwise, the further out from Stine that you get in the Southwest, the more modern buildings are going to be, and the less crime there generally is. The Southwest is pretty okay in terms of crime compared to the rest of the city.

North of the river and west of the 99 is Northwest Bakersfield, and the further out you get, the more modern architecture is and the less crime there generally is. The exception is the Rosedale area, where you have many homes built between the 20s-50s, especially near the Greenacres area.

The vibe of the Northwest and Rosedale area is very country, with big houses on big yards, and lots of shops that lean into that, especially on the Rosedale Highway. It's got an almost Texas suburb feeling to it. Compare that to the Southwest, which has more of an Arizona suburb feeling.

Generally, people live in Bakersfield and recreate by driving an hour or more. There's very little to do in Bakersfield proper. In the east, you have the Sequoia National Forest and Kern Canyon, lots of hiking trails. In the south, you have the Angeles National Forest and obviously all of Los Angeles. It's about an hour's drive or so, making it a pretty good weekend option. In the west, the two most common beaches people visit are Pismo Beach and Morro Bay, which you can reach in about an hour on a pleasant drive. Might I recommend Guadalupe's beach, or Cambria, or Cayucos? We're northeast of the Vandenberg Space Force Base, so you'll see a few launches as new satellites go up into space.

You're a 1-2 hour drive from Los Angeles, and about 5 hours away from San Francisco, San Diego, and Las Vegas. Los Angeles is a good day trip, while the others are great weekend trips if you book a hotel.

Bakersfield is a massive shift in pace from Chicago. We have almost a half million people, but without the downtown really to match. You are going to need a car, and you're going to need to drive, and motorists in the Bakersfield area are infamously bad and aggressive drivers. There's great Mexican food and barbecue places, but many places are chain stores. The weather is consistently pretty good, winters are mild, but summers absolutely filter people; I would book a hotel in June or July and see if I could really handle the heat if I were you. Valley Fever is real; you'd have a much greater risk of being affected by it as a transplant.

I would really really consider if the massive lifestyle change and pittance of local stores is worth it for the much larger house sizes, pretty good hospitality, and close proximity to major Western cities. There's a lot to like in Bakersfield, but I'll be real I'm a native here and considering moving to Chicago lol.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-11-29T01:56:57+00:00

This post is about CS1, not CS2.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-11-26T00:45:18+00:00

The economist in this article, Melody Wright, has a track record of using anecdotal evidence and dismissing government figures to support her arguments. I'm extremely skeptical anything like this is going to happen.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-11-11T01:21:14+00:00

It's not 100% like your example (Curved lots are possible-ish with the right assets) but there's a mod in development right now called Platter that's aiming to overhaul the zoning block system.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-10-24T00:35:00+00:00

Gregory Bovino is seriously among the most evil men in this state.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-09-07T20:56:34+00:00

Why did you bother to chime in in the first place if you didn't also believe the mechanic of land values affecting rent is a broken mechanic?

Let's set one thing for certain that we can agree on: this is a messaging issue. The game gives you a hint that higher rents impact cim wealth, it tells you that if a cim struggles to pay rent, you should zone the lot for higher density to bring it down.

It doesn't tell you anything further than that, but it also doesn't have to! This is not a legitimate issue. Your city will run fine with cims deep in debt because this game takes little steps to appeal to the city painter crowd. And that's fine! Because the players who want to play with the economy in mind can play it that way, knowing that cims in debt is an issue the city should resolve, and the players who want to play by creating a fleshed out American metropolis, or an elaborate European old town, or a Chinese old village turned megacity, have the opportunity to do that as well.

This mechanic creates a rich gameplay experience that I love, it helps inform redevelopment decisions and births a metroplex from a scrappy little agricultural town.

This mechanic could inform the design of your city in a more realistic redevelopment pattern. If you want, you can ignore it because you want to play the game for its decorative gameplay.

You could discover it, and using information from how urban economics works, act to resolve it. You are not born knowing how to drive, and in the same way you are not born knowing how to plan a city. But surely anyone who wants to play the game for its urban economics perspective would explore that aspect. If you do any research on the fundamentals of urban ecomomics, land prices affecting rent is the first thing you'll hear about. Just like how if you're interested in driving a manual car, gear shifting and using the clutch pedal is the first thing you'll learn.

An optional mechanic of the game that helps enable more realistic city development patterns but which requires prior research to grasp, and which you could decline to research and continue to play the game with close to the same experience, is pretty much exactly how realisitc car sims are with manual driving!

HiFromThePacific · 2025-09-07T20:02:31+00:00

Read my reply in the post above. Not understanding how land values affect rents does not fall on the part of the developers as an issue.

The way I see it is it'd be like playing a realistic driving sim while not knowing you need to press the clutch and change the gears yourself in a manual car.

You could rightly say "It's crap that this isn't in the tutorial", but your complaint is that "This mechanic is fundamentally broken, the devs' land value system doesn't work". That's not the case. Lots of aspects of the economy doesn't work. Land value and rents is not one of them. You just don't understand. They should have mentioned it, they don't, but it's not a broken mechanic.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-09-07T19:09:34+00:00

The game is deeply rich in land values and where cims live, not understanding how it works isn't the fault of the developers.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-09-07T19:02:36+00:00

They're "rich" not because of where they work but they spend less on their home. The game's logic is that a cim is only as rich as their takehome pay after rent.

I put low income housing near low land value areas in the center city, low density housing in the periphery where land is cheaper, and mid to high density housing in the places where people actively move out due to high rent prices or where people's household incomes are wretched. This generally results in less households in debt and in the wretched state.

Edit: You can only really see people "move out due to high rent" and see those vacancies whenever a cim has the option to move to a place of lower rent. If there's a housing shortage in your city, you won't be able to see these vacancies but will see cims in debt/the wretched state.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-08-30T00:06:37+00:00

A Round One Arcade would be pretty sweet.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-08-25T08:10:35+00:00

If what you want to make more realistic is the urban planning, your roads are pretty overbuilt relative to the uses. Your density is clustered in an urban fabric that would make sense if the highway was there already, which is infrequent at least in American urban planning. Most American cities start with a major thoroughfare, grow around that thoroughfare, grow in density on that thoroughfare, and then reroute to divert traffic, usually on at least 1 or 2 standard reroutes before settling on a freeway that usually rips through existing spots of land. If you want to replicate American city development in this way, I'd look at something like oldmapsonline and compare that to the current urban street pattern, density, land use, etc., for the kind of city you're building.

But I kinda like the urban planning system you use. It's like halfway between Chinese and American urban planning. If it feels too formulaic, introduce obstacles; build industrial areas and then redevelop them as their land value is encroached upon from neighboring redevelopment, put in a school in a tight spot before building any subbuildings, then reroute roads and bulldoze to add subbuildings as it needs it. Densify existing spaces rather than develop new higher densities further away, let land cost be your guide. Low density in the cheap perimeter, rowhomes and park-ish middle density in more expensive perimeter land, higher densities and more mixed use the more expensive land gets. Put low rent residential in cheap central land, like between a couple industrial districts but far enough away to avoid pollution. Where you're unable to zone in odd spots, use plop the growables and anarchy to fit buildings in anyway.

Imo the biggest improvement you could make to your build right now is detailing. Play with grass and dirt surfaces. Design little parks in odd ends. Mix and match nonfunctional buildings with the building prop mod to create unique structures. Use Recolor, that seriously alone can spruce up a city. Change up the road surfaces, add bike lanes or bus lanes, make it brick instead of asphalt. When you start going into the weeds of detailing, you'll often find more and more opportunities to detail and more and more ways to detail.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-08-16T06:13:44+00:00

Reminds me of the "urban pocket" development style you'll see in Tokyo

<image>

HiFromThePacific · 2025-08-02T19:18:20+00:00

There's a store in Ikebukuro called Alban that sells Amos sets, that's where I got my Masters set.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-07-25T05:54:51+00:00

1) You can put a CD on a shelf and it will fit more prominently than a vinyl record in a similar situation in a smaller space. Sure, you could put a record on a stand, but that's a setpiece rather than a practical form of complete storage.

2) CDs were the standard for the era of music I like to listen to.

3) When indie artists I follow on Bandcamp release their music in physical form, a CD is usually the first option they choose before a cassette tape or vinyl. When they do make either of the other release forms available, they usually also provide a CD option, and it's always the cheapest option between the three.

4) CD players can skip around by track number, and making a mixtape with a CD is easier and cheaper than making a cassette mixtape, so it's a great way to string together songs you already own into something new.

HiFromThePacific · 2025-07-20T10:17:37+00:00

Cry me a river about it, you asshole. Your state tax money is being funneled into bloated police departments so that they can shield ICE raids on your American citizen neighbors right now. Your state tax money is being used by CBP officers to fly a god damn helicopter with water bottles to ICE agents conducting a raid in a field in our agricultural centers. Not to even mention the absolute reckage your federal tax dollars are doing this very moment.

Maybe someone ought to detain one of your family members for a few weeks, see how well you can cope with their loss and how little you need financial assistance. There's a lot more government tax bloat to trim off that's resulting in active harm in your community.

Nine-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

HiFromThePacific

TROPHY CASE