A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't
- ID
- 34144
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 11 Oct 2026, 4:31 AM
- Fetched
- 11 Oct 2026, 12:09 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://housing.over.pizza/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 11 Oct 2026, 12:09 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Discretionary Review is a browser-based San Francisco housing simulator that opens in January 2015 with $36M cash, $60K/month burn, an $80M housing fund and a 3.3% construction loan rate, tasking the player with pushing projects through pre-application meetings, environmental review, the Planning Commission, Board of Supervisors appeals, lawsuits and the permit counter. It models real rules as mechanics — SB 35's 5-hearing cap, SB 423's no-hearing-if-code-compliant path, the CEQA infill exemption, a 12% on-site inclusionary requirement — and changes them on the same dates they changed in real life, with an 11-seat Board (5 pro-housing, 4 against, 2 swing) and investor reviews every two years where three misses sends the fund elsewhere. Posted to Hacker News, where the thread drew 231 points and 83 comments.
Why it matters
There is no Malaysian or Southeast Asian angle in the text — treat this as a design reference, not local news. The concrete thing worth copying is how policy text becomes state the user can act on: SB 35 is a 5-hearing cap, SB 423 is a code-compliance bypass, inclusionary housing is a 12% on-site cost, and each rule flips on its real-world date while the 3.3% loan rate moves. If you build anything that estimates approval timelines or regulatory risk (proptech, govtech, diligence tooling), this is a working template for turning statutes into numbers a founder can decide on; if you don't, it is a well-executed browser toy and nothing you need to change.
Discussion angle
If you ported this to a Malaysian setting, which rules would be the SB 35 and SB 423 equivalents — OSC 3.0 submission windows, local council planning permission timelines, state planning committee appeals — and what would replace the Standing meter as the thing that drops below 30 and gets people marching?