[AIME15]

The scope-limiting to 12 acres announced on October 31 was perceived as a win for the regulators, giving them more control over the project over time. At that point the project timeline became untenable for SWL's plans but couldn't back out due to PR concerns for Alphabet. The pandemic is a convenient excuse for the company to abandon the Quayside project.

For the last three years SWL has bent over backwards to be transparent about its plans and address community concerns. Plans have repeatedly been scaled down to the point where it makes absolutely no financial sense to move forward.

The calculation to bet the company on Toronto was made before this recent backlash against Big Tech. I suspect it would have been made differently had the company started a year later.

[ericzawo]

Bent over backwards? I don't think we were attending the same public hearings about Sidewalk Labs. I went to three of them, and do not - at all - share that view. In fact, they deliberately obfuscated many key points around their continued goal-posting moving of public-private terms, which has been well documented[1].

https://medium.com/@biancawylie/debrief-on-sidewalk-toronto-...

[eddyionescu]

The 12-acres (just Quayside) was what Toronto's RFP asked for in the first place and Sidewalk Labs won out for (https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-fir...), which now turns out to have not been financially viable for them given the high cost of their R&D (including those mass-timber buildings which aren't even in Ontario's building code yet). Sidewalk Lab's wider plans were really an unsolicited proposal that no one asked for, so it's unfair to blame "regulators" or the tech backlash.

[AIME15]

Agreed that the responsibility was 100% on SWL to build consensus among the community and decision makers in Waterfront Toronto and Toronto's government entities. I'm just saying that this became a lot tougher due to the change in public opinion on big tech.