As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume (nytimes.com) 187
An anonymous reader shares a report: For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut. The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google's map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
"It's degrading to the reputation of our area," said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. In a survey of 271 neighbors that he organized recently, he said, 90 percent disliked the name. The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighborhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence that Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.
"It's degrading to the reputation of our area," said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. In a survey of 271 neighbors that he organized recently, he said, 90 percent disliked the name. The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighborhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence that Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.
Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:3)
Are they "official" names for neighborhoods?
Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes and no. There are official districts (Sunset, Richmond, etc.) but then they're broken down into what I think are more traditional names.
This is like if Google just suddenly started calling Hell's Kitchen something else. Or renamed SOHO for no reason.
Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:4, Funny)
Gordon Ramsay would not be amused.
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This is like if Google just suddenly started calling Hell's Kitchen something else.
My sarcasm detector's broken today but I think it's already officially known as Clinton. It's kind of hard to sell development with the moniker "Hell's Kitchen."
Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is like if Google just suddenly started calling Hell's Kitchen something else. Or renamed SOHO for no reason.
Except that as the article notes, the name was actually created a few years ago by a neighborhood nonprofit steering group that residents voted for: The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.
Google didn't just suddenly rename it for no reason. The issue is more subtle than that; in previous times, the neighborhood council decision would either be ignored or take a long time to spread and catch on. With Google's ubiquity, changing it on Google maps has an immediate effect. Whether that's bad and jarring or good and avoids ambiguity, it's certainly new and different.
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They're naming things with a much smaller area than SOHO, even a single block sometimes gets a name. I'm not sure what these are supposed to be.
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I live next to a neighborhood called Hoes Heights.
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Over 50 yrs is recent? https://www.nytimes.com/2001/0... [nytimes.com]
Re: Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:5, Funny)
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The difference between Europeans and Americans is that Europeans think 200 miles is a long way and Americans think 200 years is a long time.
Actually, most Europeans think that 200 miles is (roughly) 322 kilometers.
Re: Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:1)
I think he meant that 1 mile (for Swedes at least) are 10 km and thus 200 miles is a long way
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Even if 1 mile equals 1,6 kms, 322 kilometers is still a long way (enough to pass through several large historical cities).
Alexo's post was stressing that Europeans (other than from UK) would express this saying in kilometers, not miles.
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Heck, even 200 kms would be quite a long stretch in Europe.
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Even if 1 mile equals 1,6 kms, 322 kilometers is still a long way
It's not really that far, just a bit further than the distance from Berlin to Warsaw. Most Germans could do that in one tank.
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There are no "official" neighborhood names within the city. The names are just a result of a certain name gaining critical mass where everyone just starts using it. That's part of the problem. Google being the large force that it is, can vault a name to that critical mass point pretty easily.
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It's better here in Texas (like everything) - neighborhood name is on the deed, and used on local government web sites (like days for trash pickup).
Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:5, Funny)
It's better here in Texas (like everything)
...except the weather, unless you're comparing to Oklahoma or something. The only thing I really miss from Texas, though, is the BBQ. Finding a BBQ place in California that knows anything about anything is a terrible chore. In Texas, you can't hardly drive after the first rain of the season without crashing into one. Hmm, the drivers are worse in Texas, too.
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It's better here in Texas (like everything)
...except the weather, unless you're comparing to Oklahoma or something. The only thing I really miss from Texas, though, is the BBQ. Finding a BBQ place in California that knows anything about anything is a terrible chore. In Texas, you can't hardly drive after the first rain of the season without crashing into one. Hmm, the drivers are worse in Texas, too.
You forgot tacos. South texas or north mexico depending on who you ask :) has some of the best tacos north of the boarder. The closer to the border the better the taco. Best tacos I ever had was from the street vender in mexico [Reynosa/Progresso/Etc] but as an old fart I am too scared to go over the border anymore and have to setting for "nearly' as good. Which is better than anything I have had north of here and by north I mean like San Antonio/Austin/Dallas/ETC. The further north you go the less flavor a
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You forgot tacos.
I didn't. We have plenty of Mexicans here in California, so we have plenty of good tacos. Pretty much any roach coach that isn't some kind of hipster avocado tater tot dispenser is chock-full of 'em, and even some of those have some decent carnitas. California is a lot more friendly to Mexicans than Texas is, so we've long had lots of them here. (I am not a Mexican myself, I am a Mexican-American.) I used to make my own tacos pretty regularly too, but I got rid of the smoker I used to do pork butts in so no
Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:5, Informative)
It's better here in Texas (like everything) ...
Except in Education (ranked 40th [politifact.com]) and Healthcare (ranked 38th [usnews.com]) in the nation. Also, it's really frelling hot in Texas. Still, not a bad place to fly over on your way to somewhere better. :-)
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Education (and largely healthcare) reflect demographics, not anything about the state per se.
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Are you really claiming that fluency in English has no statistical effect on educational outcome?
Are you really claiming that 1 vs 2 parents in the home has no statistical effect on educational outcome?
Are you really claiming that attitude of parents towards the value of education has no statistical effect on educational outcome?
You certainly have me questioning your own educational outcome.
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culture ... is to blame. I know you lefties ...
Perhaps you should have paid more attention when they were defining 'irony' in class.
Change the culture of the poor neighborhoods, and the kids in the schools will start to do better
Addressing the poverty tends to do that, but then that becomes a wider problem and that makes it harder to dismiss the poor with a 'change your culture' judgement.
Here's a link [wikipedia.org] to a wikipedia article that sumamrises a meta study that looks at correlations of criminal behaviour, which I'm using as a proxy for your 'horrific culture'.
I note the following, referring to socioeconomic status - "Crime rates and inequality are pos
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Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:4, Informative)
This wikipedia page has a pretty accurate/traditional listing of neighborhoods (for now.) Hopefully whoever maintains it won't start adding BS made up neighborhoods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighborhoods_in_San_Francisco
The neighborhood namings are helpful when navigating the city. We have three major street grids here, two of which are askew and converge along Market street. We also have two separate grids of numbered streets, one going by Avenue and one going by Street. If you didn't know any better and put the wrong one in to get to, say, '9th', you could end up near beach instead of near Twitter HQ.
We have a lot of very long streets here, too, relative to the size of the city. Saying you live or work on California Street is useless as it crosses a dozen or more neighborhoods. But if you talk to a local and say you live in Pacific Heights (I wish), that's a much more specific place.
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Re:Renaming Neighborhood is bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they "official" names for neighborhoods?
Most definitely. For example, there were fierce battles in San Jose over whether to call the Vietnamese area Little Saigon, Vietnamese Business District, or Saigon Business District, which led to protests and attempts to recall a city council member. Sometimes these battles are political, as with the naming of the Vietnamese area in San Jose. Sometimes the battles are cultural, as with the Koreatown naming push in Santa Clara. There was pushback from the non-Koreans in the area to calling the entire area Koreatown. In the end, the city decided not to officially designate the area as Korean. However, someone at Google decided to do the opposite, and so Koreatown shows up not only in Google Maps but also in the search results.
Google has massive power to change language, names, and thinking. For example, a short while ago, Google Maps navigation suddenly started using the term "slip road". From the context, it was obviously talking about on and off ramps to highways, but it would always say slip road. I finally looked up the word and saw that it was a British term. However, Google has broadened the recognition of the word at least to the US.
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The problem is that the popular names for neighborhoods change over time, and may not be the same as the official names. Few people head to city hall to inquire about what their neighborhood is actually called.
However, Google seems to be giving nicknames to some very tiny areas, some smaller than a city block, named after a major street or intersection. It clutters up the map to see these names in largest font on the map. They weren't there a few months ago when I looked. These aren't "neighborhoods" and
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I guess that makes DC the crooked treason politician shithole Capitol, eh?
Sounds about right. All cities are terrible.
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-1 huh? Must be a few San Francisco people in this thread...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea... [sfgate.com]
You do realise your city is known for scenic beauty, trolleys, needles, and faeces?
Had something similar happen (Score:1)
They randomly changed Mystreet Street to Mystreet Ave. You don't realize the amount of services that rely on Google for address verification until it starts throwing you errors about an invalid address. Fuck you Google, it still says Street on the signs and even on your goddamn streetview images.
Re: Had something similar happen (Score:1)
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Google doesn't care about fixing anything. My address is on a small street, and Google maps always shows it at the end of a dead end road, facing a hill, about half a mile away.
Only google.
All other map services get it correct, including many ancient GPS devices.
If I call for a ride, I have to explicitly tell them that google maps is wrong. And half the time, they'll call me saying they can't find the place, they're facing an hill.
It's been this way for, oh, four years now.
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If you think thats bad, you should see what happens when the 911 database is wrong.
I don't think it's THAT hard. When I was with an interconnected VoIP provider, we had some contacts who could make corrections to customers' location and other details in the database --- didn't really seem like it was a "1 Guy in the world" type situation.
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Nah. As someone on the database side, there are quite a few people from the phone companies to our own staff that can make updates. We recently (like a year ago recently) deployed software to help our customers make changes even easier. Obviously if you’re with a small phone company, there might be one person, but absolutely there are quite a few people who can and do make corrections.
[John]
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Try living somewhere which has two official languages and recently renamed a load of streets which were previously named after people linked to a former dictatorship. That means four different names, and Google Maps will switch between them arbitrarily for different sections of the same street.
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All street signage in the US (at least in the midwest) is in English. That doesn't stop Google Maps from showing "Illinois Route 155" as "Ruta de Illinois 155" (Spanish). It did this for multiple years, but I think it's working now.
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All street signage in the US (at least in the midwest) is in English
Huh? It's Spanish all over the southwest, and French in Louisiana. Next thing you'll tell me the US has an official language.
It's degrading to the reputation of our area... (Score:5, Funny)
"It's degrading to the reputation of our area," said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years.
He should be happy they didn't decide to call it Poop Map [mochimachine.org]!
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He should be happy they didn't decide to call it Poop Map [mochimachine.org]!
Well, the "Here" powered geolocation map on Flickr describes the location of photos I've taken by Fremont Street in Las Vegas as "Homeless Corridor, Las Vegas, Nevada".
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Are there more of these? What about LA? :D
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Finally, a way to make housing in SF affordable! (Score:5, Funny)
Google can just give every SF neighborhood a really awful name. West gash, Buttfungus grove, Trashpile drive, Stank avenue, etc, lowering property values until housing is affordable for mere mortals again!
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If you've ever been to SFO quite frankly a number of those names wouldn't be descriptively inaccurate, either.
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Don't forget Needle Row and Gangland Heights.
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Massospara Heights
https://www.theatlantic.com/sc... [theatlantic.com]
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I think this would just build up demand amongst hipsters to live in a place with a cool name.
And West Gash is a real place. Well, real in a game anyway.
It's the real-estate agents (Score:5, Interesting)
Rincon Hill, South Beach and SOMA are all distinct neighborhoods, not different names for the same area as the article insinuates.
Real estate agents here try to rename areas all the time into 'micro neighborhoods' for out of towners who would, for example, rather move to 'Eureka Valley' than 'The Castro'. This isn't anything new and I would question whether Google did this and real estate agents followed, or if it's the other way around.
People that actually live here now and have lived here for any mount of time would never deign to utter the words "South Cut". That's just a stupid name in and of itself and has no meaning.
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Indeed. There are real estate listings that don't mention Richmond, California at all preferring "Carriage Hills", "Brickyard Cove", "Marina Bay", "Hilltop Green", etc.
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That is because Richmond is notorious for poverty and crime. The city has the highest rate (70%) for unsolved murders in the SF Bay Area. Its schools are a disaster with low graduation rates and subject proficiency in the single digits. And you have the Chevron Refinery which has not been a good neighbor.
Re:It's the real-estate agents (Score:5, Informative)
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I've lived here for 20+ years (including 5 in the area in question), and had never heard "The East Cut" until today.
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Not surprising. Lots of zombies actually don't give a shit about anything that happens where they live. I fall into this category too. Didn't realise there was a festival in the park opposite my house and my wife pointed out that the signs have been up in our street for the past month.
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Could have been worse [wikia.com].
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The area known as The Castro was called Eureka Valley long before it was called The Castro.
It could be worse (Score:3)
They should be glad it's not worse. I can imagine much worse names than East Cut which Google could give to a neighborhood.
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People get angry over every stupid little thing.
What Cell Phone someone uses.
The particular food they choose in their diets.
Being a fan of a rival local sports team.
Condiments used on a hotdog.
Thickness of crust on a pizza.
Toppings on such pizza.
Using a fork to eat such pizza.
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Is (or was) there a canal or other artificial waterway in that neighborhood? Does this neighborhood ajoin a similar one to the west?
"Cut" is an archaic British colloquialism for canal, but still well enough known this side of the pond. I was unaware it was used in US.
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"Cut" refers to cutting through hills to make streets flatter: http://www.foundsf.org/index.p... [foundsf.org]
Those who live by the Goog, die by the Goog (Score:1)
I'm having a really hard time working up any sympathy for those afflicted by this. I'm trying but in the great scheme of things, it seems like something I really don't need to give a crap about. Maybe someone should call a Whaaaahmbulance.
Next Rename (Score:3, Funny)
s/Cupertino/Fruit Market/
sadly, not a new thing (Score:4, Insightful)
google renamed the street I grew up on by eliding a t. some time later, when the city went to remake the street signs, I'm guessing they checked google maps for the spelling rather than the records and suddenly Patterson became Paterson. At one point my mother had collected a 19th century city registrar book that had all the properties delineated, (and the street name correctly spelled...)
there was even a short period of time when you could use street view to look at an old and new street sign within a block of each other and see both spellings in the wild.
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I'm guessing they checked google maps
I'm guessing Google checked with the council and they renamed the street and just because Google is a tech company that isn't dependent on labourers you misattributed the cause of the street name change because Google is faster.
I found a typo in Google maps once. I hit the send feedback button, reported the error and 2 weeks later the spelling mistake was gone.
racists gonna race (Score:1)
Hey guy, what you did there was say a bunch of racist shit, and then throw in an almost racist thing so that you could then tell us it isn't and blame us for being racists. Racism was on YOUR mind. YOU had to "explain" your own damned post. That's a pretty good indictaor that you are being racist. Just like when someone starts a sentence with "I'm not racist but...". If you respond, you'll claim it was a joke, like most racists do, but it wasn't even remotely funny. AND fixating on Bronies seems to in
Here/Navteq Maps (Score:3)
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Another example of "journalism" by the ny times (Score:5, Informative)
They spend tax money on advertising it and probably went to google to get the name to reflect what the city wanted.
This was not some sudden change caused by google, nor an example of how google is a final arbitrator of names.
it is just another daily example of how the new york times is worth for journalism and its only value is in wiping down the street of San Francisco.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/ba... [sfchronicle.com]
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If you'd take a moment to RTFA and climb down off of your soapbox, you'd see they clearly explained that:
The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district.
But "the East Cut" wasn't really the focus of the article in the first place. The article is more about how rapid any renaming of a neighborhood spreads nowadays, due to Google's proliferation. The "why" it got renamed is not the point. It's the speed at which the new name spreads.
But at least you got to tear the media a new one, like Dad.
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The article did nothing to show that google did it.
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One has to wonder had it not been for Google whether East Cut would have been yet another one of those ill-fated efforts.
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/. and RTFA
the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a "brand experience design company" to rebrand the district.
But it wasn't until Google Maps adopted the name this spring that it got attention -- and mockery.
"The East Cut sounds like a 17 dollar sandwich," Menotti Minutillo, an Uber engineer who works on the neighborhood's border, said on Twitter in May.
Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it through public sources. The company's San Francisco offices are in the neighborhood (as is The New York Times bureau), and one of the East Cut nonprofit's board members is a Google employee.
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Menotti Minutillo sounds like a fancy coffee
RTFA will_die (Score:1)
The NYT article clearly states this if you had bothered to read it instead of just bashing. From the New York Times [nytimes.com]
"In San Francisco, the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district."
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Better than nonexistent death traps. (Score:1)
Better than naming places which flat out don't exist. There's a piece of land in eastern Utah called Big Park which is not referenced on any state databases or on any other mapping service. It is located out in truly desolate country with no services for miles. Going out there without adequate preparations is likely to get someone stranded or killed.
Google Maps is accountable to no one. That is the problem with these corporations.
Traffic (Score:2)
Many of Google’s decisions have far-reaching consequences, with the maps driving increased traffic to quiet neighborhoods
Too bad. It isn't creating traffic it's a redistribution. Public streets are public.
I've noticed this too (Score:2)
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Most likely the Federal Government or Local Government, they keep track of these things typically in some form of GIS and that is established through documents (eg. deeds). My original deed has the name of some 1800's guy on there that developed the area, so they named it the "developer name" tract and that has changed over time, to a $number ward now and probably many other names (you find things on old maps when you go to city hall for some permit and your name of the area doesn't match their name).
In big
Old name maybe? (Score:2)
I've seen this locally too. I've noticed some really old names for areas that I've only seen on maps made before the 1920s. I have to wonder if Google is acquiring really old maps in
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Phoenix Area? (Score:2)
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Nobody who doesn't live there in that exact spot would know or use any of those. They look like housing development or apartment complex names.
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Wow, you're right. I'm from Phoenix and nobody uses those names at all. They probably represent housing development names that were used to market the houses way back when, but which quickly fell into disuse. And those development names are always goofy and arbitrary, adding nice-sounding things like "creek" and "vista," when in reality before they built it was all just flat dirt like the rest of the valley.
The only names we do use represent very large districts. I'm from South Phoenix, which is traditional
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The risk in not doing this is that you lose all context. For
Rename SF to Frisco (Score:2)
Nextdoor does this too (Score:2)
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Nextdoor doesn't name any of the "neighborhoods" they list. When a person that doesn't live in one of their existing "neighborhoods" creates an account, that person can name the area they live in and define its borders.They become the Lead and/or founding member of that "neighborhood". It makes for crazy "neighborhood" names and boundaries but at least it is zero work for Nextdoor.com.
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Because other dickweed outsiders are going to start calling it what google maps calls it, which is incorrect.
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Well stop making stupid names for your neighborhood.
Re:Identity (Score:4, Interesting)
You need to get a life if your identity hinges on the correct naming of your residence.
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So you can find the Local vs the Neighbor vs the Foreigner.
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They are trying to improve things. They want to increase the value of neighbourhoods and drive out everything that attracts the homeless.
First thing incomers do is Google up on the neighbourhood reviews and take a stroll through StreetView. If the area looks post-apocalyptic they'll go elsewhere. So they rebrand the neighbourhood with new names so no-one knows any better - Tenderloin becomes SunnyValley.
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In the US official place names are tracked by the Census Bureau and the Postal Service.