It’s this inevitable dichotomy between data and real life that will likely define Sidewalk Labs, as it has defined the civic hacking movement, which launched with ambitious goals and now looks like a smattering of hackathons. In a New York Times story about the new company, the author suggests that “rapidly maturing” technologies will bring about a revolution in the availability of affordable housing. It’s the kind of breathless prediction you’d expect from a fresh-faced and left-leaning computer science grad who’s never seen a city council meeting.

The company has dabbled in urban planning for years, but this new investment seems to indicate those projects weren’t just for fun. As more people move to cities worldwide, the business of planning, innovating, and running those cities is poised to grow too—and it’s a model in which the “user” has no choice but to opt in.

I hate to say I told you so.

Ever since tech companies’ employee shuttle buses began attracting attention in San Francisco, locals have worried about private services for the wealthy drawing funds from public services and furthering an already deep class split. In fact, the opposite appears to be happening: Ridership on public transportation in the Bay Area is steadily increasing, with local buses and trains regularly running over capacity.

Instead of investing more in elite service alternatives—which on their own have not proven to be a great business model—more private money is flowing into the public realm.

The results of this exchange often come in the form of community benefit agreements. Municipal tax codes written in the pre-knowledge economy have left cities broke and more reliant on these kinds of quid pro quo agreements made with private developers to pay for basic public services. In most places, these agreements look like an extra street light or sidewalk improvement; in Silicon Valley, they can look like free bus rides for an entire town. But they still add up to far less than the city’s old business tax income.

Yes, Silicon Valley needs more housing, but the politics of how, where, and when are far more nuanced than Google can apparently handle.

This is where Google has essentially already built its own city within a city, learning much about planning, development, and local government along the way. Google’s interest in the physical design and function of a city seems born of pragmatism (the necessary logistics of building and running its giant campus), with a vague tinge of eco-friendly progressive ethos. Those traffic jams bring the region to a halt every rush hour—how could a self-driving car make travel more efficient? Those parking lots for thousands of workers are really expensive—how do you get more of them to bike to work instead?