> This place [farmer's market/flea market] is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It pr

> This place [farmer's market/flea market] is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create compared to the usual economic development model meant to induce artificial prosperity through tax holidays and subsidies for mega projects. ... > So why don’t local governments embrace more of this sort of pop up grass roots mom and pop enterprise? Officials are in a trap that requires them to boost tax revenue to pay for all the attenuated infrastructure and municipal overhead that’s accumulated for decades. Highly functional flea markets don’t generate enough cash surplus to skim. So municipalities are obliged to search for show horses with all the associated prestige, complexity, and expense. ... Those local governments probably bought into the Growth Ponzi Scheme and are now trapped in an endless cycle of megacorp courthship that with each iteration further destroys the means for the area to survive independently: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme