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Those economics are the result of the system set up by politics and laws, which mandate car dependency and outlaw walkable neighborhoods. Those stores arose be

Those economics are the result of the system set up by politics and laws, which mandate car dependency and outlaw walkable neighborhoods. Those stores arose because smaller more convenient commercial space is banned. And once going to the store means a drive, hunting for a parking spot, and walking, you start to minimize your trips to the store, and buy a lot more at once to minimize the basic hassle of doing it by car. And once each trip becomes more infrequent and larger scale, then the bigger stores start to make sense, because you are never going to be walking by their store front and quickly grab something, they try to get every last dollar from you on your trip by providing a huge array of products, requiring more space.

Vrondi 5y ago
In my part of the USA, there are no laws outlawing walkable neighborhoods. Small, convenient commercial space is not banned. However, renting or leasing a small shop space in our quaint, cute, walkable downtown is _expensive_. It is cheaper for a business owner to rent space in the malls, most of which are located outside city limits, not subject to city tax, and much cheaper to lease a storefront in. All the malls, the Wal-Marts, the strip-mall-shopping-centers full of big-box stores, they are all built outside city limits, because there is far less red tape, less taxes, etc. The cute downtown wanted to preserve their old-fashioned cuteness all through the 80s and 90s, and they did so. The result is that everything went just outside of town for a long time, and the downtown stores slowly lost more and more business to the big boxes as more and more residents who live downtown drove their cars outside town to shop, and eventually began to move to new developments outside of town.
- supperburg 5y ago
- epistasis 5y ago
  That's fantastic. It sounds like it might be a small rural town? Those are often great. But it sounds like even though they didn't outright make commercial space illegal, like is commonly the case, they still put up enough "red tape" to have nearly the same effect as zoning making commercial space illegal. These sorts of code and zoning are legal inventions within the past century, and they tend to be seemingly minor technical changes, but they have absolutely huge negative repercussions. I'm not advocating for elimination of zoning and codes, but rather of quick change of them to promote more walkable neighborhoods rather than prohibition of them. Elimination of all planning departments would probably be better than having them, but the best outcomes would be from radical reform of planning to be more centered on the needs of all parts of communities, rather than the most conservative of neighbors.

Vrondi 5y ago

In my part of the USA, there are no laws outlawing walkable neighborhoods. Small, convenient commercial space is not banned. However, renting or leasing a small shop space in our quaint, cute, walkable downtown is _expensive_. It is cheaper for a business owner to rent space in the malls, most of which are located outside city limits, not subject to city tax, and much cheaper to lease a storefront in. All the malls, the Wal-Marts, the strip-mall-shopping-centers full of big-box stores, they are all built outside city limits, because there is far less red tape, less taxes, etc. The cute downtown wanted to preserve their old-fashioned cuteness all through the 80s and 90s, and they did so. The result is that everything went just outside of town for a long time, and the downtown stores slowly lost more and more business to the big boxes as more and more residents who live downtown drove their cars outside town to shop, and eventually began to move to new developments outside of town.

supperburg 5y ago
epistasis 5y ago
That's fantastic. It sounds like it might be a small rural town? Those are often great. But it sounds like even though they didn't outright make commercial space illegal, like is commonly the case, they still put up enough "red tape" to have nearly the same effect as zoning making commercial space illegal. These sorts of code and zoning are legal inventions within the past century, and they tend to be seemingly minor technical changes, but they have absolutely huge negative repercussions. I'm not advocating for elimination of zoning and codes, but rather of quick change of them to promote more walkable neighborhoods rather than prohibition of them. Elimination of all planning departments would probably be better than having them, but the best outcomes would be from radical reform of planning to be more centered on the needs of all parts of communities, rather than the most conservative of neighbors.