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>From what I've seen, this is purely because of zoning laws. America is vast and sparse for the most part. I don't know if such a model is even viable even if

>From what I've seen, this is purely because of zoning laws. America is vast and sparse for the most part. I don't know if such a model is even viable even if you were to relax zoning for grocery stores. Isn't the store's profitability proportional to population density ? Considering the real estate and labour costs, you would have to incentivise the grocery stores quite a bit to achieve that sort of store/ditance ratio.

_dain_ 4y ago
America is vast and sparse, but that doesn't mean your settlements have to be, does it? Besides, there are big regions where the macro-scale density isn't that dissimilar from Europe or the UK. Coastal California and the Northeast Corridor are like this. And yes, it would be viable. For one thing, the zoning laws are what is keeping the local population density low in the first place, so the problem is circular. There are huge tracts of land where you can only build single detached houses with minimum lot sizes. Let people build duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings. Allow for subdivisions. This gives the customer base for amenities. (When I say this, often the first reply is: but people want single family homes! Well yes, I'm not denying they are popular, but that's no reason to mandate them. The status quo enshrines one set of people's preferences in law while forbidding all alternatives. You can't really gauge true preferences in the presence of such huge market distortions. At any rate, single family homes still exist in places without zoning to mandate them, so they are available to people who want them. And moreover, you can have single family housing without forbidding retail.) I grew up in a suburb of a town that was dying twice over (from collapsed manufacturing and collapsed tourism, the two big employers in the old days). Most housing was semi-detached, what you call duplex housing. Within 10 minutes walking distance of my house, there were three off-licences, a Co-Op, two butchers, two pubs, a post office, a library, and a chip shop. So, lets say we halve the population density by making the houses single detached instead of semi-detached. All else equal, that would let them support about half the retail, so that would be (rounding down) one off-licence, a smaller Co-Op with a post office branch inside, one butcher, and one pub. A wealthier town would likely have even more. So yes, it's completely workable, both in theory and from my own experience. When I talk about this it puts me in mind of a Cold War westerner trying to explain how grocery stores work to an eastern bloc denizen. Yes, ordinary people can afford bananas! Zoning is a kind of Soviet-style central planning mania that has somehow grown like a tumor inside the world's biggest free market democracy. It distorts markets and mindsets.

_dain_ 4y ago

America is vast and sparse, but that doesn't mean your settlements have to be, does it? Besides, there are big regions where the macro-scale density isn't that dissimilar from Europe or the UK. Coastal California and the Northeast Corridor are like this. And yes, it would be viable. For one thing, the zoning laws are what is keeping the local population density low in the first place, so the problem is circular. There are huge tracts of land where you can only build single detached houses with minimum lot sizes. Let people build duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings. Allow for subdivisions. This gives the customer base for amenities. (When I say this, often the first reply is: but people want single family homes! Well yes, I'm not denying they are popular, but that's no reason to mandate them. The status quo enshrines one set of people's preferences in law while forbidding all alternatives. You can't really gauge true preferences in the presence of such huge market distortions. At any rate, single family homes still exist in places without zoning to mandate them, so they are available to people who want them. And moreover, you can have single family housing without forbidding retail.) I grew up in a suburb of a town that was dying twice over (from collapsed manufacturing and collapsed tourism, the two big employers in the old days). Most housing was semi-detached, what you call duplex housing. Within 10 minutes walking distance of my house, there were three off-licences, a Co-Op, two butchers, two pubs, a post office, a library, and a chip shop. So, lets say we halve the population density by making the houses single detached instead of semi-detached. All else equal, that would let them support about half the retail, so that would be (rounding down) one off-licence, a smaller Co-Op with a post office branch inside, one butcher, and one pub. A wealthier town would likely have even more. So yes, it's completely workable, both in theory and from my own experience. When I talk about this it puts me in mind of a Cold War westerner trying to explain how grocery stores work to an eastern bloc denizen. Yes, ordinary people can afford bananas! Zoning is a kind of Soviet-style central planning mania that has somehow grown like a tumor inside the world's biggest free market democracy. It distorts markets and mindsets.