7 ms·

Fixing retail with land value capture

117 points by marojejian 8mo ago

marojejian 9mo ago
Interesting article, though I'm biased since: - I like to shop IRL, and the opportunities to do this pleasurably are going extinct - I live right by Hayes valley, which they start out with. - I'm also a member of "The Commons" which they mention at the end. I love what it's trying to do: creating a new social 3rd space in SF.
iamrobertismo 9mo ago
Always in agreement to such initiatives. I do think a barrier to adoption is the space of possibilities is quite large and generally not well organized around a specific proposal or mandate, so opposition to these initiatives can pick them apart of details. Especially since opposition is usually much more engaged in local governance. It's somewhat complicated to understand, but I think this is an opportunity for strong communicators to present to a public that is much more receptive toward these ideas.
jeffbee 8mo ago
How does this survive contact with the triple net lease? You pass the bond and the property tax is immediately due from the tenant. Congratulations, you destroyed all the businesses.
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago
  Destroy the businesses, rental prices go down, land value tax rates punish land owner for keeping land empty, so either land owner sells the property to someone who can make the numbers work, or land owner accepts lower profits. Obviously, there is pain for the current players, but long term, the landowner should not be able to extract so much profit margin without also providing sufficient utility, such as operating an in demand business.
  - Waterluvian 8mo ago
    This feels like a solution at the barrel of a loaded gun.
    - int_19h 8mo ago
      Property rights in general are enforced at the barrel of a loaded gun, ultimately. Is that an argument against them?
  - asdff 8mo ago
    Something to be said about the number of vampires out there. I think about my own apartment complex. Less than half a dozen units owned by a single landlord. They pay a handiman probably less than $1000 worth of work on the property a year, really nothing major every happens. They pay a crew to come by once every other month and trim the bushes and blow everything out, mostly because the city has fire code saying the bushes cannot touch the structure. Whatever the cheapest two man crew for that costs I guess. And for that couple hundred in upkeep maybe they pay a year, my landlord clears probably between 150k to 200k in rent doing nothing at all. I think they actually own a couple more similar properties so its more than that. So here is this couple in this city, that has found for themselves a way to pull out at least 200k from the local economy, and contribute basically nothing back at all. They don't otherwise work. They just cash checks pretty much and text the handiman when an tenant texts them. Imagine how cheap my rent would be not having to pay for these vampires considering actual costs of this building. Probably like $50/mo each between all of us tenants would be plenty to cover typical yearly overhead. I'd certainly go out to eat a ton more and heavily support local economy if I was only losing $50 a month of my pay to rent. I'd probably get away only having to work 10 hours a week. But no I work 40 hours and give them like 30% my gross because my landlord needs 200k to do nothing. Literally all they do is suck my blood. Their whole existence based on sucking my blood.
    - singleshot_ 8mo ago
      “basically nothing back at all,” or, “ the time value of money.”
- doctorpangloss 8mo ago
  how many retail storefronts do you think Phil Levin and Ben Southwood have started? how many retailers do you think they've talked to? rents could drop to zero, and people would still be buying more shit off amazon than from stores. i can't comprehend how they can go from talking about amazon being the cause of foot traffic reductions, and then the non sequiter comes, "We risk losing something that makes cities what they are, because we don’t have a good model for letting retail capture the value it creates." hospitality is a different thing entirely. rents could drop to zero, and restaurants and hotels will still be going out of business due to reduced conference tourism. and anyway, they are alcohol (drugs) businesses. they make profit from alcohol. the food, the concept, all that stuff is a hook for alcohol.
  - titanomachy 8mo ago
    He is including restaurants, bars, and coffee shops in “retail”. Amazon doesn’t replace those spaces.
- BrenBarn 8mo ago
  I mean one possibility is to ban triple net leases.
intrasight 8mo ago
I never considered how a street with lots of cool shops could create value for homeowners and commercial real estate owners without necessarily creating value for the businesses that were responsible for making it cool. I don't think that any of the suggested solutions would work, as they all involve the government and taxation - which can only destroy value, IMHO. Creating a cool vibe certainly has value and can contribute to price appreciation in the community, but ultimately capitalism is not based upon creating vibe but upon selling products and services.
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago
  >as they all involve the government and taxation - which can only destroy value, IMHO. My government and taxation provides the police, the courts, the schools, the roads, the sewers, the power, etc. Seems like a little bit of a value add.
  - philipallstar 8mo ago
    I think you've misread the OP's point. It's not that the government doesn't provide the police (although it doesn't - the taxpayer pays for the police and staffs it). It's that government policies and regulations to try and change fundamental market forces create extremely obvious problems, although they aren't always obvious to the myopic voter.
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  You’re very close to asking whether capitalism leads to the best quality of life, if you think of quality as going beyond the availability of products and services. People who grew up in Soviet-era poverty of course see this differently than comfortable middle class people who feel alienated by soulless suburbia. I think the article could be read as a way to reconcile the two.
  - digiown 8mo ago
    Value creation not captured is the definition of a positive externality, and landlords being able to extract that value despite not creating them is an example of rent seeking. Aiming to address these does not somehow question capitalism.
lotsofpulp 8mo ago
>But homeowners would likely be willing to share value too No, they wouldn't. That is why property tax rates (and hence land value tax rates) have so many laws capping them and otherwise limiting them for all the important voting blocs (old people, military, big business, etc). See California prop 13, that voters passed. See Oregon measure 5 and 50, also passed by voters. And politicians wouldn't dare touch these. >In American cities, there is an issue with value capture. One party creates the value (in this case retailers), another party (landowners or homeowners) captures it. This phenomenon is not restricted to American cities. It will broadly exist in all human societies with flattened or top heavy population age histograms. The old are the most populous and knowledgeable (and motivated) to structure society so that the non working (themselves) can capture the most value. Hence, the popularity of earned income tax instead of marginal land value tax rates. The goals of the wealthy and the old (and the ones with aspirations to be wealthy) align to support rent seeking policy.
- danny_codes 8mo ago
  A perennial cause for revolution around the globe. It’s a bit ironic. In an effort to horde wealth, the wealthy bring about their own ruin. Though I suppose if you die before the revolution that’s alright for you
  - asdff 8mo ago
    Revolution has never changed this status quo. Just results in violence, then once the ship rights itself the social order is back to how it was with an oligarchical elite extracting value from labor. In fact I don't think there has ever been a single case of labor unshackling itself from the yoke of the oligarchy. If there is a natural human condition, it must be this, just because of how sustained this pattern has been over the course of what tens of thousands of years to today, even in the face of modern technology and more universal awareness that this is how the world actually works.
  - eucyclos 8mo ago
    Apres moi, le deluge.
yellowapple 8mo ago
This is Exhibit A for why land value tax is a good idea.
- RobGR 8mo ago
  I don't think there is a connection. The situation where the landlords capture most of the increase in value that a cluster of retailers create, would not be affected if we switched from taxing the landlords on the value of their land and building, to taxing them just on the value of the land.
  - jimnotgym 8mo ago
    It does capture the increased value of the land around the shops though. Transferring that to the retailer is harder, as you say
    - digiown 8mo ago
      It can be transferred by lowering sales or corporate taxes. It is also indirectly transferred by encouraging more valuable land use around the retail like public transport or complementary businesses.
      - yellowapple 8mo ago
        Another option on top of all that is UBI, which gives customers more money to spend at those businesses.
  - Based-A 8mo ago
    In the immediate order of things yeah, tenants aren't going to receive any relief from taxing land. The benefit lies in the second, or maybe even third order of effects that LVT produces. Do we want the landlords to just sit on all of that value they're accumulating or do we want to take in more tax revenue (not a higher tax rate) as their land value increases and then do something for the common good with that additional tax revenue? Maybe tax relief for businesses, or social programs that reduce the cost of living for the workers. Or even better, encourage the landowner to further develop their land to get a better return, potentially benefitting tenants and the nearby community? Because that's what LVT does, or at the very least enables.
Tiktaalik 8mo ago
This is a vexing problem I was made aware of by friends that are in the retail business, renting their stores from landlords. It's really brutal. Retailers take on all the risk, put in the work to revitalize a neighbourhood, and their reward is that when lease renewal comes up in 10 years, it spikes and they're faced with a choice of being displaced or handing over an enormously increased part of their margins to the landlord which has done literally nothing. The others that benefit are the nearby condo developers, that take photos of cool retail in the area to put into their brochures in order to help sell their product. They benefit from the land speculation and the work from others. I don't really have a solution except that I can see that the landlords benefit from scarcity, and their leverage and ability to raise rents would be lessened if there was more viable retail spaces to take advantage of. So the city could help retailers by dramatically liberalizing retail zoning and allowing more competitive high streets to develop. This could take the edge off being forced to move by a landlord jacking up rent.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  I've seen a similar thing happen (though more rarely) where a retailer owns the building or space, and after 10 or so years, looks up and realizes they could make more take-home by renting it out.
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    In truth, retail is a pretty awful business. People love the romanticism of it and the "simplicity", but really it's a shit way to make money the vast majority of the time. $100k of money sitting on shelves depreciating. Narrow hours when most of your business comes, but need to hang around all those other hours for the trickle of other customers. Dealing with theft. Dealing with bottom tier workers. Dealing with the general public It's really best when you are already retired and just want something to do for fun.
    - steveBK123 8mo ago
      Vanity shops/restaurant projects by rich spouses are very much a thing in some rich towns as well. People who are doing it for fun since they have nothing else to do with their time and this also hurt competing businesses that actually need to make money. That said it would probably be fun way to engage with the community in whatever retirement hobbies you have. Like a daytime cafe / nighttime lounge / listening bar / art gallery thing haha. You do need some staff you can trust to deal with all the not fun parts. Anyone who has worked retail as a teen knows what that’s like.
QuadmasterXLII 8mo ago
The most chaotic solution I can think of would be making Felix Margolis, who joins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and gives out 30 year tiny interest loans to help first time small business owners buy the property instead of renting it. A beautiful crop of thriving businesses started in 2027 at the low low price of commercial real estate prices climbing imto the stratosphere so no small business started in 2040 being able to rent more than a square foot.
- titanomachy 8mo ago
  It does seem like kind of an obvious way for businesses to capture more of the value they create.
cyberax 8mo ago
The whole discussion about "fixing" cities is stupid. Dense cities can't be fixed, and using ad-hoc regulations like this is just like plugging the holes in a dike with fingers. Next you'll find that you also need to do the same for schools. But schoolteachers won't be able to afford living near the areas that they serve. So you need subsidized housing for them. Oh, and the same for kindergarten. But what about at-home childcare? And so on. And no, "land value capture" won't fix it. You'll just move the complexity from giving out subsidies into assessing the value of kindergartens and schools.
- crooked-v 8mo ago
  The problem with US cities is that they're not dense enough. Most of the US has spent the past half-centry actively making new high-density construction illegal or incredibly expensive, so everything is operating within the bounds of 1970s-80s construction being reused over and over again because it was grandfathered in.
  - cyberax 8mo ago
    BS. European cities are just as bad. And the US cities resisted the urbanism blight for longer than Europe thanks to a much better design. And Europe is now paying price for its density obsession. You see it as a rising tide of far-right movements in Europe.
    - danny_codes 8mo ago
      Interesting jump there. Not sure what you mean by blight though?
      - cyberax 8mo ago
        People being forced by economic forces to move into uncomfortable and unaffordable dense cities. This in turn creates disadvantaged underclass with no hopes for a better future. And even European social safety nets can only do so much. While just hours away from dense cities, the apartments are often literally free. With copious space and easy access to basic services. This results in rising crime. The downward trend that started in 90-s had been reversed. And the crimes of despair, mainly drug-related crimes, are rising faster than violent crimes.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
bhickey 8mo ago
> Two thirds of new American homes are in some sort of community association, typically homeowners’ associations, but also co-ops, and condominium associations, and 30 percent of American homes overall. Buyers opt into these associations, pay annual fees in the thousands of dollars, and suffer their annoying restrictions and demands because they create amenities: quiet, cleanliness/tidiness, safety, or things like public pools and parks. Uh... People "opt-in" to homeowners' associations because two-thirds of new builds impose them. Municipalities don't want to accept new roads, so developers can get things built through privatization.
danny_codes 8mo ago
A classic “just do LVT” situation. It’s amusing because Henry George wrote down exactly what to do 130 years ago and we’re still arguing about it. Just read the book people!
- greenie_beans 8mo ago
  wavy hands
munificent 8mo ago
I hear people talk about this all the time and I know I am guilty of it too: 1. Go into a store to check out a product in person or try it on. 2. Leave and buy it cheaper online. I try not to. Sometimes it's because the store doesn't have the exact color or model I want. Sometimes the point in time when I'm shopping happens to not be when I'm ready to buy and when I am ready, it's a hassle to go back to the store. But sometimes it's just being lazy and cheap. I'm surprised the article didn't mention an obvious (but extremely difficult) answer: 1. Levy taxes on online retail companies. Scale so that the larger the business is and the greater the fraction of their business is online, the higher the tax. 2. Use that to subsidize or lower the taxes on smaller, in-person focused businesses. Taxes are the single best lever we have to architect incentivizes to improve the world for the public. It's a shame that government and politics in the US is so broken that we can't really use it effectively.
wxw 8mo ago
> The Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway buys up the land around new station sites before they start building them. This rail-plus-property model makes them one of the few profitable transit services in the world. I really enjoyed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI describing more in detail how they did this. It has as much to do with historical circumstance as it does with good decision-making. The MTR is an impressive organization. MTA in NY seems to be taking a few cues, prioritizing in-house expertise.
m463 8mo ago
Why can't retailers BUY the property, in the same way as homeowners?
- antonymoose 8mo ago
  There is a chicken-and-egg problem. You would need to show cash flow in your business for several years in order to get a loan to purchase a property. In the mean time, if you’re successful, your landlord has no incentive to sell but instead hold and raise rents.
- AngryData 8mo ago
  Access to capital. People who want to start their own small store aren't usually sitting on the money they would need to buy urban property on top of stocking the store and potentially earning nothing for a few years before they can form any steady customer base.
econ 8mo ago
The solution is obvious and not going to happen. Extra tax, super cheap rent with conditions: Minimum number of products, product diversity, open x days per year (etc?) 30 years ago there was this lovely shop here full of hand crafted wooden dolls and beautiful wooden statues about the size of a garden gnome. They were reasonably expensive but an absolute joy to look at without buying anything. I don't think selling tickets like in a museum would work for a place like that. If they tax me 10 bucks the city could buy the building and continue to lure me into town.

117 points by marojejian 8mo ago

Interesting article, though I'm biased since: - I like to shop IRL, and the opportunities to do this pleasurably are going extinct - I live right by Hayes valley, which they start out with. - I'm also a member of "The Commons" which they mention at the end. I love what it's trying to do: creating a new social 3rd space in SF.

iamrobertismo 9mo ago

Always in agreement to such initiatives. I do think a barrier to adoption is the space of possibilities is quite large and generally not well organized around a specific proposal or mandate, so opposition to these initiatives can pick them apart of details. Especially since opposition is usually much more engaged in local governance. It's somewhat complicated to understand, but I think this is an opportunity for strong communicators to present to a public that is much more receptive toward these ideas.

jeffbee 8mo ago

How does this survive contact with the triple net lease? You pass the bond and the property tax is immediately due from the tenant. Congratulations, you destroyed all the businesses.

lotsofpulp 8mo ago
Destroy the businesses, rental prices go down, land value tax rates punish land owner for keeping land empty, so either land owner sells the property to someone who can make the numbers work, or land owner accepts lower profits. Obviously, there is pain for the current players, but long term, the landowner should not be able to extract so much profit margin without also providing sufficient utility, such as operating an in demand business.
- Waterluvian 8mo ago
  This feels like a solution at the barrel of a loaded gun.
  - int_19h 8mo ago
    Property rights in general are enforced at the barrel of a loaded gun, ultimately. Is that an argument against them?
- asdff 8mo ago
  Something to be said about the number of vampires out there. I think about my own apartment complex. Less than half a dozen units owned by a single landlord. They pay a handiman probably less than $1000 worth of work on the property a year, really nothing major every happens. They pay a crew to come by once every other month and trim the bushes and blow everything out, mostly because the city has fire code saying the bushes cannot touch the structure. Whatever the cheapest two man crew for that costs I guess. And for that couple hundred in upkeep maybe they pay a year, my landlord clears probably between 150k to 200k in rent doing nothing at all. I think they actually own a couple more similar properties so its more than that. So here is this couple in this city, that has found for themselves a way to pull out at least 200k from the local economy, and contribute basically nothing back at all. They don't otherwise work. They just cash checks pretty much and text the handiman when an tenant texts them. Imagine how cheap my rent would be not having to pay for these vampires considering actual costs of this building. Probably like $50/mo each between all of us tenants would be plenty to cover typical yearly overhead. I'd certainly go out to eat a ton more and heavily support local economy if I was only losing $50 a month of my pay to rent. I'd probably get away only having to work 10 hours a week. But no I work 40 hours and give them like 30% my gross because my landlord needs 200k to do nothing. Literally all they do is suck my blood. Their whole existence based on sucking my blood.
  - singleshot_ 8mo ago
    “basically nothing back at all,” or, “ the time value of money.”
doctorpangloss 8mo ago
how many retail storefronts do you think Phil Levin and Ben Southwood have started? how many retailers do you think they've talked to? rents could drop to zero, and people would still be buying more shit off amazon than from stores. i can't comprehend how they can go from talking about amazon being the cause of foot traffic reductions, and then the non sequiter comes, "We risk losing something that makes cities what they are, because we don’t have a good model for letting retail capture the value it creates." hospitality is a different thing entirely. rents could drop to zero, and restaurants and hotels will still be going out of business due to reduced conference tourism. and anyway, they are alcohol (drugs) businesses. they make profit from alcohol. the food, the concept, all that stuff is a hook for alcohol.
- titanomachy 8mo ago
  He is including restaurants, bars, and coffee shops in “retail”. Amazon doesn’t replace those spaces.
BrenBarn 8mo ago
I mean one possibility is to ban triple net leases.

intrasight 8mo ago

I never considered how a street with lots of cool shops could create value for homeowners and commercial real estate owners without necessarily creating value for the businesses that were responsible for making it cool. I don't think that any of the suggested solutions would work, as they all involve the government and taxation - which can only destroy value, IMHO. Creating a cool vibe certainly has value and can contribute to price appreciation in the community, but ultimately capitalism is not based upon creating vibe but upon selling products and services.

lotsofpulp 8mo ago
>as they all involve the government and taxation - which can only destroy value, IMHO. My government and taxation provides the police, the courts, the schools, the roads, the sewers, the power, etc. Seems like a little bit of a value add.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  I think you've misread the OP's point. It's not that the government doesn't provide the police (although it doesn't - the taxpayer pays for the police and staffs it). It's that government policies and regulations to try and change fundamental market forces create extremely obvious problems, although they aren't always obvious to the myopic voter.
shermantanktop 8mo ago
You’re very close to asking whether capitalism leads to the best quality of life, if you think of quality as going beyond the availability of products and services. People who grew up in Soviet-era poverty of course see this differently than comfortable middle class people who feel alienated by soulless suburbia. I think the article could be read as a way to reconcile the two.
- digiown 8mo ago
  Value creation not captured is the definition of a positive externality, and landlords being able to extract that value despite not creating them is an example of rent seeking. Aiming to address these does not somehow question capitalism.

lotsofpulp 8mo ago

>But homeowners would likely be willing to share value too No, they wouldn't. That is why property tax rates (and hence land value tax rates) have so many laws capping them and otherwise limiting them for all the important voting blocs (old people, military, big business, etc). See California prop 13, that voters passed. See Oregon measure 5 and 50, also passed by voters. And politicians wouldn't dare touch these. >In American cities, there is an issue with value capture. One party creates the value (in this case retailers), another party (landowners or homeowners) captures it. This phenomenon is not restricted to American cities. It will broadly exist in all human societies with flattened or top heavy population age histograms. The old are the most populous and knowledgeable (and motivated) to structure society so that the non working (themselves) can capture the most value. Hence, the popularity of earned income tax instead of marginal land value tax rates. The goals of the wealthy and the old (and the ones with aspirations to be wealthy) align to support rent seeking policy.

danny_codes 8mo ago
A perennial cause for revolution around the globe. It’s a bit ironic. In an effort to horde wealth, the wealthy bring about their own ruin. Though I suppose if you die before the revolution that’s alright for you
- asdff 8mo ago
  Revolution has never changed this status quo. Just results in violence, then once the ship rights itself the social order is back to how it was with an oligarchical elite extracting value from labor. In fact I don't think there has ever been a single case of labor unshackling itself from the yoke of the oligarchy. If there is a natural human condition, it must be this, just because of how sustained this pattern has been over the course of what tens of thousands of years to today, even in the face of modern technology and more universal awareness that this is how the world actually works.
- eucyclos 8mo ago
  Apres moi, le deluge.

yellowapple 8mo ago

This is Exhibit A for why land value tax is a good idea.

RobGR 8mo ago
I don't think there is a connection. The situation where the landlords capture most of the increase in value that a cluster of retailers create, would not be affected if we switched from taxing the landlords on the value of their land and building, to taxing them just on the value of the land.
- jimnotgym 8mo ago
  It does capture the increased value of the land around the shops though. Transferring that to the retailer is harder, as you say
  - digiown 8mo ago
    It can be transferred by lowering sales or corporate taxes. It is also indirectly transferred by encouraging more valuable land use around the retail like public transport or complementary businesses.
    - yellowapple 8mo ago
      Another option on top of all that is UBI, which gives customers more money to spend at those businesses.
- Based-A 8mo ago
  In the immediate order of things yeah, tenants aren't going to receive any relief from taxing land. The benefit lies in the second, or maybe even third order of effects that LVT produces. Do we want the landlords to just sit on all of that value they're accumulating or do we want to take in more tax revenue (not a higher tax rate) as their land value increases and then do something for the common good with that additional tax revenue? Maybe tax relief for businesses, or social programs that reduce the cost of living for the workers. Or even better, encourage the landowner to further develop their land to get a better return, potentially benefitting tenants and the nearby community? Because that's what LVT does, or at the very least enables.

Tiktaalik 8mo ago

This is a vexing problem I was made aware of by friends that are in the retail business, renting their stores from landlords. It's really brutal. Retailers take on all the risk, put in the work to revitalize a neighbourhood, and their reward is that when lease renewal comes up in 10 years, it spikes and they're faced with a choice of being displaced or handing over an enormously increased part of their margins to the landlord which has done literally nothing. The others that benefit are the nearby condo developers, that take photos of cool retail in the area to put into their brochures in order to help sell their product. They benefit from the land speculation and the work from others. I don't really have a solution except that I can see that the landlords benefit from scarcity, and their leverage and ability to raise rents would be lessened if there was more viable retail spaces to take advantage of. So the city could help retailers by dramatically liberalizing retail zoning and allowing more competitive high streets to develop. This could take the edge off being forced to move by a landlord jacking up rent.

bombcar 8mo ago
I've seen a similar thing happen (though more rarely) where a retailer owns the building or space, and after 10 or so years, looks up and realizes they could make more take-home by renting it out.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  In truth, retail is a pretty awful business. People love the romanticism of it and the "simplicity", but really it's a shit way to make money the vast majority of the time. $100k of money sitting on shelves depreciating. Narrow hours when most of your business comes, but need to hang around all those other hours for the trickle of other customers. Dealing with theft. Dealing with bottom tier workers. Dealing with the general public It's really best when you are already retired and just want something to do for fun.
  - steveBK123 8mo ago
    Vanity shops/restaurant projects by rich spouses are very much a thing in some rich towns as well. People who are doing it for fun since they have nothing else to do with their time and this also hurt competing businesses that actually need to make money. That said it would probably be fun way to engage with the community in whatever retirement hobbies you have. Like a daytime cafe / nighttime lounge / listening bar / art gallery thing haha. You do need some staff you can trust to deal with all the not fun parts. Anyone who has worked retail as a teen knows what that’s like.

QuadmasterXLII 8mo ago

The most chaotic solution I can think of would be making Felix Margolis, who joins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and gives out 30 year tiny interest loans to help first time small business owners buy the property instead of renting it. A beautiful crop of thriving businesses started in 2027 at the low low price of commercial real estate prices climbing imto the stratosphere so no small business started in 2040 being able to rent more than a square foot.

titanomachy 8mo ago
It does seem like kind of an obvious way for businesses to capture more of the value they create.

cyberax 8mo ago

The whole discussion about "fixing" cities is stupid. Dense cities can't be fixed, and using ad-hoc regulations like this is just like plugging the holes in a dike with fingers. Next you'll find that you also need to do the same for schools. But schoolteachers won't be able to afford living near the areas that they serve. So you need subsidized housing for them. Oh, and the same for kindergarten. But what about at-home childcare? And so on. And no, "land value capture" won't fix it. You'll just move the complexity from giving out subsidies into assessing the value of kindergartens and schools.

crooked-v 8mo ago
The problem with US cities is that they're not dense enough. Most of the US has spent the past half-centry actively making new high-density construction illegal or incredibly expensive, so everything is operating within the bounds of 1970s-80s construction being reused over and over again because it was grandfathered in.
- cyberax 8mo ago
  BS. European cities are just as bad. And the US cities resisted the urbanism blight for longer than Europe thanks to a much better design. And Europe is now paying price for its density obsession. You see it as a rising tide of far-right movements in Europe.
  - danny_codes 8mo ago
    Interesting jump there. Not sure what you mean by blight though?
    - cyberax 8mo ago
      People being forced by economic forces to move into uncomfortable and unaffordable dense cities. This in turn creates disadvantaged underclass with no hopes for a better future. And even European social safety nets can only do so much. While just hours away from dense cities, the apartments are often literally free. With copious space and easy access to basic services. This results in rising crime. The downward trend that started in 90-s had been reversed. And the crimes of despair, mainly drug-related crimes, are rising faster than violent crimes.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

bhickey 8mo ago

> Two thirds of new American homes are in some sort of community association, typically homeowners’ associations, but also co-ops, and condominium associations, and 30 percent of American homes overall. Buyers opt into these associations, pay annual fees in the thousands of dollars, and suffer their annoying restrictions and demands because they create amenities: quiet, cleanliness/tidiness, safety, or things like public pools and parks. Uh... People "opt-in" to homeowners' associations because two-thirds of new builds impose them. Municipalities don't want to accept new roads, so developers can get things built through privatization.

danny_codes 8mo ago

A classic “just do LVT” situation. It’s amusing because Henry George wrote down exactly what to do 130 years ago and we’re still arguing about it. Just read the book people!

greenie_beans 8mo ago
wavy hands

munificent 8mo ago

I hear people talk about this all the time and I know I am guilty of it too: 1. Go into a store to check out a product in person or try it on. 2. Leave and buy it cheaper online. I try not to. Sometimes it's because the store doesn't have the exact color or model I want. Sometimes the point in time when I'm shopping happens to not be when I'm ready to buy and when I am ready, it's a hassle to go back to the store. But sometimes it's just being lazy and cheap. I'm surprised the article didn't mention an obvious (but extremely difficult) answer: 1. Levy taxes on online retail companies. Scale so that the larger the business is and the greater the fraction of their business is online, the higher the tax. 2. Use that to subsidize or lower the taxes on smaller, in-person focused businesses. Taxes are the single best lever we have to architect incentivizes to improve the world for the public. It's a shame that government and politics in the US is so broken that we can't really use it effectively.

wxw 8mo ago

> The Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway buys up the land around new station sites before they start building them. This rail-plus-property model makes them one of the few profitable transit services in the world. I really enjoyed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI describing more in detail how they did this. It has as much to do with historical circumstance as it does with good decision-making. The MTR is an impressive organization. MTA in NY seems to be taking a few cues, prioritizing in-house expertise.

m463 8mo ago

Why can't retailers BUY the property, in the same way as homeowners?

antonymoose 8mo ago
There is a chicken-and-egg problem. You would need to show cash flow in your business for several years in order to get a loan to purchase a property. In the mean time, if you’re successful, your landlord has no incentive to sell but instead hold and raise rents.
AngryData 8mo ago
Access to capital. People who want to start their own small store aren't usually sitting on the money they would need to buy urban property on top of stocking the store and potentially earning nothing for a few years before they can form any steady customer base.

econ 8mo ago

The solution is obvious and not going to happen. Extra tax, super cheap rent with conditions: Minimum number of products, product diversity, open x days per year (etc?) 30 years ago there was this lovely shop here full of hand crafted wooden dolls and beautiful wooden statues about the size of a garden gnome. They were reasonably expensive but an absolute joy to look at without buying anything. I don't think selling tickets like in a museum would work for a place like that. If they tax me 10 bucks the city could buy the building and continue to lure me into town.