6 ms·

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

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.
    - bombcar 8mo ago
      If you own the building and rent to your spouse it often makes sense to charge as high as you can because of depreciation. Of course, you have to be careful to avoid self dealing.
  - sokoloff 8mo ago
    I’d much rather punch myself in the face every morning than open a retail operation in retirement.
    - bombcar 8mo ago
      The only people I've ever met who dreamed of retiring to run a retail operation were those who have never worked retail a day in their life - they imagine it to be like a sitcom or something.
cousin_it 8mo ago
There seems a bit of inner conflict in what you're saying. If retailers "revitalizing a neighborhood" leads indirectly to them getting priced out due to rising land values, isn't it also true that poor people living in the neighborhood get priced out at the same time? Is it a good or bad thing to make a neighborhood more hip, is the retailer a hero or a villain?
- eru 8mo ago
  A hero. It's pretty simple. No need to complicate things. Just like saving a (healthy) life is a good thing, even if you can spin some stories about the dignity of death or whatever.
- michaelt 8mo ago
  Long term residents may own their properties, protecting them from rent increases and letting them share in the wealth should they sell up and move. For various reasons it’s extremely rare for retail businesses to own the buildings they operate out of.
  - scienceman 8mo ago
    You aren’t looking at it in the long term view. Yes that works for people who have been living by there for 40 years since the area was not so nice. But how they are rich (housing value increase) and no one new who is not rich can move it. Eventually the people who have been there long will die and it will only be for the rich.
- appreciatorBus 8mo ago
  Depends whether or not the city allows other neighbourhoods to exist/grow/change. If the total floorspace in the city is fixed in regulations, then ofc anything done to improve conditions will hurt people on the bottom. The people who can afford a "revitalized neighbourhood" would happily live in brand new housing built on top of land in the nearby mansion district, displacing no one, but city planners do not allow that - new apartments can only be added to the city stock by destroying old ones, new store floorspace can only be added by destroying old etc. This forces everyone to play musical chairs with too few chairs and the only winners are those who own the chairs.
carlosjobim 8mo ago
Anybody who has entered the retail business as a renter for the past 15 years has made a mistake. Because land lords do this to everybody. If their goal wasn't to suck the lifeblood of people and businesses, then they would have invested their money into something different than becoming landlords. If you have a great retail idea, then you need to get investors behind you so that your company can outright own the stores. Otherwise you will be leeched on endlessly. It's incredibly hard to get on top if you're depending on the good will of landlords. Solution: Online shopping until the bubble collapses.
- mhb 8mo ago
  That's a nice just so story for the cases in which a landlord benefits due to the success of his tenant. Now do the ones where the property value goes down because of any of a zillion other factors.
  - lux-lux-lux 8mo ago
    CRE has historically provided very good and stable returns, especially compared to retail businesses who face extreme failure rates and risk; trying to compare the two is insulting.
    - mhb 8mo ago
      So retail business owners are just dullards who can't figure this out like you can?
      - Supermancho 8mo ago
        I imagine most people are not capitalized, confidently practiced in it, or interested in that kind of business. Took 10 seconds to think about it.
        mhb 8mo ago
        Maybe spend the next 10 seconds thinking about comparative advantage.
cyberax 8mo ago
Stop densifying cities and start building out suburbs where the land is cheap. Using all kinds of regulations to ignore the market signals usually points out that you're doing something wrong (not _always_).
- tidbits 8mo ago
  Except regulations are what got us here in the first place? At least in the US, zoning is a recent invention with racial motivations. Cities want to be dense because that is the cheapest way to build. That is why basically every city older than a 100 years old that hasn't been wrecked by zoning is dense. Suburbs are an unnatural product of abundant land in the US, the invention of automobiles, and zoning.
  - Legend2440 8mo ago
    ...that's a pretty disingenuous take on zoning, which has many other motives beyond racism. For example zoning keeps industry away from residential, preventing disasters like the West Texas Fertilizer explosion.
    - actionfromafar 8mo ago
      Must we have extremes? I could live near ”no explosives” zoning, while still allowing at lot more than is typical today.
    - cucumber3732842 8mo ago
      The state claims jurisdiction on pretty much all the "seriously heavy" industry people like to trot out as though it would be in your back yard if not for zoning. The local towns don't get much of a say and even when they do the projects are high dollar enough that if the town won't grant it then they'll win on appeal and it'll be no big deal. Aaaand, the real kicker is that the towns typically can't fight too hard because a lot of zoning provisions they'd use are not up to the legal standard it takes to do battle with a megacorp and they'd rather keep them on the books as they are than have the megacorp's lawyers pick them apart. So you can still have Chernoybl in your back yard with zoning.
jmyeet 8mo ago
It's almost like you could describe the physical store as the means of production so what we're talking about is the worker's relationship to the means of production. You might say: but what abou the owners? Many such small businesses are just jobs you buy. Many don't survive when the owners don't move on or the business sells for what's a relatively low price given the turnover. I'll give you another real world example of this distortion: NYC"s so-called "zombie stores" [1]. I keep thinking about a statement made by Xi Jinping in 2016: houses are for living, not for speculation [2]. Many China critics liked to point to the Evergrand collapse as some gotcha but what really happened is that the CCP intentionally just popped the real estate bubble, taking the position that affordable housing was more important than inventor returns. Why do I bring up housing? Because as intentional policy decisions increase the cost of construction, it also makes commercial real estate more expensive. Even if you ignore the increased construction cost, every commercial space becomes more expensive because it's an opportunity cost to not build housing there in a speculative market. Increased rent and increased property costs are an input into everything you buy and are killing the businesses people seem to like and the so-called "third spaces" a lot of people talk about. And why? Because a plurality of Americans (if not an outright majority) see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" [3] and future real estate moguls. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/nyregion/pharmacies-vacant-drugstores-retail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/nyregion/pharmacies-vacan... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for... [3]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-said-that-socialism-never-took-root-in https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
- appreciatorBus 8mo ago
  The physical store is not the "means of production" in urban areas, but a closer analog is the piece of paper that allows a given square foot of floorspace (for any use) the right to exist within the city for a given period of time. You could call this piece of paper a floorspace factory, since it's the limiting factor. Somehow we have decided it's best to have as few floorspace factories as possible.
  - 8mo ago
WarmWash 8mo ago
On paper though, if the area becomes nicer, they should be raising their prices to reflect that. The landlord asking for a larger cut because the value of the storefront has increased, should be a signal to raise your prices to pass the cost along. As a bit of a "cute downtown" junkie, I can assure you that those quaint town stores have crazy prices, but people pay them.
- jimnotgym 8mo ago
  That works if you sell something exclusive. It is less easy if you sell things that are for sale on Amazon.
  - appreciatorBus 8mo ago
    Unfortunately city planners are the original "scientific" central planners and they have decided that legal floorspace (residential, commercial, retail, all of it) should exclusive & scarce, with predictable results.
- asdff 8mo ago
  It is difficult to simply raise prices when your business is not a necessity but a luxury, because there is a tipping point where customers will decide they can just do without whatever you have on offer. Customers can be awfully price sensitive beyond even what would be economically rational. They might balk at a pint of beer going up by $3 while they pull down four or five figures of income a month.
pc86 8mo ago
> 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. This happens on the personal side as well, where property tax rates are artificially depressed - or more accurately, subsidized - until the property changes hands. When we bought our nearly 30 year old house that had had zero improvements, additions, or renovations since initial construction, our property tax bill increased 300% and has since "stabilized" to +10% a year. What is truly insidious about this is that it's impossible to guess or estimate until you've already purchased the home, and by then it's too late to do anything about it except complain at the courthouse, which might get you a year's abatement if you're lucky. If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase.
- gertlex 8mo ago
  > If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase. I wouldn't be surprised to hear this varies by jurisdiction. In CA, which has large property tax jumps on sales thanks to Prop 13, it seems like you can know the annual property taxes in advance. The sale price is the taxable valuation* and you can find what the local tax rate is (or you can infer it pretty closely from another recently sold home's public municipal taxes paid). So solves one problem, but is still problematic :) *I assume this is the general case, anyways; maybe there's details I'm forgetting about separate tax rates on the land and the improvements; the split of the overall proper value between those two categories was mystifying when I bought...
- alistairSH 8mo ago
  Where is this? As far as I know, my area doesn’t do that. The assessments go up over time, but there’s no large jump on transfer of ownership.
  - 8mo ago
nradov 8mo ago
Retail condos avoid this problem, although require the business to have access to more capital. https://shoppingcenterbusiness.com/retail-condominiums-breaking-down-the-nuances-of-this-unique-ownership-structure/ https://shoppingcenterbusiness.com/retail-condominiums-break... But in general most US cities have an excess of retail space. Eliminating a lot of it would probably be a net positive.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> Retailers take on all the risk > landlord which has done literally nothing This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money. There's also a risk involved in renting out the properties. Not all tenants will pay the rent, and when they stop paying for long enough you have to evict. It takes a long time to get someone's business out and turn the property over so a new business can move in. The rents have to be adjusted to compensate for some of that loss, but in a downturn (e.g. COVID) the losses can all sync up at once and torpedo the financial model used by the landlord. Retail spaces also need to be kept up. It's common in my area for groups to buy out blocks of spaces and overhaul the old parking lots, landscaping, lighting, traffic patterns, and security so that they go from being sketchy run-down locations to something safe and inviting. I'll probably get downvoted for trying to add some balance to the conversation because this is an internet comment section and my comment wasn't "landlords bad", but retail property investment isn't really a magical safe investment like everyone assumes. Keep that in mind if anyone hits you up for an investment opportunity related to one.
- cucumber3732842 8mo ago
  >This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money. Nobody develops the sort of organic small scale anything anymore because the caricature informs the local government who then sink their teeth in at every turn and the end result is that the only people doing new development or refreshing stuff at great expense are corporations capable of fending off the government or rich enough to play along.
  - SeanAnderson 8mo ago
econ 8mo ago
here in the Netherlands a lot of shops that use to own their building switched to renting it to some sucker who does all of the work for a fraction of the profit. Then, when they go bankrupt you put a new sucker in.
throwawayqqq11 8mo ago
Location or land is a scarce resource by nature. I believe, the notion that more competition will fix things for cant really hold up. By designating more commercial zones, you just move around where space is left but you dont ensure that the same development happens there too.

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.
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    If you own the building and rent to your spouse it often makes sense to charge as high as you can because of depreciation. Of course, you have to be careful to avoid self dealing.
- sokoloff 8mo ago
  I’d much rather punch myself in the face every morning than open a retail operation in retirement.
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    The only people I've ever met who dreamed of retiring to run a retail operation were those who have never worked retail a day in their life - they imagine it to be like a sitcom or something.

cousin_it 8mo ago

There seems a bit of inner conflict in what you're saying. If retailers "revitalizing a neighborhood" leads indirectly to them getting priced out due to rising land values, isn't it also true that poor people living in the neighborhood get priced out at the same time? Is it a good or bad thing to make a neighborhood more hip, is the retailer a hero or a villain?

eru 8mo ago
A hero. It's pretty simple. No need to complicate things. Just like saving a (healthy) life is a good thing, even if you can spin some stories about the dignity of death or whatever.
michaelt 8mo ago
Long term residents may own their properties, protecting them from rent increases and letting them share in the wealth should they sell up and move. For various reasons it’s extremely rare for retail businesses to own the buildings they operate out of.
- scienceman 8mo ago
  You aren’t looking at it in the long term view. Yes that works for people who have been living by there for 40 years since the area was not so nice. But how they are rich (housing value increase) and no one new who is not rich can move it. Eventually the people who have been there long will die and it will only be for the rich.
appreciatorBus 8mo ago
Depends whether or not the city allows other neighbourhoods to exist/grow/change. If the total floorspace in the city is fixed in regulations, then ofc anything done to improve conditions will hurt people on the bottom. The people who can afford a "revitalized neighbourhood" would happily live in brand new housing built on top of land in the nearby mansion district, displacing no one, but city planners do not allow that - new apartments can only be added to the city stock by destroying old ones, new store floorspace can only be added by destroying old etc. This forces everyone to play musical chairs with too few chairs and the only winners are those who own the chairs.

carlosjobim 8mo ago

Anybody who has entered the retail business as a renter for the past 15 years has made a mistake. Because land lords do this to everybody. If their goal wasn't to suck the lifeblood of people and businesses, then they would have invested their money into something different than becoming landlords. If you have a great retail idea, then you need to get investors behind you so that your company can outright own the stores. Otherwise you will be leeched on endlessly. It's incredibly hard to get on top if you're depending on the good will of landlords. Solution: Online shopping until the bubble collapses.

mhb 8mo ago
That's a nice just so story for the cases in which a landlord benefits due to the success of his tenant. Now do the ones where the property value goes down because of any of a zillion other factors.
- lux-lux-lux 8mo ago
  CRE has historically provided very good and stable returns, especially compared to retail businesses who face extreme failure rates and risk; trying to compare the two is insulting.
  - mhb 8mo ago
    So retail business owners are just dullards who can't figure this out like you can?
    - Supermancho 8mo ago
      I imagine most people are not capitalized, confidently practiced in it, or interested in that kind of business. Took 10 seconds to think about it.
      - mhb 8mo ago
        Maybe spend the next 10 seconds thinking about comparative advantage.

cyberax 8mo ago

Stop densifying cities and start building out suburbs where the land is cheap. Using all kinds of regulations to ignore the market signals usually points out that you're doing something wrong (not _always_).

tidbits 8mo ago
Except regulations are what got us here in the first place? At least in the US, zoning is a recent invention with racial motivations. Cities want to be dense because that is the cheapest way to build. That is why basically every city older than a 100 years old that hasn't been wrecked by zoning is dense. Suburbs are an unnatural product of abundant land in the US, the invention of automobiles, and zoning.
- Legend2440 8mo ago
  ...that's a pretty disingenuous take on zoning, which has many other motives beyond racism. For example zoning keeps industry away from residential, preventing disasters like the West Texas Fertilizer explosion.
  - actionfromafar 8mo ago
    Must we have extremes? I could live near ”no explosives” zoning, while still allowing at lot more than is typical today.
  - cucumber3732842 8mo ago
    The state claims jurisdiction on pretty much all the "seriously heavy" industry people like to trot out as though it would be in your back yard if not for zoning. The local towns don't get much of a say and even when they do the projects are high dollar enough that if the town won't grant it then they'll win on appeal and it'll be no big deal. Aaaand, the real kicker is that the towns typically can't fight too hard because a lot of zoning provisions they'd use are not up to the legal standard it takes to do battle with a megacorp and they'd rather keep them on the books as they are than have the megacorp's lawyers pick them apart. So you can still have Chernoybl in your back yard with zoning.

jmyeet 8mo ago

It's almost like you could describe the physical store as the means of production so what we're talking about is the worker's relationship to the means of production. You might say: but what abou the owners? Many such small businesses are just jobs you buy. Many don't survive when the owners don't move on or the business sells for what's a relatively low price given the turnover. I'll give you another real world example of this distortion: NYC"s so-called "zombie stores" [1]. I keep thinking about a statement made by Xi Jinping in 2016: houses are for living, not for speculation [2]. Many China critics liked to point to the Evergrand collapse as some gotcha but what really happened is that the CCP intentionally just popped the real estate bubble, taking the position that affordable housing was more important than inventor returns. Why do I bring up housing? Because as intentional policy decisions increase the cost of construction, it also makes commercial real estate more expensive. Even if you ignore the increased construction cost, every commercial space becomes more expensive because it's an opportunity cost to not build housing there in a speculative market. Increased rent and increased property costs are an input into everything you buy and are killing the businesses people seem to like and the so-called "third spaces" a lot of people talk about. And why? Because a plurality of Americans (if not an outright majority) see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" [3] and future real estate moguls. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/nyregion/pharmacies-vacant-drugstores-retail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/nyregion/pharmacies-vacan... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for... [3]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-said-that-socialism-never-took-root-in https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...

appreciatorBus 8mo ago
The physical store is not the "means of production" in urban areas, but a closer analog is the piece of paper that allows a given square foot of floorspace (for any use) the right to exist within the city for a given period of time. You could call this piece of paper a floorspace factory, since it's the limiting factor. Somehow we have decided it's best to have as few floorspace factories as possible.
- 8mo ago

WarmWash 8mo ago

On paper though, if the area becomes nicer, they should be raising their prices to reflect that. The landlord asking for a larger cut because the value of the storefront has increased, should be a signal to raise your prices to pass the cost along. As a bit of a "cute downtown" junkie, I can assure you that those quaint town stores have crazy prices, but people pay them.

jimnotgym 8mo ago
That works if you sell something exclusive. It is less easy if you sell things that are for sale on Amazon.
- appreciatorBus 8mo ago
  Unfortunately city planners are the original "scientific" central planners and they have decided that legal floorspace (residential, commercial, retail, all of it) should exclusive & scarce, with predictable results.
asdff 8mo ago
It is difficult to simply raise prices when your business is not a necessity but a luxury, because there is a tipping point where customers will decide they can just do without whatever you have on offer. Customers can be awfully price sensitive beyond even what would be economically rational. They might balk at a pint of beer going up by $3 while they pull down four or five figures of income a month.

pc86 8mo ago

> 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. This happens on the personal side as well, where property tax rates are artificially depressed - or more accurately, subsidized - until the property changes hands. When we bought our nearly 30 year old house that had had zero improvements, additions, or renovations since initial construction, our property tax bill increased 300% and has since "stabilized" to +10% a year. What is truly insidious about this is that it's impossible to guess or estimate until you've already purchased the home, and by then it's too late to do anything about it except complain at the courthouse, which might get you a year's abatement if you're lucky. If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase.

gertlex 8mo ago
> If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase. I wouldn't be surprised to hear this varies by jurisdiction. In CA, which has large property tax jumps on sales thanks to Prop 13, it seems like you can know the annual property taxes in advance. The sale price is the taxable valuation* and you can find what the local tax rate is (or you can infer it pretty closely from another recently sold home's public municipal taxes paid). So solves one problem, but is still problematic :) *I assume this is the general case, anyways; maybe there's details I'm forgetting about separate tax rates on the land and the improvements; the split of the overall proper value between those two categories was mystifying when I bought...
alistairSH 8mo ago
Where is this? As far as I know, my area doesn’t do that. The assessments go up over time, but there’s no large jump on transfer of ownership.
- 8mo ago

nradov 8mo ago

Retail condos avoid this problem, although require the business to have access to more capital. https://shoppingcenterbusiness.com/retail-condominiums-breaking-down-the-nuances-of-this-unique-ownership-structure/ https://shoppingcenterbusiness.com/retail-condominiums-break... But in general most US cities have an excess of retail space. Eliminating a lot of it would probably be a net positive.

Aurornis 8mo ago

> Retailers take on all the risk > landlord which has done literally nothing This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money. There's also a risk involved in renting out the properties. Not all tenants will pay the rent, and when they stop paying for long enough you have to evict. It takes a long time to get someone's business out and turn the property over so a new business can move in. The rents have to be adjusted to compensate for some of that loss, but in a downturn (e.g. COVID) the losses can all sync up at once and torpedo the financial model used by the landlord. Retail spaces also need to be kept up. It's common in my area for groups to buy out blocks of spaces and overhaul the old parking lots, landscaping, lighting, traffic patterns, and security so that they go from being sketchy run-down locations to something safe and inviting. I'll probably get downvoted for trying to add some balance to the conversation because this is an internet comment section and my comment wasn't "landlords bad", but retail property investment isn't really a magical safe investment like everyone assumes. Keep that in mind if anyone hits you up for an investment opportunity related to one.

cucumber3732842 8mo ago
>This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money. Nobody develops the sort of organic small scale anything anymore because the caricature informs the local government who then sink their teeth in at every turn and the end result is that the only people doing new development or refreshing stuff at great expense are corporations capable of fending off the government or rich enough to play along.
- SeanAnderson 8mo ago

econ 8mo ago

here in the Netherlands a lot of shops that use to own their building switched to renting it to some sucker who does all of the work for a fraction of the profit. Then, when they go bankrupt you put a new sucker in.

throwawayqqq11 8mo ago

Location or land is a scarce resource by nature. I believe, the notion that more competition will fix things for cant really hold up. By designating more commercial zones, you just move around where space is left but you dont ensure that the same development happens there too.