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An economical aspect that is often ignored when complaining about non intensive uses of land is that probably an intensive use would not be profitable in that particular location.
Or that the landowner is just leasing it for non intensive uses (like a parking lot) while waiting for when it is ripe for an intensive development.
Using the quote from someone above:
Quote:
Big box stores occupy acres of valuable land in our towns with their large-scale buildings and even larger parking lots. This is land that generates far less tax revenue per acre than traditional commercial development.
First, the land might not be as valuable as you think. We are talking about economics here, not environment or sacred land of our ancestors or stuff like that, so the value has to be proven case by case.
Second, that "far less than" misses the fact that nothing guarantees that the traditional commercial development would ever appear in that particular lot
Downtown Miami was full of 'parking craters'. It was not because the owners were happy with that business or something. They just had an intertemporal preference. Better build a high rise condo 20 years form now, than a smaller building today. When money flows in, empty lots disappear, McDonalds are tore down etc. But when there is no money, whatever it pays the property tax is welcome.
numerous
papers (discussed below) suggest that local economic performance in general and employment growth in particular is strongly associated with smaller average establishment size, but little or no evidence exists
whether these small establishments are resident versus nonresident-owned. The objective of this paper is
to provide such evidence using a new data set. Based on aforementioned claims I investigate whether the
relative size of the locally-owned business sector has a positive association with local economic well-being.
...
My resident business measure is the share of the employment in resident business
establishments in total employment by all establishments (resident, non-resident, and noncommercial)
in a county. I assess the relationship between the size of the local business sector and the local income
and employment growth and the change in poverty as measured by the per capita real income growth,
the change in full- and part-time employment, and the change in poverty rate, respectively, averaged
over the period 2000 to 2008.3 Next I disaggregate the measures of percent of employment in resident
establishments into different sizes based on the categorization provided by the data developer Edward
Lowe Foundation (youreconomy.org) and examine the relationship between these various categories on
measures of county economic performance.
...
This study uses data from NETS Database provided by the Edward Lowe Foundation (). The NETS is a
unique data set that describes the type of ownership, the size of firms, and geographic location. It was
constructed using the most recent waves of the Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) data.
...
County-level analysis show that there were nearly 100 million workers employed by resident
establishments and a little over 31 million workers employed by nonresident establishments in the
United States in 2007. As a percent of total employment, 59 percent were employed by resident
establishments and 22 percent were employed by nonresident establishments. The remaining
employees were in the noncommercial sector. One noticeable feature is that these proportions between
resident and nonresident employee categories do not vary much and stay more or less stable during the
time period considered, 1997 to 2007 (Figure 3). The figures for metro areas in 2007 were 86 million
resident employees (57 percent) and 27 million nonresident employees (18 percent) and for nonmetro
areas, there were 14 million resident employees (52 percent) and 4 million nonresident employees (15
percent).
...
The direct and indirect impact measures for the income growth equation for all samples are
presented in Table 12 for set-one variables and Table 13 for set-two variables. Turning to the direct
impact of total resident employment share on county real per capita income growth, it has a positive
and significant impact for all counties and nonmetro samples, but has no significant effect for metro
sample. When disaggregated to establishment size, the share of employment in micro establishments is
positive and significant for all counties and nonmetro samples. The medium share is negative and
significant for metro sample and positive and significant for the nonmetro sample.
...
When disaggregated to establishment size, the shares of employment in micro and small establishments are positive and significant for all samples. The medium share is negative and significant for the metro sample and the large share is positive and significant in the all counties and metro samples.
...
My results in general support the two main hypotheses and provide evidence that local
entrepreneurship matters for local economic performance and smaller local businesses are more
conducive than larger local businesses for local economic performance.
That's interesting. Not much data; pre-recession, some of it almost 20 years old now (1997). I'm sorry you think I'm so mean, but that article doesn't say a lot. I'd like to see what the average retail wage is of "Mom and Pop" vs Walmart, Target, etc, also average benefits. But that data, realistically, probably doesn't exist. You do realize M&P don't have to follow the EEOC, no? They can hire whoever they want, discriminate against whoever they want. I know there's this meme that M&P's profits go back into the community, but that's hard to prove, too. For all we know, M&P could be investing their profits in a diamond mine in South Africa.
Funny that you're so rah-rah Trader Joe's, a chain grocery.
Many small towns downtowns are dying or have died in France with the development of big box stores since the 1970s.
Fortunately, France is not (yet?) like the US, where there are large cities without shopping activity in the city center.
Any cities above 100,000 still have a vibrant city centers, maybe less vibrant than what it used to be in the past but still vibrant.
The dead downtown is mostly for towns under 50,000 inhabitants whereas larger cities between 50,000 and 200,000 sees rising vacancy levels outside the main streets dominated by big chains.
Big city downtowns are still thriving.
Anyway I think that people put too much blame on big box retails and not enough blame on downtowns.
In my opinion, downtowns don't just die because of external factors but also because those downtown have not adapted to change.
Obsolete shopping spaces, obsolete buildings. Not attractive for offices or residents.
Problems often have multiple causes, one must be careful to blame everything on few scapegoats.
Unattractive downtowns, development of big box retailers, people moving to suburbs...
Here is Vierzon (27,000 inh), a declining industrial town in Central France.
Except that the application of your "point" to your dense retail objective illustrates that if your "point" were true then your objective is an exercise in futility. So either you're wrong or you've established the futility and inevitable failure of your dense retail plans.
Your theory is simplistic. Density also means more competitors nearby. Businesses tend to prosper more from buying customers rather than prospective customers. More stores selling the same stuff does not mean more customers for any given store even if there are more prospective customers. Are you also going to dictate what stores are permitted, where they are located, and what they are allowed to sell?
But back to your claim: Unless robots are serving them there won't be any customers. There are no retail clerks because there was no increase in jobs per your theory, remember?
No, it's an example of a city taxing without providing services. You also were vague about what cost was avoided and who avoided it. Seems to me density is the bootstrap justification for rail or other transit systems. An expensive subsidized transit system isn't avoiding a cost.
At any rate you won't need to worry about parking since you won't have any customers because there were no jobs for retail clerks created. You've eliminated the clerks (because of no new jobs per your theory, remember?) and parking - what kind of customers do you think clerk-less shops will get?
Well per your "theory" no new jobs are created so where are these "young people" going to work? The type of urban environment you promote isn't affordable for retail clerks - they will have to live elsewhere and commute in. But since you claim the creation of these retail shops didn't create any jobs there won't be any employment for the "young people" to engage in anyway.
I'm starting to think you're just stirring the pot too! And you might be the same guy.
How could this be any more simple? Retail stores HAVE jobs, but they don't add jobs on a NET basis, because a new job is generally taking away a DIFFERENT job.
Seriously, look up the "net increase" concept in a dictionary.
As for the amount of retail in urban areas, the square footage per capita or per spending dollar will be similar in the suburban or urban scenario all else being equal. If the urban area doesn't have enough retail space, then both sales and rents will tend to be higher, and vice versa. As for more competition, I'm glad you agree that a dense, walkable area will give a customer more choices.
And then you go on and on in the same vein, like the lady in the old skit that used get clued in eventually, stare blankly, then say "never mind."
Well, here's the problem: cities spend a remarkable amount of resources attracting and supporting shopping center/big box retail, through incentives to the retailer or developer and with outright expenditures on infrastructure to accommodate that development. Cities have a finite amount of resources at any given time and can try to raise future income or lower future expenditures. If a city want to raise income (so it can provide more services, presumably) without raising the burden per person, it has to encourage higher intensity of land use within its boundary. Going the other direction, cities can only streamline so far, there's a lower limit to efficiency gains.
So, it is worth asking if any given use is the most effective use. And cities totally have the right and authority to change how land many be used by future owners. So, if a city decides one form isn't delivering enough benefits for the burden, then that city can zone for something different.
The city cannot mandate that one build a high density retail outlet on a site, convert a golf course to apartments, or put a building on a parking lot. On the one hand you complain because you want higher intensity land use and then you complain when it is a big box store. You got your higher intensity land use, right?
A city might have the ability to take property from an owner - so long as it follows eminent domain law and compensates when takings occur. But that's not what you are talking about.
As far as some "form isn't delivering enough benefits for the burden" as being a basis for anything - that's absurd and offensive logic. As noted by someone else - your parks, libraries, statutory, government buildings, and so forth aren't high intensity land use, they are economic drains. What "burden" do you claim a functional building or piece of land is imposing on a city? What burden is a parking lot imposing on a city?
The types of services you might be referring to are often already accounted for by taxes or direct sales or other jurisdiction. Cities offload or simply avoid services by having another entity or political subdivision of the state provide them. Emergency services is one example. Water or electricity are others. When a city actually provides those services it does and can charge for infrastructure installation or causes the customer to bear the cost. As far as providing the consumable the city charges for that too.
You can ask all you want about whether a given use is the most "effective use" as an academic question. But the standing to assert the question in a forum and whether that forum has authority to do anything about it is a completely different ball of wax as is the issue of "for who". All too often the "for who" is left out of these discussions and when the answer to "for who" is someone other than the owner (which it almost always is since the person posing the question is not the owner) then you have to question the relevance of your opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darkeconomist
Further, government can totally tell land owners they can't do some given activity on their own property. A city can totally say no more strip clubs, no indoor smoking, no dumping of hazardous materials, or set a maximum number of parking spaces if it so chooses, and owners have to abide by that.
Within limitations yes otherwise the city has to pay for the taking. The city has more authority over commercial properties than it does over other properties. Wouldn't agree without seeing some basis for it that a city has the right to set a maximum number of parking spaces as a general proposition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darkeconomist
However you feel about Strong Towns and what they advocate for, they're not advocating for powers cities don't already have, they're advocating for different outcomes.
Well we can disagree about that. As but one example, when your organization's stated principle is "Land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered" you should recognize that the organization's members do not respect private property rights and that the non-existent "community" will be used as the excuse for taking your rights in your property and your property in your rights. The land isn't theirs to take nor theirs to decide what is squandered. Their principle is a very offensive to fundamental principles enshrined in federal and state constitutions.
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