I find it interesting that during the mortgage crisis, banks couldn’t wait to unload the housing they were left with at fire sale prices, and now investment firms are overpaying to monopolize the housing supply.
Yes! It's also refreshing to see you mention parking minimums. It's like everyone is blind to the sheer amount of parking lots everywhere taking up so much space.
And that's by design. Parking minimum laws were literally written with maximum demand in mind, not typical. Like, those parking lots are going to sit half-empty for 99% of the year, and we all collectively have to pay for it every day through pricier goods in stores (parking lots and the real estate they occupy ain't free), pricier rent (it could have been housing instead), and pricier transportation (ginormous parking lots just spread everything out, meaning we're forced to become more dependent on gas-guzzling cars instead of being able to walk to the shop for free).
In my experience as an electrical engineer, this kind of thinking, 99% non-maximum and 1% maximum, is how electrical infrastructure is built too. Conductors and transformers and other equipment are sized to the historical max + a safety factor so that the electrical system will work even on the rainiest of rainy days. It has to do with reliability and resilience.
But parking lots don't need to be super reliable or resilient... Bridges and buildings definitely, but roads and lots literally just cover land. You don't have the same risk as your do with structures or the grid. Most get repaved every few years anyways.
In my experience as an electrical engineer I size things like that and everyone fucking argues with me. I even have a document for it that basically says
"Please sign that you have been informed that what you are doing will cause a fire and you were informed of that fact by email"
And then announce that I am not proceeding until the document is signed. So far no one has taken me up on it.
Not to mention how with store fronts you don't even really need pavement gravel when used gets the job done and it lets rain water drain away through it and when the place goes bankrupt the lot slowly becomes a park back in my home state of Vermont there's a lot of places that have simple dirt parking lots
The crazy thing about the whole situation is it's like the ONE time that the solution is actually deregulation and stronger property rights, but it's also the ONE time libertarians WANT heavy regulations, weak property rights, and big daddy government interfering in your personal life.
A backsplash in the kitchen made out of those linear tiles in shades of grey, or at least that's what all the house flippers of the last few years seem to think.
Higher taxes I imagine. Government only has so much land to get money from so they want the most money per unit. You might say "well why not put an apartment building there?". Which should mean even more money but each person there is a certain cost. So even if you make more money per unit you spend more. The ideal, from the POV of the government, would be the town having no residents only businesses. Plus you know only poor people young people and non-whites live in apartment buildings and Karen on the zoning board has strong opinions on those types.
I honestly think many people don't really know what freedom means. They think it's a one-way street that means they can get whatever they want, but they never consider that freedom means other people can do what they want, too.
I honestly think many people don’t really know what freedom means.
I can't find it right now, but this reminds me of a tweet that said something like, "Americans think freedom means the ability to choose from between 8 different types of salad dressing instead of like, the ability to leave your job without losing your healthcare."
True Freedom™ is when the government forces every single person to have identical, ugly-ass front lawns for completely arbitrary aesthetic reasons, clearly /s