This is what I have found in NYC, where rents are insane. Yes, there might be more foot traffic, but not always. I wrote about this a while back and found that some businesses use their storefront almost as "marketing" and have a backend businesses (not just ecommerce). I write a newsletter about the survival of independent businesses in NYC, can I link to your post? I will give you full credit of course! Thanks for the illuminating information.
I might have mentioned this on another of your (excellent) posts, but the #1 predictor of if a restaurant will last longer than 3 years is if the proprietor/chef owns the building.
I opened two restaurants in Redmond, WA. One is 10 years old this year and the other 7, and no unfortunately, we don't own the buildings but our niche and sales have made them, combined with loads of luck, successful and viable.
Redmond is a comparatively well-off Seattle suburb with a tiny downtown core and I've grumped about and questioned why we can't have the nice idyllic vibrant shopping area that I grew up with in Lawrence, KS. Thanks for some great breakdowns of the financial hurdles and yes, ownership of the building seems like a key factor in success.
The growth in town took off after microsoft and other tech companies headquartered and expanded here and our little downtown exploded with the typical 5-over-1 apartment buildings and the promise of light-rail. I don't remember all of the details but our western Washington growth management plan channeled growth into various defined districts so that growth would keep metastasizing and there are virtually no buildings that could be owned by something outside of a corporation.
I had heard of programs in Vancouver B.C. and Seattle to try and help smaller independent businesses and although I don't know much about them, they seem like a potential starting point.
I'll also try and share these with our local city council as possibilities to help our downtown.
Thank you for this, Tony! I’m always glad to hear from a business that is making it work without owning the building. I have a friend in Tacoma who owns a juice bar and his rent is under 9% of total sales. Seems a bit easier in food. I know of one retail business in Tacoma that makes this work without owning—they have cheap rent and a 10-year term with a 10-year option. It’s not impossible. But as you point out in Redmond with the density of developer ownership, it’s increasingly unlikely a small business will ever own the real estate in that area, and that makes the successful formula increasingly out of reach for many business types.
I also think in those 5-story developments the street level commercial could be a condo. Some buildings do it that way.
I did the same math on running an art studio and it is impossible that the demand for classes would be high enough to pay for the space needed as a standalone activity however if I owned the building that’s entirely doable
Katherine, have you reached out to Charles (“Chuck”) Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, or any Strong Towns members in your area? You will likely appreciate how they make economics tangible by rooting it in the built environment, namely peeling back the abstractions that constitute financialization of real estate to which you allude implicitly.
I know about Strong Towns and I’d like to see more of their work around incremental development pointing to this owner occupancy issue or studying how independent food and retail business works. Institute for Local Self Reliance is also a resource as is the Small Business Anti Displacement Network. None are looking at this issue specifically.
Thanks, I’ve never seen the math broken out like this. As a frequent downtown customer of my little town, it is disheartening to see these shops struggle when we are all trying to give them as much business as we can.
Knowing that the major property owners will never relinquish their properties, what’s a Main St to do?
I could—and probably will—write an entire post in response to this very important question, but let me try a short reply in the comments to start.
First, we need to reframe the idea of trying to give struggling shops our business like it is a required charitable good vs. actually finding it useful to shop with them. I'm 46 so I remember shopping with my mom in the 1980s. We went to the locally-owned garden center, fabric store, feed store, grocery store, shoe store, hardware store, bakery, liquor store, clothing store—even the anchor department store in the mall was locally owned. What happened? That is what we need to ask first. How did our strong local economy get replaced by olive oil tasting shops we feel obligated to support even though we don't need 100 types of olive oil?
How to handle the major property owners depends on what part of Main Street you work in. I don't think it's true that they will not relinquish, depending on how they are benefitting from the properties. Main Street organizations can first: understand the problem, then recognize that building ownership should be the goal for most shops; then identify pathways and common roadblocks to ownership; then eliminate the roadblocks and create more pathways depending on the specific needs in their community.
Shoppers and locals can just talk about this issue at dinner parties and encourage their friends to make the connection between business closure and real estate ownership, not the failure of a shop to make it work. Banking deregulation is what eroded our local economies in the 1990s and we are now feeling the ripple effects. We should be angry about this from a systemic perspective, not sad for the shop owners.
You can also research local banks and community banking, and move your money to those banks that still hold their own loans. They are fewer and fewer these days, but look for portfolio lenders and community banks and move your money there. They are the only financial institutions left that lend money out to small businesses and we need to view them as vital.
Thanks for taking a stab at the question. Maybe the two towns I live / work in are unique as we have legacy owners who would rather hold onto buildings with empty store fronts than allow businesses in that are not up to their “standards”.
Where I live, our city bought a building from one owner (they are out of state and typically unreachable) for an above market price just to gain control of it. I heard of and controversial but a turning of the tide. Usually when buildings are for sale they get snapped up right away by a willing developer.
I used to be a Main St manager so understand the struggle. One cafe owner who feels threatened about a new cafe opening up around the shop didn’t like that I welcomed them to town like it was a good thing. I reminded her that I spent money at her shop yesterday on two cookies that I didn’t need. Like, we are all trying and we don’t have to!
Look forward to more of your writing exploring these (and related) topics
While owning your own retail is a marvelous advantage, it is NOT the definitive edge for a successful retail operation. The success of a retail store is determined by its ability to sell. The second thing that kills physical product retail is inventory.
Let's say someone were to get their retail store for free. If they can't sell more than 100k a year, then this is still a losing money business even with free rent.
Let's say the rent in your example has tripled, but revenue is 1.5m. Suddenly, margins are healthy despite the increase in rent.
This would be the question I would ask if I was a mentor at score.org "Tell me about your retail sales experience with this product."
The person who says, "Ok, i got laid off at Saks women's ready to wear but I had a million dollar book there, many of these customers are folks I keep in regular touch with and they trust my recommendations. I'm in touch with several of the best selling brands, But I don't own my physical retail... should I still try this?"
Another person "My family bought commercial real estate years ago and I'm thinking about opening a shop because the rent is essnetially free. I've never sold anything before and frankly I'm not even sure what to sell. What do you think?"
These two individuals have very different commercial real estate advantages but my outlook on the former is far more positive than the latter.
Exactly. In my past life I knew heaps of fashion boutiques that that knew their customer, knew what would work, and would reorder what styles worked. Best way to capitalize on a best seller and reduce inventory risk.
I appreciate that you know one formula for success here: product market fit. You’re right that retail shops have to get this right. This is what any SCORE mentor will tell you. It sounds like your thesis here is: business owners aren’t good at marketing, so they’re failing.
My suspicion, and the thesis I’ve been writing this blog for several years to research, is that even when they are good at marketing and have high markups, since about the 2000s, the numbers don’t pencil out because commercial rents have increased out of pace with consumer spending, credit is hard to secure at reasonable interest rates, and a key factor that makes it feasible for owner operators to retire—owning the real estate—has become increasingly out of reach for business owners.
Maybe I’m wrong? I would invite you to read some of the other posts I’ve written about deregulation in the banking industry, the difficulty in securing financing for owner occupied real estate because of OCC guidelines around DSCR and repayment sources for commercial borrowers, and commercial property appraisal practices that have shifted since the 1990s.
If you have the time, try to find some longitudinal studies that track the success of the types of small enterprises you’re referring to here, that tracked where assets and debt were held by these firms for the past 70 years and how that’s shifted, along with revenue growth and expenses ratios.
I may be wrong about all of this, but it’s hard to say one way or the other what makes the businesses you’re talking about actually successful—because there isn’t any data to back it up. Or there is data, but it has to be compiled by hand, through parcel by parcel research or examining decades-old P&Ls from firms who would volunteer them. I’d love to see that.
I include a lot of detailed financial info on paid posts and annual subscriptions are $8/month. Maybe start there—those posts contain revenue and expense details specific to my business.
I think that's the problem: that many store owners are willing to do that rather than something else. If they weren't, then rents would fall due to vacancies.
So discouraging people from starting shops is the best way to improve things for existing shopowners.
Unfortunately that logic doesn’t work. Building owners are actually not discouraged by vacancies. Most are incentivized to hold out for market or above market rent. Check out Strong Towns or Zero Empty Spaces for more info on that counterintuitive phenomenon.
Also: encouraging people to stop opening stores is counter to building a strong local economy which benefits existing stores.
I think back to the Main Street of my parents’ small town in New Hampshire; they lived upstairs in a house owned by my English immigrant grandparents, who lived downstairs, just outside downtown.
There was Maude’s, a classic five-and-dime store that we kids would race to with our pennies after school. There was the Drug Store, owned and operated by a fellow with one arm, the other one having been lost in the war; he sold the Sunday paper, making change from the coins left on the counter. They were never stolen.
The store had an old-school fountain, with the red seats, and some booths. The employees behind the counter wore those white clothes and hats seen in every 'Fifties movie. Down the road a bit was Doctor Roy’s office—like all other physicians of his era, he made house calls—the dentist’s chair, the fire house, a real diner—it is still there, owned and operated by one of the very young waitresses from my time—and the only lawyer’s office.
Across the street were the town offices and the one movie theatre. That building is still there and unchanged, though the movie theatre is long gone.
Though some of the buildings are there—the town offices and the diner—many others have changed, probably many times. The fire house is now much larger and operated by a professional, paid workforce, not the untrained yet enthusiastic volunteers of my day. Maude’s and her penny candy and the fountain and the Sunday paper man with one arm are gone, the interior having been replaced by a Walgreens.
The entire town has become a very expensive place to live, mostly because it is really just a bedroom community for high-paid professionals working in Boston, a short train ride away. The town of my first eight years left long ago.
I am absolutely not a business person but this was a very interesting article. The question I have is if retail can't exist in main street properties, what are the used for then? When people buy these properties for income, who did they expect is going to occupy them?
I don’t think the people who invest in commercial real estate understand this model either. They probably think retail and restaurant will rent them and be successful. Even if they aren’t, after the lease is up, someone new will comes in and rent for 5 years and the cycle will continue. The landlords don’t lose money in this model. Even if the commercial space is vacant they don’t “lose” money.
Yes, since I commented I did some reading and apparently a lot of these properties are left vacant on purpose. The buyers either just sit on it hoping the price will go way up at some point, or it is a tax write-off when they own multiple properties. I live in Maine and Portland is beginning to fine vacant commercial properties unless they host pop-up art.
Great (but depressing) article Katherine. You said in a comment below, "Shoppers and locals can just talk about this issue at dinner parties and encourage their friends to make the connection between business closure and real estate ownership, not the failure of a shop to make it work." I think you're being too charitable by not saying something like "We need to make our towns incredibly hostile to real estate investors and other big absentee companies playing an active role in destroying our towns."
I know that sounds a bit antagonistic and radical...but I don't believe in letting non-empathetic, greedy corporations who don't give a flip about the well being of communities and their people off the hook!
Scott—you’re right. The trouble is that creating barriers to who gets to own real estate and for what purpose is all tied in with legal land ownership issues that form the basis of How America Works and cities are terrified to push policy around it for legal challenge reasons, for one. But I agree with you. At some point I’d love to study all the creative ways municipalities have found of legally blocking harmful development.
The workaround is probably programs that encourage small business real estate ownership and fund it, but those programs need funding. The federal threats to CDFIs are one way even those bandages are being eroded.
Citizen Deux: It’s hard to answer your question in the comments because most people who read this blog have done a lot of reading on this issue. As succinctly as I can put it: not all development is bad. But development funded by outside capital—and the rents that need to keep up with the cost of that financing—tend to outpace the earning capacity of people in a community. This leads to displacement, which erodes community safety, local wealth building, and civic participation. I would encourage you to follow the work of the small Business Anti-Displacement Network or the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to learn more. Someone here already mentioned Strong Towns—a great book and blog to read. Next City is a great media outlet that reports on these issues as well as More Perfect Union. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is a dense one, but will give you background on the longitudinal decline of civic life, although Putnam doesn’t tie it to development per se—it’s a well-researched document about why civic participation is good for community.
I also recommend the book The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy by Oscar Perry Abello.
I might be misreading Katherine's comment, but the short answer to your question is: because not all development benefits the community. The profits often leave the community, and that's harmful to everyone in that community. Businesses (IMO) have an obligation to be more than simplistic "supply the demand and reap the rewards" operations.
I disagree. Profits always leave the community. It’s wages and secondary effects which benefit the community. Employing the plumbers, landscapers, etc. In order to operate.
This is what I have found in NYC, where rents are insane. Yes, there might be more foot traffic, but not always. I wrote about this a while back and found that some businesses use their storefront almost as "marketing" and have a backend businesses (not just ecommerce). I write a newsletter about the survival of independent businesses in NYC, can I link to your post? I will give you full credit of course! Thanks for the illuminating information.
Please do, yes! I’m scrolling thru your posts as we speak….
I might have mentioned this on another of your (excellent) posts, but the #1 predictor of if a restaurant will last longer than 3 years is if the proprietor/chef owns the building.
I believe it! What’s the source for this stat, do you know?
Not off the top of my head :/
I opened two restaurants in Redmond, WA. One is 10 years old this year and the other 7, and no unfortunately, we don't own the buildings but our niche and sales have made them, combined with loads of luck, successful and viable.
Redmond is a comparatively well-off Seattle suburb with a tiny downtown core and I've grumped about and questioned why we can't have the nice idyllic vibrant shopping area that I grew up with in Lawrence, KS. Thanks for some great breakdowns of the financial hurdles and yes, ownership of the building seems like a key factor in success.
The growth in town took off after microsoft and other tech companies headquartered and expanded here and our little downtown exploded with the typical 5-over-1 apartment buildings and the promise of light-rail. I don't remember all of the details but our western Washington growth management plan channeled growth into various defined districts so that growth would keep metastasizing and there are virtually no buildings that could be owned by something outside of a corporation.
I had heard of programs in Vancouver B.C. and Seattle to try and help smaller independent businesses and although I don't know much about them, they seem like a potential starting point.
I'll also try and share these with our local city council as possibilities to help our downtown.
https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/vancouver-project-takes-aim-at-bcs-commercial-rent-crisis-9681710
https://www.seattle.gov/economic-development/grants-and-funding/business-community-ownership-fund
Thank you for this, Tony! I’m always glad to hear from a business that is making it work without owning the building. I have a friend in Tacoma who owns a juice bar and his rent is under 9% of total sales. Seems a bit easier in food. I know of one retail business in Tacoma that makes this work without owning—they have cheap rent and a 10-year term with a 10-year option. It’s not impossible. But as you point out in Redmond with the density of developer ownership, it’s increasingly unlikely a small business will ever own the real estate in that area, and that makes the successful formula increasingly out of reach for many business types.
I also think in those 5-story developments the street level commercial could be a condo. Some buildings do it that way.
I did the same math on running an art studio and it is impossible that the demand for classes would be high enough to pay for the space needed as a standalone activity however if I owned the building that’s entirely doable
TRUTH. I owned all my buildings. Only way I made it as a yoga studio owner.
Katherine, have you reached out to Charles (“Chuck”) Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, or any Strong Towns members in your area? You will likely appreciate how they make economics tangible by rooting it in the built environment, namely peeling back the abstractions that constitute financialization of real estate to which you allude implicitly.
I know about Strong Towns and I’d like to see more of their work around incremental development pointing to this owner occupancy issue or studying how independent food and retail business works. Institute for Local Self Reliance is also a resource as is the Small Business Anti Displacement Network. None are looking at this issue specifically.
Thanks, I’ve never seen the math broken out like this. As a frequent downtown customer of my little town, it is disheartening to see these shops struggle when we are all trying to give them as much business as we can.
Knowing that the major property owners will never relinquish their properties, what’s a Main St to do?
I could—and probably will—write an entire post in response to this very important question, but let me try a short reply in the comments to start.
First, we need to reframe the idea of trying to give struggling shops our business like it is a required charitable good vs. actually finding it useful to shop with them. I'm 46 so I remember shopping with my mom in the 1980s. We went to the locally-owned garden center, fabric store, feed store, grocery store, shoe store, hardware store, bakery, liquor store, clothing store—even the anchor department store in the mall was locally owned. What happened? That is what we need to ask first. How did our strong local economy get replaced by olive oil tasting shops we feel obligated to support even though we don't need 100 types of olive oil?
How to handle the major property owners depends on what part of Main Street you work in. I don't think it's true that they will not relinquish, depending on how they are benefitting from the properties. Main Street organizations can first: understand the problem, then recognize that building ownership should be the goal for most shops; then identify pathways and common roadblocks to ownership; then eliminate the roadblocks and create more pathways depending on the specific needs in their community.
Shoppers and locals can just talk about this issue at dinner parties and encourage their friends to make the connection between business closure and real estate ownership, not the failure of a shop to make it work. Banking deregulation is what eroded our local economies in the 1990s and we are now feeling the ripple effects. We should be angry about this from a systemic perspective, not sad for the shop owners.
You can also research local banks and community banking, and move your money to those banks that still hold their own loans. They are fewer and fewer these days, but look for portfolio lenders and community banks and move your money there. They are the only financial institutions left that lend money out to small businesses and we need to view them as vital.
Thanks for taking a stab at the question. Maybe the two towns I live / work in are unique as we have legacy owners who would rather hold onto buildings with empty store fronts than allow businesses in that are not up to their “standards”.
Where I live, our city bought a building from one owner (they are out of state and typically unreachable) for an above market price just to gain control of it. I heard of and controversial but a turning of the tide. Usually when buildings are for sale they get snapped up right away by a willing developer.
I used to be a Main St manager so understand the struggle. One cafe owner who feels threatened about a new cafe opening up around the shop didn’t like that I welcomed them to town like it was a good thing. I reminded her that I spent money at her shop yesterday on two cookies that I didn’t need. Like, we are all trying and we don’t have to!
Look forward to more of your writing exploring these (and related) topics
While owning your own retail is a marvelous advantage, it is NOT the definitive edge for a successful retail operation. The success of a retail store is determined by its ability to sell. The second thing that kills physical product retail is inventory.
Let's say someone were to get their retail store for free. If they can't sell more than 100k a year, then this is still a losing money business even with free rent.
Let's say the rent in your example has tripled, but revenue is 1.5m. Suddenly, margins are healthy despite the increase in rent.
This would be the question I would ask if I was a mentor at score.org "Tell me about your retail sales experience with this product."
The person who says, "Ok, i got laid off at Saks women's ready to wear but I had a million dollar book there, many of these customers are folks I keep in regular touch with and they trust my recommendations. I'm in touch with several of the best selling brands, But I don't own my physical retail... should I still try this?"
Another person "My family bought commercial real estate years ago and I'm thinking about opening a shop because the rent is essnetially free. I've never sold anything before and frankly I'm not even sure what to sell. What do you think?"
These two individuals have very different commercial real estate advantages but my outlook on the former is far more positive than the latter.
Perfect. Turns per square foot. Low overhead. The cost profile lives and dies by COG
Exactly. In my past life I knew heaps of fashion boutiques that that knew their customer, knew what would work, and would reorder what styles worked. Best way to capitalize on a best seller and reduce inventory risk.
I appreciate that you know one formula for success here: product market fit. You’re right that retail shops have to get this right. This is what any SCORE mentor will tell you. It sounds like your thesis here is: business owners aren’t good at marketing, so they’re failing.
My suspicion, and the thesis I’ve been writing this blog for several years to research, is that even when they are good at marketing and have high markups, since about the 2000s, the numbers don’t pencil out because commercial rents have increased out of pace with consumer spending, credit is hard to secure at reasonable interest rates, and a key factor that makes it feasible for owner operators to retire—owning the real estate—has become increasingly out of reach for business owners.
Maybe I’m wrong? I would invite you to read some of the other posts I’ve written about deregulation in the banking industry, the difficulty in securing financing for owner occupied real estate because of OCC guidelines around DSCR and repayment sources for commercial borrowers, and commercial property appraisal practices that have shifted since the 1990s.
If you have the time, try to find some longitudinal studies that track the success of the types of small enterprises you’re referring to here, that tracked where assets and debt were held by these firms for the past 70 years and how that’s shifted, along with revenue growth and expenses ratios.
I may be wrong about all of this, but it’s hard to say one way or the other what makes the businesses you’re talking about actually successful—because there isn’t any data to back it up. Or there is data, but it has to be compiled by hand, through parcel by parcel research or examining decades-old P&Ls from firms who would volunteer them. I’d love to see that.
Super helpful article. Any chance you have a spreadsheet to share with that info so I can do some analysis. Happy to pay a fee for it.
I include a lot of detailed financial info on paid posts and annual subscriptions are $8/month. Maybe start there—those posts contain revenue and expense details specific to my business.
If the math doesn't work, how does anyone pay the rent?
Because store owners pay rent before they pay themselves a reasonable living wage.
I think that's the problem: that many store owners are willing to do that rather than something else. If they weren't, then rents would fall due to vacancies.
So discouraging people from starting shops is the best way to improve things for existing shopowners.
Unfortunately that logic doesn’t work. Building owners are actually not discouraged by vacancies. Most are incentivized to hold out for market or above market rent. Check out Strong Towns or Zero Empty Spaces for more info on that counterintuitive phenomenon.
Also: encouraging people to stop opening stores is counter to building a strong local economy which benefits existing stores.
I think back to the Main Street of my parents’ small town in New Hampshire; they lived upstairs in a house owned by my English immigrant grandparents, who lived downstairs, just outside downtown.
There was Maude’s, a classic five-and-dime store that we kids would race to with our pennies after school. There was the Drug Store, owned and operated by a fellow with one arm, the other one having been lost in the war; he sold the Sunday paper, making change from the coins left on the counter. They were never stolen.
The store had an old-school fountain, with the red seats, and some booths. The employees behind the counter wore those white clothes and hats seen in every 'Fifties movie. Down the road a bit was Doctor Roy’s office—like all other physicians of his era, he made house calls—the dentist’s chair, the fire house, a real diner—it is still there, owned and operated by one of the very young waitresses from my time—and the only lawyer’s office.
Across the street were the town offices and the one movie theatre. That building is still there and unchanged, though the movie theatre is long gone.
Though some of the buildings are there—the town offices and the diner—many others have changed, probably many times. The fire house is now much larger and operated by a professional, paid workforce, not the untrained yet enthusiastic volunteers of my day. Maude’s and her penny candy and the fountain and the Sunday paper man with one arm are gone, the interior having been replaced by a Walgreens.
The entire town has become a very expensive place to live, mostly because it is really just a bedroom community for high-paid professionals working in Boston, a short train ride away. The town of my first eight years left long ago.
I'm sorry but what do you mean about peeling back the abstractions? That is like a different language to me.
I am absolutely not a business person but this was a very interesting article. The question I have is if retail can't exist in main street properties, what are the used for then? When people buy these properties for income, who did they expect is going to occupy them?
I don’t think the people who invest in commercial real estate understand this model either. They probably think retail and restaurant will rent them and be successful. Even if they aren’t, after the lease is up, someone new will comes in and rent for 5 years and the cycle will continue. The landlords don’t lose money in this model. Even if the commercial space is vacant they don’t “lose” money.
Yes, since I commented I did some reading and apparently a lot of these properties are left vacant on purpose. The buyers either just sit on it hoping the price will go way up at some point, or it is a tax write-off when they own multiple properties. I live in Maine and Portland is beginning to fine vacant commercial properties unless they host pop-up art.
Great (but depressing) article Katherine. You said in a comment below, "Shoppers and locals can just talk about this issue at dinner parties and encourage their friends to make the connection between business closure and real estate ownership, not the failure of a shop to make it work." I think you're being too charitable by not saying something like "We need to make our towns incredibly hostile to real estate investors and other big absentee companies playing an active role in destroying our towns."
I know that sounds a bit antagonistic and radical...but I don't believe in letting non-empathetic, greedy corporations who don't give a flip about the well being of communities and their people off the hook!
Scott—you’re right. The trouble is that creating barriers to who gets to own real estate and for what purpose is all tied in with legal land ownership issues that form the basis of How America Works and cities are terrified to push policy around it for legal challenge reasons, for one. But I agree with you. At some point I’d love to study all the creative ways municipalities have found of legally blocking harmful development.
The workaround is probably programs that encourage small business real estate ownership and fund it, but those programs need funding. The federal threats to CDFIs are one way even those bandages are being eroded.
Citizen Deux: It’s hard to answer your question in the comments because most people who read this blog have done a lot of reading on this issue. As succinctly as I can put it: not all development is bad. But development funded by outside capital—and the rents that need to keep up with the cost of that financing—tend to outpace the earning capacity of people in a community. This leads to displacement, which erodes community safety, local wealth building, and civic participation. I would encourage you to follow the work of the small Business Anti-Displacement Network or the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to learn more. Someone here already mentioned Strong Towns—a great book and blog to read. Next City is a great media outlet that reports on these issues as well as More Perfect Union. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is a dense one, but will give you background on the longitudinal decline of civic life, although Putnam doesn’t tie it to development per se—it’s a well-researched document about why civic participation is good for community.
I also recommend the book The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy by Oscar Perry Abello.
Why? I mean that sincerely. What possible economic reason would you have for preventing development?
I might be misreading Katherine's comment, but the short answer to your question is: because not all development benefits the community. The profits often leave the community, and that's harmful to everyone in that community. Businesses (IMO) have an obligation to be more than simplistic "supply the demand and reap the rewards" operations.
We're saying the same thing! :)
I disagree. Profits always leave the community. It’s wages and secondary effects which benefit the community. Employing the plumbers, landscapers, etc. In order to operate.
Super insightful! Thanks for this 🙏