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Originally Posted by Libertarian
Agreed that retail has remained positive of late due to post-pandemic recovery as the apartment and office sector has remained weak. My point, owners and developers should decide whether to include retail. It should not be mandated. What's the problem? You think government can be a better planner than the enlightened self interest of the parties involved? Top-down government theory never gives the best outcome. Mandates cause building costs to rise which results in higher rents and lower product quality.
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Man, I really appreciate how much of a relic of a bygone era you are with these sorts of arguments.
Anyways, pretty simple free-rider/externality problem at play here. The neighborhood benefits from street level retail (or “active uses,” which as other have pointed out is a lot broader/easier of a thing to achieve). This drives up property values immensely by making it a walkable sort of place that people want to live. But it’s not necessarily in the interest of an individual developer to redesign their building for a relatively small amount of street level retail which doesn’t help the financing, changes/constrains parking garage configurations, and just isn’t very profitable in general. They’re best off benefiting from the active street experience created by other developers, but not delivering it themselves—a bad outcome.
Textbook ~ECON102 situation where government intervention improves outcomes.
And as you can see throughout Midtown, there are plenty of recent examples showing just how milquetoast the active use requirements really are. You can still get away with doing very little. Maximum FAR is a way, way bigger intervention in the market, and much less economically sound.
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