Joseph Lawler (in an essay that reminded me of something from Hannah Coulter below):
[This 7-Eleven] exemplifies a shortfall of American urban design, namely that the system of property ownership has created too much distance between the owners of a given plot of land and the families who live and work around it.
“That enormous amount of separation leads to tons of qualitative issues and really leads to a lot of commodification,” Ward Davis, a founding partner of an Arkansas real estate company focused on traditional-style development, told me in a phone interview.
The U.S. has separated landowners from neighborhoods through regulations and tax laws meant to make real estate markets accessible and liquid — that is, easily bought and sold among investors. These rules and regulations have worked for their intended purposes. They have successfully turned much of the built environment into commodities, which are easy for buyers and sellers to understand, price, and transact. They have made it possible for teachers in Ontario, policemen in Los Angeles, sheikhs in Dubai, and millions of others to finance the convenience stores, houses, hospitals, hotels, malls, and offices that Americans frequent every day. All kinds of people get access to a powerful investment vehicle, while builders get access to a vast pool of financing.
But there has been a cost. Commodities aren’t lovable.
All the qualities that give a place charm or loveliness are ones that are best stewarded by people who live there. Someone who owns the plot from afar, without even visiting, can never understand the subtle details that give it life. And the middleman property developer or manager just will never care.
No one will ever cherish a plot of land as much as someone who has a long-term ownership and residence interest in it. Yet more and more of the built environment we live in every day is owned by people far away who don’t even know they own it.
[…]
It is hard enough for a company building in suburban Virginia on behalf of Alaskans and global investors to care about the small details that give a place its character — even if that were a goal.
It typically isn’t, though. Landowners and developers like REITs and private equity firms rarely state that they aim to build charming or lovely places. They certainly can make the case that their product will be commercially successful. And they do often tout environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, goals, which can translate into measurable objectives set by activist groups related to emissions or diversity. But beauty isn’t usually part of the pitch.
In fact, the features that would make a development beautiful can be a negative from the perspective of an analyst at a REIT or private equity firm. Anything that is unique makes a development less like a commodity and more like a bespoke product. The more commoditized the property, the better, because it can be sold into more-liquid markets.
“When you start mixing uses in a building, it becomes a more dynamic calculation to determine whether or not that investment is a worthwhile investment,” said Andrew Malick, the founder of Malick Infill Development, based in San Diego. “The investment world … they’re just dumb in that sense.”
“Dumb” processes that break down investments into quantifiable attributes work well for actual commodities, like steel, oil, or wheat. They even work well for consumer goods. But it’s problematic for the built environment, because people have to live there, permanently. They cannot discard it when they grow tired of it.
The value of what is truly charming is highly specific to context. For example, a rowhouse on Captains Row has little value outside Alexandria, Virginia. On paper, it lacks key amenities and has relatively low square footage. It’s old, lacks parking, has small rooms, doesn’t have any modern bathrooms, and so forth. If it were suddenly transported to somewhere in Tysons Corner, it would probably be a teardown.
By contrast, the triple-net-leased 7-Eleven can easily be quantified to show its value to someone who will never visit it. What makes it valuable is the very fact that you don’t have to worry about any of the context. And the less you have to worry about it, the more valuable it is.
[…]
The federal government has put the thumb on the scale in favor of large-scale, short-term developments. In theory, it could even out the scale by also creating such a regulatory structure that would allow for smaller, infill projects.
Whether such a product is even conceivable is a major question. But a first step would be to recognize the ways the government now gives preference in the built world around us not to what is most suited to life lived with other people but to what is big, uniform, and impersonal.
From Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter:
Past the mailbox you have left the public behind. The lane dips down, crosses the creek on a bridge that Nathan had rebuilt not long before he died, and then curves gently upward and around the slope in a way I think is lovely. The lane is just a narrow sleeve passing through the trees and the undergrowth. The trees are fairly old, and you know you’re passing through one of the orders of the world. And then almost all of a sudden your eyesight widens sweetly out onto the upland, and you see that you’ve come into an order of another kind, a farm kindly kept, you may say, for a lifetime. You see the house in its shady yard, the barns and other buildings, and the broad, long ridge rising beyond.
What you won’t see, but what I see always, is the pattern of our life here that made and kept it as you see it now, all the licks and steps and rounds of work, all the comings and goings, all the days and years. A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it, walking over it, and it is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mostly lost, generation after generation, going back and back to the first Indians. And now the history of Nathan’s and my life here is fading away. When I am gone, it too will be mostly gone.
Sometimes I imagine another young couple, strong and full of desire, coming quietly into this old house that will be empty again of all that is of any use, and will be stale and silent and dingy with dust, and they will see it shining before them as Nathan and I saw it fifty-two years ago. And I say, “Welcome! Love each other. Love this place and use it well. Bless your hearts.”
That is the foretelling of my hope. The foretelling of my fear is that no such couple will ever come here again to live in this place and renew it and make their living from it. It could all end in fire, as everybody knows. And maybe the hand of God is in it, who can say? Maybe it won’t be a flood and a rainbow this time, but a mushroom cloud and then silence. Which will solve our problems for the time being.
But the cities are overflowing and stepping toward us too. Mr. Feltner used to say in his last years, “You see those old hillsides of mine? Some day they’ll be covered up with little huts.” Maybe so. Or maybe all our work and care will be bulldozed away to make room for something fancier, for Port William Estates or Sand Ripple Park or Sandhurst or The Meadows.
Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.
I think of Art Rowanberry, another one who went to the war and came home and never willingly left again, and I quote him to myself: “Something better! Everybody’s talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don’t matter if it ain’t nothing but a log pen.”
Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thoughts and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, “Thy will be done,” and then again I am free and can go to sleep.
