Not sure how it went down but https://archive.ph/6wz6K
Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
191–200 of 321 posts
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
My sister just moved into a place that has an HOA. She's actively trying to get it suspended permanently. They live on a lake that attracts very aggressive Canadian geese. The geese do geese things like eat and poop lots of poop. The HOA fined them before they moved into the house for having goose poop in their back yard. For me, it's hilarious. I take handfuls of corn and stuff to throw around their backyard when I…
> The HOA fined them before they moved into the house for having goose poop in their back yard. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. the house was owned by _someone_ before they moved in. at _some_ point the guano was left and the HOA found it (whether that alleged violation cited done in a good-faith effort is irrelevant). The HOA applied their process, and at _some point_ ownership changed. Leaving your sister with t…
HOAs’ most redeeming feature is they serve to coarsely segregate people who like to live under HOAs from people who don’t.
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#193It's funny to see Matt Stoller complain about land use restrictions here, as he refuses to acknowledge the problem for residential building: https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1824155610201432264 If apartment buildings are banned in 96% of residential land in California, with most of the 4% already built up with apartments, isn't that pretty similar to the commercial land use situation in Mammoth, CA?
It's funny to see criticism of Matt Stoller's points boil down to whataboutism. It's okay to be right one one thing and wrong on another. It doesn't invalidate anything.
To be clear, I think he's very right in this article about abuse of monopoly. I just wish he'd cede that for California, and other highly in-demand areas, he's wrong to pooh-pooh the monopoly of land use, and it makes him seem a bit foolish to me.
If I'm ever inconsistent, I hope people point it out to me! This isn't "whataboutism" this is me changing the subject to a different area where I wish he'd be correct and use his considerable wonk-weight to correcting. Its not changing the subject to counter his point about grocery stores in Mammoth, California, it's more of a yes, and.
I'm also for improving the market forces in construction, and do devote some political effort to correcting exactly that problem.
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it becomes a "food desert", and people just learn to buy a car and drive to the nearest town with a store once a week. So really it just increases car dependency. (they are buying too much to bike or take transit - you need a car for the large storage space)
This is a ski town that gets buried in snow for half the year. Everyone has a car and you can't really bike safely with the snow plows running, icy streets. No one really lives there because of the food quality. The article leaves this out. Mammoth isn't just "rural," it's a wealthy vacation town hemmed in by federal land with severely limited land. But then it confuses it with Bishop which is 40 minutes away and has…
Many bikers in canada, minnesota, and other places where they get snow would beg to disagree
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's literally just capitalism. This is the point of the economic system. Why are people surprised? Is the propaganda just that good?
It's not really capitalism, but its late stage cancerous form, where businesses grow too big (too close to monopolies) and go unchecked, so the markets start to fail because the competition is killed. I could be wrong, but I think property use restrictions are actually more of a socialist concept. When done right, they're meant to protect others (aka society, in general - not some businesses that don't like having co…
It is capitalism, and I think this is inherent in all stages of capitalism. The goal of any corporation is to maximize profit, period. In earlier forms, monopolists and oligarchs may have used different levers of power, but it’s all ultimately the same thing. Use whatever means are available to make profit.
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#196These sorts of land use restrictions should be illegal. It's basically a corporation trying to act as a pseudogovernment, enforcing regulations on land that they no longer own themselves. One could argue that HOAs are kind of a similar issue, acting like a pseudogovernment, with restrictions on housing passing on down indefinitely, even to new owners who may not have wanted to agree to them (but with housing being as…
It seems they already are illegal, at least in some jurisdictions. > "In June, for instance, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who is also litigating against the merger, fined Albertsons $25,000 for imposing a land use restriction on a store it sold in 2018 in a low-income section of Bellingham, Washington. As part of the sale, the supermarket giant put a requirement on the deed that no grocery store co…
Precedent is the win, not the fine.
Now anyone can file the same suit and they'll need to settle.
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#197Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#198These sorts of land use restrictions should be illegal. It's basically a corporation trying to act as a pseudogovernment, enforcing regulations on land that they no longer own themselves. One could argue that HOAs are kind of a similar issue, acting like a pseudogovernment, with restrictions on housing passing on down indefinitely, even to new owners who may not have wanted to agree to them (but with housing being as…
> These sorts of land use restrictions should be illegal An easier solution is mandatory sunsets after a period of time. Because the flip side of making them illegal is you'll have a lot more land with conservation easements being exploited for resources.
It’s not that hard to carve out classes of restrictions that are illegal. Racial covenants were nullified this way in the past.
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#199It's funny to see Matt Stoller complain about land use restrictions here, as he refuses to acknowledge the problem for residential building: https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1824155610201432264 If apartment buildings are banned in 96% of residential land in California, with most of the 4% already built up with apartments, isn't that pretty similar to the commercial land use situation in Mammoth, CA?
So the majority of people want to keep it that way? Then it might just essentially boil down to democracy issues. Companies on the other hand don’t get a vote. So if all grocery companies banded together and voted for a law to allow monopolies then it wouldn’t be the same thing as if all the humans voted for it. Companies do love to lobby though, but lobbying and voting are still two different things. So if all the p…
>Companies on the other hand don’t get a vote.
Bullshit. Their money holds more value than any vote.
Re: Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
#200The way I understand it... If Alice owns land and sells to Bob with some restrictions, that means Alice is still maintaining some ownership of the land. And the price that Bob pays is discounted from the otherwise fair market value, because it has those restrictions on it. Then, if Bob sells it to Charlie, Alice still has an ownership stake (logically speaking) from the restrictions (whether it is land use, or minera…
Alice is not maintaining ownership of the land at all once it is sold to Bob. She owns specific rights separate from the ownership of the land.
What is property ownership, really? Isn't it the exclusive right to do things with that property, and exclude random others from it? You buy a standard city lot, you have the right to build a house on it and to keep others off your property.
If Alice still has some say over what can be done with a property, even if it is through a contract with Bob, then how is Alice able to tell Charlie what he can do with the property once Bob sells it to Charlie? When Charlie never signed any paperwork with Alice? That sounds like something that comes with still having some level of ownership, even if the law that enables the restrictions to be enforced don't word it that way. And that is where I'm saying that the county can write into the tax law that this type of control is taxable with property tax (because even if it isn't technically ownership of the land, the right of enforcing the restrictions is still something that Alice owns).
I'd also like to see taxes on property that is underutilized (for the zoning that it is in). For example, some landlords would prefer to not rent out units rather than lower the rent to market rates (either housing or storefront properties), contributing to a constrained supply. If property taxes are raised on a unit that is unoccupied for a specific length of time, that would encourage the owner to rent it out at what the market is willing to pay instead of artificially keeping the rent higher and therefore the building empty.