[Tycho]

I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.

I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.

Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?

[andrepd]

In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]

No space in 2025 for any such considerations.

[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...

[astrange]

One kind of worker the chains are better for is the people who work at the chain. Large businesses treat their employees better because they're more professional and can eg afford an HR department.

Sole proprietorships can be okay, but employee-hiring small businesses are run by tyrants and have fewer protections against worker abuse. After all, they're only small businesses because they aren't good enough to become big businesses.

[I-M-S]

Or maybe they stay small because big business made it impossible for new businesses to grow through consolidation, regulatory capture, and other contemporary business practices that decidedly do NOT make them a better place to work (the HR department isn't there to protect the employees - it's there to protect the company from the employees).

[astrange]

Please don't reply with platitudes. If your coworker is sexually harassing you then your coworker is the person the HR department is protecting the company from. Not you. You won't make it in the middle class if you can't navigate basic politics like that.

If you have an issue with payroll I hope you don't avoid getting it fixed either, because that's HR.

[I-M-S]

I think you might be mixing up how things are supposed to work with how they work in practice. I've seen HR from the inside - while I accept that my experience was just one data point, it made me personally actively avoid workplaces that have an HR department. YMMV, of course.

[Maxion]

A park will generate less revenue than an apartment building, a sports complex, or a cafe.

Not all value is quantifiable in USD.

[jlhawn]

this isn't necessarily true. While it generates less direct revenue, it increases nearby land value in two ways: 1) business activity which would have taken place on that parcel "overflows" to nearby parcels, ie, the demand for those other land uses doesn't go away and increases prices in the surrounding area. 2) the park provides real value to its users and access to that value also increases nearby ground rents.

[astrange]

Also, it's possible to have businesses in a park (rented sports fields, coffee stands etc). I know a park nearby with a pottery studio in it.

Generally Americans don't think of this because they think public services "shouldn't try to make money" and interpret this as they need to be designed to lose money as hard as possible. So public transit stations have no vending machines and activists are constantly trying to ban them from charging fares.

[vkou]

If we're going to talk about speculative land value, I'll point out that the easiest way to raise it is to ban all future construction.

You are correct that the park provides real value to its users.

[IAmBroom]

Tycho didn't claim it was. In fact, they explicitly asked if such a heuristic existed.

[stevenwoo]

Just in case you missed it, last year's winners included it as one phenomena in their 2019 book, The Narrow Corridor, it's kind of like an interpretation of history through their particular lens.