Comment by AnthonyMouse
18 days ago
> That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.
> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.
> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".
And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?
> As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
> That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
Suppose there are currently 5 coffee shops because the area zoned to allow them is already saturated, and then you rezone to allow them in other areas.
If the maximum number that can be sustained is still 5 because the zoning wasn't actually the constraint to begin with then either no one will build another one or someone will, there will be 6+ until some of them go out of business, and then there will be 5 again which is back to being sustainable. You still don't end up with 0.
If the zoning was the thing preventing there from sustainably being more than 5 then rezoning allows there to be e.g. 10. Then if there are 11+, some go out of business until there are 10.
About the closest approximation you could get to that is if you could sustain 5 but had 6+ and then several of them went out of business simultaneously, before the first one's exit could save the second or third one. But that's just a temporary condition where you have e.g. 3 in an area that can support 5 or more until people notice that the area is underserved and sustainably open more.
And that has little to do with zoning except that changing the zoning could allow the sustainable number to increase. If the number was 5 with the existing zoning and you don't change it, someone could still open a 6th downtown where that isn't sustainable and then have the temporary condition when there are less than the sustainable number if more than one of the 6 fail simultaneously.