Not emphasized in Johnny’s post, there’s also a ton of neighborhood pushback against flea markets and such in many communities. Basically the wealthier folks don’t like the aesthetics of these things, and will argue that they’re a nuisance or crime-magnets or whatever, a thin veneer over the discomfort they have with anything that draws a low income crowd.
You’ll see things like the “Sunday Farmers Market” that closes a block of a street somewhere because temporary event permits are much easier to get and harder to block, but the kind of semi-permanent marketplace described in the article remains rare.
And he’s right, cities don’t have a lot of incentive to try and make space for these sorts of entry level incubator environments because in most cases they can’t skim any tax off it - the underlying property is still just a parking lot and they usually can’t reassess the value for impermanent activities happening on top.
The city also doesn't have a way to measure the increase in tax revenue that comes from having a place to walk to that you can get food, tools, clothing, and supplies. I wish I didn't have to drive anywhere to get stuff, and if I lived near a flea market I actually wouldn't have to drive anywhere.
Why would you say that? Cities ate constantly doing studies of revenue and cost impact. Forecasting revenue and traffic changes is bread and butter stuff.
Putting flea markets in walking distant of everyone is a terrible logistical model.
Actually no, it's amazing one. This is how markets have been for thousands of years, within walking distance of the homes of the people using them. But yet it isn't compatible with modern "advances" like zoning, parking lots, and NIMBY driven politics.
Zoning, in particular, is a terrible scourge on communities. It's hard to overstate the social damage caused by making it essentially illegal to build a functioning "village". I would go so far as to assert that it essentially shreds the fabric of society, both directly (by robbing people of shared local activities and context), and indirectly (by forcing everyone into cars to get anything done, where they can't interact with one another).
If you've ever lived in a town where shops, parks, living quarters, and government buildings are cheek-by-jowl within walking distance, a "zoned" area feels like a desert - unable to sustain life.
>there’s also a ton of neighborhood pushback against flea markets and such in many communities. Basically the wealthier folks don’t like the aesthetics of these things
Tons of perfectly fine things that don't really bother anyone are not allowed because wealthy people don't like the aesthetics.
"Don't like the aesthetics" is code for "it attracts minorities and the poor." The primary reason they or their direct ancestors moved out of the city in the first place was to get away from "those people".
"It attracts minorities and the poor" is wokespeak for "It drives up the crime rate, lowers the value of the property you're still paying mortgage on, makes it less safe to go out at night, and makes it more likely that your child will accidentally step on a used syringe."
There's a heck of a lot of room for variation between "minorities and poor" and driving up the crime rate.
The blue collar dude with five cars and a project boat in his yard is totally unwelcome as far as the "muh property values" types care. He's not driving up the crime rate or leaving used needles around though.
"Basically the wealthier folks don’t like the aesthetics"
That's not inherent though. A nice French brocante sale basically sells tat, but its nice and acceptable.
I don't think its impossible that this flea market could become a hipster hang out. One of the eateries starts making a name for itself, and people start seeking it out. It isn't just poor people that want a functioning high st.
Yep. Schools, police, fire, water and sewer. That's the minimum price of entry. And that's with no nice to haves, like libraries, sidewalks, or snow and garbage removal. (And it assumes the state is willing to maintain most of a city's streets free of charge?)
In my experience most small towns big enough to have any services have a "library" that is comprised of a few rooms in the shared town hall/police/public offices building that is run by some (usually senior citizen) volunteer(s) and has a fairly poor collection of books but can get anything you want on loan as long as you don't need it that day. If they don't have a library they probably have some other "nice to have but not essential" type service that's run in the same manner. My experience is limited to the rural northeast. I suspect the rural midwest is even more likely to have libraries because of how those towns were planned out back in the day.
The parent comment would work better without (or rewording) the remark on bias.
I have lived in rural, suburban, and dense urban areas in my life (currently high density urban), and there is a bias on HN toward the idea that rural communities are unsustainable on their own and mere leeches on the city dwellers. That's likely true in some places, but not universally. Sustainable rural communities have exports of resources, housing, and/or tourism, that outweigh their cost.
As the parent comment describes, one model for remote communities is volunteers who work at the library because they care. The cost of everything is lower -- labor, food, matetials -- so what looks too expensive for a town might actually be fully sustainable.
I wish we could get some numbers on this, as I've lived in the same spread of places as you and I agree with the GP. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
The sustainable rural community is exceedingly rare - most are propped up by ag subsidies and state aid. For much of the central part of America, there's no housing benefit or tourism to speak of, just resources (corn/soy in general, maybe livestock).
Ok so the parent says that when small towns have a library, it's not because they are run in a more enlightened fashion than revenue guzzling big cities, but because these small towns are subsidized by the economic contributions of said big cities, either on a state or country level.
You then counter by saying that's wrong and actually small towns have a small library that has a crappy selection but they can get you any book you want if you can wait.
Pop quiz hotshot: Where do you think there is enough built up infrastructure, wealth, and surplus labor capacity to have a large centralized store of books and to organize and distribute said books?
A lot of them don't, though. Libraries are often funded by the county, not the city, which can help the tiny towns with a library, but there are plenty of tiny rural towns that don't have one. Like everything else, they need funding to survive. Here's an example where the county stopped funding them so the cities have stepped up with taxes and donations: https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/06/e72ef198469825...
City incentives are very directly driven by the people who live there. Municipal elections, and city council meetings, are the closest thing to direct democracy that you'll probably experience in your life.
The problem with direct democracy is that the people who have the most time to waste (or the most money at stake) on playing politics are the ones who show up. It's also why your HOA is probably governed by a hand-picked selection of devils from the Fifth Circle of Hell.
the wealthy class LOVES the aesthetics of those things. Woke is so IN right now. The middle class, on the other hand, have mortgages to pay and thin walls to block the noise with.
The armchair planner in me was a little taken aback at first by the description of the flea market as "amazingly good urbanism" -- good urbanism looks like bike lanes and trees and mixed-use development, not parking lots! -- but of course that's falling into the very thought trap illustrated by the post.
Parking lot flea markets are exactly 'tactical urbanism' in the same mode as pop-up bike and bus lanes -- the repurposing of car storage for more economically valuable and human-centric use, and (us) urbanist types should talk about them more often!
Oh, it's worse. Some expensive houses now have a show kitchen and a work kitchen.
Why would someone make counter tops from permeable stone? That's idiotic. There are stone materials like granite that are impermeable. Besides, why is marble high-status? You can get that stuff at Home Depot.
My own countertops are inch thick glazed fired ceramic tiles, from the 1960s. Same material as those indestructible walls schools and gyms used to use. Fifty years of use have not marked them, they can be cleaned with strong cleaners, and they are unaffected by contact with hot pans.
How're the grout lines? That's the complaint I've always heard from people who've had tile countertops, who are all eager to tell you how they never want them again. I tend to try to eliminate anything in the kitchen that's not smooth and am baffled by places where things aren't smooth for no good reason—any countertop edge that's not just a smooth curve makes me sad.
I'm coming around to the opinion that modern mid-quality laminate is actually the best all-around countertop material. Cheap, easy to self-install (making it yet cheaper). No maintenance. Softish, which I consider a bonus. I hate granite and other stones, having to always take great care placing anything breakable (glass, ceramic) on them. Only downside to laminate is that it signals cheap/poor, which does kinda matter when, say, selling a house. And you can't put hot stuff on it, I guess. That's about it.
I really like my quartz countertops. They so far have been similarly durable and easy to clean to tile, while also tolerating fairly hot pans (I haven't tried anything hotter than 400F).
Good lord... a show kitchen? Not to doubt you, but I have never heard of this. Clearly I don’t travel in rarefied circles. But, it’s hard for me to imagine being held hostage to the psychological drive to own such a thing.
The living room in my grandparent's house was basically for show and never used, and they were by no means affluent. It was (and still is) a collection of antique and early-sixties furniture, often inherited, thick carpets and baroque wallpaper. They gradually stopped using the room and converted the dining room into a second living room after their children were out of the house, and by the time I was a child, the room was basically a museum where children were not allowed. My grandpa is 90 and lives in the house alone now, he still never uses the room. There even is an alibi television set in there that was last used in the 70ies.
You’ve seen show living rooms, right? Where the furniture is new and pristine, nobody’s allowed to sit there and kids aren’t allowed to play there? Even some middle class people do this thing. Probably a similar concept, especially in bigger houses. Beyond some size, I suppose you have more space than you can effectively use, so rooms start emphasizing display rather than function.
What is being described here is a working multi-functional town centre - a place to walk to, make necessary purchases and hang out and even eat out.
We know how to build more and more of these "town centres" - we used to find them at the centre of almost all towns. The problem is it's not something governments can do or force - it's something they allow, and don't strangle.
It's waaaaay harder.
It is what evolves naturally until it is stretched out of existence by roads and car journeys, or bored to death by same-old franchises that suck revenue back to HQ
It involves ending the nice suburban compromise ( ala StrongTowns) and that is probably a bigger change to modern Western lifestyles than almost anything.
How could we all move back into city-level densities?
If state governments made suburbs pay their bills and externalities out of current accounts instead of mortgaging the future and cutting up and poisoning city residents with highways, the invisible hand of free market economics would push people to live together in cities if they want to keep their highly materialistic lifestyles. As it is, people make short term optimal, long term bankrupt, and tragedy of the commons, pollution externalizing choices.
I doubt you could build a public transit system without mortgaging the future. If the pollution externalities are priced in, people will buy electric cars.
What do they drive the electric cars on? I agree about mortgaging the future, but roads + (electric) buses makes a perfectly sensible public transit system for a lot of density levels.
> This place [farmer's market/flea market] is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create compared to the usual economic development model meant to induce artificial prosperity through tax holidays and subsidies for mega projects. ...
> So why don’t local governments embrace more of this sort of pop up grass roots mom and pop enterprise? Officials are in a trap that requires them to boost tax revenue to pay for all the attenuated infrastructure and municipal overhead that’s accumulated for decades. Highly functional flea markets don’t generate enough cash surplus to skim. So municipalities are obliged to search for show horses with all the associated prestige, complexity, and expense. ...
Those local governments probably bought into the Growth Ponzi Scheme and are now trapped in an endless cycle of megacorp courthship that with each iteration further destroys the means for the area to survive independently:
Why is the article assuming away the obvious solution?
Tax the flea market and everybody still wins. Or leave the flea market untaxed as a public good, and raise property taxes to account for how the flea market cashlessly raises quality of life.
This parallels my favorite Mr Money Mustache article, which happens to be about work trucks[0]. There seems (to me) to be so much money ill-spent on façades.
In the UK there are a lot of flea markets, or "car boot sales" as we call them.
You still have the same stigma attached with them, and being honest they are sometimes not for the faint hearted. A lot of them are similar in they are hosted in old car parks or industrial brown sites.
However a bargain can always be had; 24 pack of just expired Duracell AA batteries, mahogony furniture from a house clearance, old style lightbulbs etc.
Probably not an HN-worthy comment, but when I read the title my mind immediately went to the constitution of engineering teams. Now I'm curious if there's a treatment of this anywhere that is worth reading. Seems like you need a bit of both to maximize effect (or at least wear both hats to the extent you're willing and able).
Something I've wondered is why people don't turn abandoned big-box stores (and smaller malls) into flea markets. There wouldn't be any problems with the weather. The merchants can rent by the month and not have to tear-down their shops on Sunday evenings. Bathrooms would be available. Power could be run.
Flea markets are an eyesore and typically sell low quality merch, attracting ebay type resellers slinging phone cases, gold by the inch, stuff like that
But setting up an indoor flea market means they wouldn't be an eyesore, and would put a property to productive use that would otherwise sit empty, generating no tax revenue, possibly becoming a target for vagrants, arsonists, and graffiti taggers.
If the goal of the renovation was to add resale value, as opposed to meal preparation value, to the home they did the correct thing. Kitchens and bathrooms are the "runway models" of real estate.
Expensive nonpractical kitchen remodels are at the top of every list I've seen of projects to avoid when looking to resale value because they usually add less resale value than they cost to do.
How many really well laid out kitchens have you been in, where you have adequate prep space, and the fridge, cooker and sink are in sensible positions?
Kitchens are generally designed to look nice, not be practical unfortunately.
> This particular municipality is often described as a food desert. A significant proportion of the population buys its food at gas stations and quickie marts where healthy fresh food isn’t usually on offer.
I’m flabbergasted by this comment. How can people accept living like this?
You’ll see things like the “Sunday Farmers Market” that closes a block of a street somewhere because temporary event permits are much easier to get and harder to block, but the kind of semi-permanent marketplace described in the article remains rare.
And he’s right, cities don’t have a lot of incentive to try and make space for these sorts of entry level incubator environments because in most cases they can’t skim any tax off it - the underlying property is still just a parking lot and they usually can’t reassess the value for impermanent activities happening on top.
Putting flea markets in walking distant of everyone is a terrible logistical model.
If you've ever lived in a town where shops, parks, living quarters, and government buildings are cheek-by-jowl within walking distance, a "zoned" area feels like a desert - unable to sustain life.
This is intentional. You shred the fabric of society, then you can let companies sell all of it back to people and tax the value.
No tax revenue when your Auntie cools lunch for the neighborhood kids.
Tons of perfectly fine things that don't really bother anyone are not allowed because wealthy people don't like the aesthetics.
The blue collar dude with five cars and a project boat in his yard is totally unwelcome as far as the "muh property values" types care. He's not driving up the crime rate or leaving used needles around though.
That's not inherent though. A nice French brocante sale basically sells tat, but its nice and acceptable.
I don't think its impossible that this flea market could become a hipster hang out. One of the eateries starts making a name for itself, and people start seeking it out. It isn't just poor people that want a functioning high st.
Edit: Spelling
Reminds me of Camden market
Cities cost money. Lots of it.
Often, when they do, it is either:
(1) Because of state funding specifically for rural counties, which amounts to a revenue transfer from urban counties, or
(2) Because the rural town is in a county with, and deriving revenue from, a city, funding county libraries in the rural town as well as the city.
Even more often, tiny rural towns don't have public libraries, and you have to go to a neighboring town or the nearest city.
I think your bias is showing.
I have lived in rural, suburban, and dense urban areas in my life (currently high density urban), and there is a bias on HN toward the idea that rural communities are unsustainable on their own and mere leeches on the city dwellers. That's likely true in some places, but not universally. Sustainable rural communities have exports of resources, housing, and/or tourism, that outweigh their cost.
As the parent comment describes, one model for remote communities is volunteers who work at the library because they care. The cost of everything is lower -- labor, food, matetials -- so what looks too expensive for a town might actually be fully sustainable.
The sustainable rural community is exceedingly rare - most are propped up by ag subsidies and state aid. For much of the central part of America, there's no housing benefit or tourism to speak of, just resources (corn/soy in general, maybe livestock).
You then counter by saying that's wrong and actually small towns have a small library that has a crappy selection but they can get you any book you want if you can wait.
Pop quiz hotshot: Where do you think there is enough built up infrastructure, wealth, and surplus labor capacity to have a large centralized store of books and to organize and distribute said books?
Probably just another small town, am I right?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The problem with direct democracy is that the people who have the most time to waste (or the most money at stake) on playing politics are the ones who show up. It's also why your HOA is probably governed by a hand-picked selection of devils from the Fifth Circle of Hell.
Isn't TFA a wealthy guy raving about how great the flea market is? Clearly a lot of wealthy folk do like the aesthetics.
Parking lot flea markets are exactly 'tactical urbanism' in the same mode as pop-up bike and bus lanes -- the repurposing of car storage for more economically valuable and human-centric use, and (us) urbanist types should talk about them more often!
Why would someone make counter tops from permeable stone? That's idiotic. There are stone materials like granite that are impermeable. Besides, why is marble high-status? You can get that stuff at Home Depot.
My own countertops are inch thick glazed fired ceramic tiles, from the 1960s. Same material as those indestructible walls schools and gyms used to use. Fifty years of use have not marked them, they can be cleaned with strong cleaners, and they are unaffected by contact with hot pans.
I'm coming around to the opinion that modern mid-quality laminate is actually the best all-around countertop material. Cheap, easy to self-install (making it yet cheaper). No maintenance. Softish, which I consider a bonus. I hate granite and other stones, having to always take great care placing anything breakable (glass, ceramic) on them. Only downside to laminate is that it signals cheap/poor, which does kinda matter when, say, selling a house. And you can't put hot stuff on it, I guess. That's about it.
Nice problem to have I guess!
[1] https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/decorate/kitchen/news/a134...
We know how to build more and more of these "town centres" - we used to find them at the centre of almost all towns. The problem is it's not something governments can do or force - it's something they allow, and don't strangle.
It's waaaaay harder.
It is what evolves naturally until it is stretched out of existence by roads and car journeys, or bored to death by same-old franchises that suck revenue back to HQ
It involves ending the nice suburban compromise ( ala StrongTowns) and that is probably a bigger change to modern Western lifestyles than almost anything.
How could we all move back into city-level densities?
> So why don’t local governments embrace more of this sort of pop up grass roots mom and pop enterprise? Officials are in a trap that requires them to boost tax revenue to pay for all the attenuated infrastructure and municipal overhead that’s accumulated for decades. Highly functional flea markets don’t generate enough cash surplus to skim. So municipalities are obliged to search for show horses with all the associated prestige, complexity, and expense. ...
Those local governments probably bought into the Growth Ponzi Scheme and are now trapped in an endless cycle of megacorp courthship that with each iteration further destroys the means for the area to survive independently:
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/04/28/what-does-your-wo...
But yeah, unfortunately theres only so many ways you can get tell someone to not spend money.
You still have the same stigma attached with them, and being honest they are sometimes not for the faint hearted. A lot of them are similar in they are hosted in old car parks or industrial brown sites.
However a bargain can always be had; 24 pack of just expired Duracell AA batteries, mahogony furniture from a house clearance, old style lightbulbs etc.
It's almost funny how any plaintext/simple web page like this one is the same way.
How many really well laid out kitchens have you been in, where you have adequate prep space, and the fridge, cooker and sink are in sensible positions?
Kitchens are generally designed to look nice, not be practical unfortunately.
Right, but anything involving substantial marble surfaces in a ktichen, as in the article, is both expensive and impractical.
The Cathedral takes decades to build and is fragile , while the Bazaar is quick to assemble and resilient.
I’m flabbergasted by this comment. How can people accept living like this?