In the past 7-Eleven was unique in the franchise world where you could make a comfortable living owning a single store and that was the major ownership model. McDonalds and other options at the time really depended on a multi-store ownership model. Corporate 7-Eleven (Southland Corp technically) moved away from this single store model in the mid to late 90's, instead preferring single, larger corporations in a region, owning 10+ stores over a single store owner. They made this happen over a 20 year span by changing the contracts franchisees sign and must to re-sign every x years. Every contract renewal drastically reduced the single store income and made it much harder for single store owners to make a living. Corporate also started preferring to give new stores to existing, large scale franchises over new store owners which changes the initial capital needed for a store by over 10x as with an existing store you will have to pay the rights from the previous franchisee instead of just the corporate.

My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all own or have owned 7-Eleven stores and have since the 80's. I've worked there, been to their conferences, and still get to hear about them at all family gatherings :)

Not to be a contrarian but that vanilla look is what creates traction or commerce. When we pull into a 7-Eleven weather in Seattle or Florida people want the same experience and the same expectations. And as such with end with liminal space. A sad space where the coffee and the Slim-Jim are the same. The familiarity of nowhere or anywhere America.

This was my home gas station for 4 years so I may be biased, but it is fine. Symptomatic of a deeper car-centric problem, sure.

I think part of the reason the US doesn't feel like the US anymore is that ownership of properties is no longer Bob who dreamed of some day opening a Pizza shop on Main st. It's all corporate now, all the way down.

The article spends a lot of time describing problems that I would see as a result of car centricity and land use patterns, but it just fails to make a point on why it’s a problem caused by REITs.

You can easily go to NYC and find entire neighborhoods owned by large absentee landlords and yet are still walkable and desirable to live in. Yes perhaps regulations and tax laws favor large firms, but in the end zoning laws can easily require those large firms to build desirable neighborhoods.

No, this is just poor management. Japanese 7-11s are ran better because of better culture, products and management. It's not magic.

In systems thinking, this would be called "intrinsic responsibility" (or lack thereof).

  > Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions. 

I want to see what the author considers a nice 7-11 for contrast, because it seems normal to me? Could be more walkable of course but I'm not sure that's on the REIT. They didn't lay out the roads or anything.

The wood paneling and nice front lights actually seem like an improvement over local 7-11s if anything.

By that logic, I also own a microscopic share in all sorts of businesses, many of which have their own sadness or disinterest.

Is there anything that makes real-estate significantly different, beyond how the pathos can be more-easily photographed?

In other words, I expect the (legitimate) issues raised in the article have close analogues in legal/financial/incentive problems for other forms of investment.

> The shortcoming of such analyses is that they make it difficult to capture the value that would accrue to a project that created a neighborhood.

Sounds like an opportunity for experts in the field to develop and sell a good kind of analysis!

Though point-taken: It'd still be hard to attract cautious investors until something is perceived as "proven".

So Vanguard owns one-eighth of ADC, an REIT whose stock price has declined 2.65% in the last 5 years. Surely there is space in the market for a smaller, leaner, possibly privately-owned REIT whose values more closely align with 2026 values and will one day be able to eat ADC's lunch.

Zoning might be seen as a way of getting local control over property that’s actually owned by someone else, for better or worse. Developers often have to make concessions to local governments to get approval, and NIMBYism has its downsides.

A local government has options like creating a historical district if they really want to control aesthetics. A home owner’s association can control aesthetics in a residential area. They are just people and you might disagree with their decisions.

Real estate is expensive. Large commercial properties usually require rich owners. the local gentry that owns farms and car dealerships and shopping malls and fast-food franchises isn’t necessarily any more interested in aethetics than an REIT.

It seems like land-use governance is always going to be messy no matter how it’s structured?

seems like aesthetically it matches its surroundings. it doesn't seem like an outlier in the neighborhood which kind of defeats the premise of the article.

I'll never miss an opportunity to promote this TED talk from James Kunstler[1]. It's a real pleasure to see a skilled hater take a vile trend to task and he does so with gusto. It's from 2004 and really feels like it, but the central points remain just as true today.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...

Pure market based solutions will never work and neither will restrictive planning policies. The only way to bring back real neighborhoods is to completely remove fixed zoning for direct neighbor votes or local councils deciding individual projects, and create a federal investment fund that will give cheap loans to builders who plan to do what the community actually wants.

Of course the root cause of this is wealth concentration, and that's not something you can fix with a couple new laws.

the commodification of everything, just one more example. once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

It looks like a normal 7-Eleven.

On the flip side: your retirement is dependent on the property listed in the article and if no improvements are needed while it generates a return…

It means you’re a landlord!

Congratulations!!

Give yourself a round of applause. By not maintaining it, you are electing to keep cash flow high and profits secured. The overall commercial market has negative numbers so even if said REIT is down 2.65% it’s hedged together with numerous properties in a nice geographic arbitrage opportunity to minimize losses.

Is that really… So bad?

Land value tax would solve this.

Ah, perfect. A patronizing tone to start off the article. Where have I seen this before?

7-11's, which I frequent often, need a slightly higher food quality selection to appease affluents like me, but as far as how they look, that's what a 7-11 looks like! It's what I look for when I'm driving, on "stroads" / highways, and am looking for an exactly predictable experience, one which is low-key, inexpensive, and does not imply a formal dress code. I'd never want a 7-11 to look like a brownstone in the west village, that would imply an entirely different kind of business establishment.

Bogle (Mr Vanguard himself) saw this coming and warned us, but it was perhaps too late: https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/bogle-managerial-ca...

I mean, to be fair, local owners of buildings also neglect them sometimes.

So, even if this is a problem, fixing it doesn't immediately make neighborhoods beautiful.

Interesting, but I kind of like the building :)

This is a stupid article. "Sad" is not an objective criterion. Is IKEA furniture sad? I think the author would say so.

I _love_ the pictured 7-Elevens, especially the one in Austin, TX. They are perfectly functional: you drop in, get whatever items you need, and get out in seconds. Everything is designed to help you with that.

The parking lot is a necessity for convenience stores because you likely won't invest 30-40 minutes of your time to _walk_ to a convenience store. You might as well just walk to a full-blown store. The exceptions are, of course, "food deserts" where the density death spiral has hit the bottom and made the city unliveable (see: Manhattan, Tokyo).

The places like "Captains Row" are beautiful to look at but hellish to actually _live_ in. Ask me how I know. They are the equivalent of the restored classic cars: beautiful to look at, but unsafe and uncomfortable for actual use compared to modern cars.

Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encourages fraud), a public liability (it inevitably concentrates ownership who can easily lobby and get bailouts), and leads to missed opportunities and inefficient use.

The mass US real estate fraud that ended in 2008 was entirely built around loaning money to people who weren't creditworthy for overvalued property that they had no expertise to judge, then immediately selling that loan to somebody who would hide it in a complex product and immediately sell it again. Eventually, these was sold to municipalities and pension funds in complex gambling vehicles whose value would fall to zero if anything went wrong in this structure, after being branded "AAA" by institutions 1) paid by the people selling the products, and 2) literally written into legislation by name and into the rules governing the pension funds.

That's what distance between an investor and in investment gets you. Tax every single hop. Make them break themselves up.

edit: Yes it does. Tax them. These transactions cost the public more than direct transactions. I know that people feel like they're far beyond having to justify a tax other than "I like it, so don't tax it," but this distance in and of itself imposes costs to the public. If you dump money into Vanguard, and Vanguard then invests in an index, Vanguard gets taxed and you get taxed, too. Poof, no more Vanguard. The horrible outcome of that is that people understand the stocks they're investing in, and that the stock market becomes a repository of intelligence - which is what I thought was supposed to justify it.

Nobody cares about justice, though. They're libertarians when they're rich and revolutionaries when they're poor. Government to protect my stuff when I have stuff, government that gives me stuff when I don't have stuff.