> 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.
Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.
No. You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant. The point is the city needs to be friendly to mixed-use development, not that big corporate or REIT ownership inherently leads to bad neighborhoods.
You also need customers who are OK with the fact that local businesses are going to be more expensive than Walmart or Costco and the corporate restaurants that are clustered around them. This sort of happens by default in neighborhoods where the externalities of car ownership are properly priced, because even though Joe's Grocery is more expensive, it's still cheaper to walk there and shop than it is to own a car and drive to a big supermarket. But it's difficult/impossible for these kinds of small businesses to flourish in the suburbs where the default is to drive everywhere. If I'm driving anyway, I might as well go get the best prices.
> You can look at the recent Hudson Yards development. Largely owned by two companies, Related and Oxford Properties, the development is quite pleasant.
You're using Hudson Yards as a positive development example? It's broadly hated for pretty much exactly the kind of large-scale developer homogenization discussed in the article.
This article is so badly written that I cannot tell whether its main point is homogenization or land use. Perhaps the author is just conflating the two intentionally. Take this sentence from the article about how a strip mall with a grocery store is the same in California and Massachusetts:
> But the sameness and isolation of our built environment is not just the work of the invisible hand; policies have also encouraged this trend.
See how the author conveniently lumps together sameness and isolation? My comments are responding the isolation part, and you are probably referring to sameness. This is how a badly written article causes commenters to talk past each other.
But specifically on the point of sameness and homogenization: I disagree here. I think most people are insufficiently attuned to the differences in buildings. Next time take a real camera, put yourself in a street photographer’s shoe and photograph the Hudson Yards neighborhood. Even the skyscrapers aren’t the same. There’s enough aesthetic variation there.
Sure, because they were largely built a hundred years ago, and parceled into lots a hundred more before that, and because NYC remains uniquely friendly to continued mixed-use development today.