Third Blog Post

When I left the house this morning, I left with a specific agenda. I decided to photograph empty lots.

All of these lots have the following three things in common:

• All are (presumably) privately owned lots located in Downtown Fresno, as defined by the following boundaries:
• South of Divisadero Street.
• West of Highway 41.
• North/East (both technically apply) of Highway 99.
• None of them are being put to any productive use (one has a couple trailers hanging out).
• Not a single “for sale” sign was to be found among them.

There are plenty more than these, but I stopped at ten on purpose.

If I were a betting man, I would assume they’re being held by land speculators, people who have correctly surmised that, due to existing taxation laws, financing structures, and land use regulations (among other factors), they have far more incentive to simply hold land and wait for prices to go up than do anything with it. This is not their fault; nobody can be blamed for choosing a risk-free, low-cost path to riches.

I would like Mayor Brand to spend the rest of his term, instead of short-sightedly chasing “more jobs” for the city as he proposes to do, to instead focus his efforts on addressing and removing the barriers to increased economic activity and entrepreneurship in this city that are have been in place for decades—the kind of thing that would build more lasting wealth for everyone.

At the very least, he could educate himself on how cities create and destroy wealth, and maybe join the conversation from the side of the solution, rather than the side of the problem, that our local politicians, in cahoots with developers and large, out-of-town corporations, tend to create for us.

And maybe the next set of mayoral candidates can learn from and start to apply the “Strong Towns” principles that have led to cities prospering for millennia.