The Real Reason American Stores Are Ugly

Everyone loves to visit a well-kept historic district. We park our cars, walk around on brick sidewalks. Imagine a simpler time. We admire the natural and artistic beauty of the place. But instead, today, all the new construction seems to be ugly plazas, giant box stores, unwalkable streets, and endless parking lots. And this is really personal for me. My formerly quintessential New England town has houses and taverns from the colonial and revolutionary war eras. The green still looks like the set of Gilmore Girls.

You can really love this town, or at least the six acres of the historic district. The rest of the town, not so much anymore. A couple of years ago, a massive real estate investment trust bought up hundreds of acres of former farmland and forest up north by the interstate. They raised everything to the ground and put up a master-planned community, 440 living units and a 152,000 square foot strip mall. Sure, right now it looks clean and new. It currently houses bougie stores like Lululemon, Barnes & Noble and a nice TJ Maxx.

Its massive parking lots line a now unwalkable strode, not a street, not a road. The fact is, no one is going to love that strip mall in 50 years. No one will paint lovely landscapes of our town, Connecticut, with a view of the Sephora. It is utterly interchangeable with every other strip mall in America. The dystopian strip mall reflects nothing of the people who built this town. It contributes nothing to a sense of belonging, particularity, or neighborliness that would convince our kids and grandkids.

To stay here when they grow up. Something in our investment-based system is obviously changing the character of our cities. The scariest part? It's also changing us. So, who's to blame? Is it the government? Big bad investment companies? Or are we all unwitting participants in the leveling out of our hometowns?

Joseph Lawler wrote a piece on this phenomenon for the New Atlantis this year titled, You Probably Own This 7-Eleven, and That's Why It Looks So Sad. And what I learned shocked me. The crazy thing is, the very people who complain the most about what our classic American towns have become are the very same ones whose investment portfolios are effecting their demise. And here's how it works. In a real estate investment trust, also known as a REIT, investors pool their money to collectively purchase income-producing real estate.

It's been so successful that today, an estimated 50% of American families are invested in REITs, primarily through their 401ks. Only 6% of families hold actual equity in commercial property, but REITs, as companies with publicly traded stock, REITs, as companies with publicly traded stock, hold actual equity in commercial property. Make it so that your average American worker can own a stake in the lucrative real estate business. But we don't just own a piece of the strip malls. We also shop there. These businesses serve the local community by feeding the American female's favorite pastime, shopping.

They sell products that people want to buy, but they pay rent to massive corporations that have nothing to do with the neighborhood. As of June 2026, one company, Realty Income, held 1,855 leases with Dollar General and 1,253 with Family Dollar, two companies whose stores require the same type and size of retail space offer basically the same products and all operate on nearly identical financial models. And you've probably never heard this name before, but chances are you have shopped at a Kimco strip mall.

Kimco Realty, another massive REIT, owns about 565 shopping centers around the United States. The site plans for Branhaven, Connecticut, look almost exactly like the site plans for strip malls in North Texas, St. Charles, Missouri, and Las Vegas, to name a few. Big, nondescript boxes of varying sizes.

Sameness and interchangeability are the name of the game. Marshals or TJ Maxx would not know what to do with a shop row in a historic town center. Dollar Tree's head would explode if it had to rent a space like an old mill building in Steubenville, Ohio, or a historic barn in Wyoming, or a corner shop in a San Francisco residential row. The investment-based development system depends on predictability and favors repetition.

Standardized buildings make properties easier to finance, value, lease, and sell. A structure is judged on its income potential, its risks, and its maintenance costs. REITs build and own buildings that are commodities first. The people who visit the building are consumers first, and are just as transient and interchangeable as the name out front and the buildings themselves.

The underlying message is, it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from, as long as you spend the money and buy the stuff. But how did large investment companies become more powerful than local ownership? It also has to do with the choices local and state governments have made when it comes to land use policies and local zoning laws. The organic mixed-use development that gave rise to New England villages or European walkable cities has basically been rendered impossible, if not outright banned, in the United States for the last 100 years.

Local governments should have taken responsibility for the beauty and long-term life of a neighborhood. Instead, we got Euclidean zoning. Named for a 1926 Supreme Court case, this kind of town planning divides every land parcel into one kind of use. An industrial park here, two-story houses there, shopping centers there. For a century, the directional development of American towns has been away from walkability, historic considerations, and legacy planning toward isolated, fragmented parts and a car-dependent population. It's not just the local governments. At the federal level, regulations and tax laws favor large firms that can .

. . Pour massive investments into the single-use large-lot molds created by the local land-use laws. In other words, our own democratic choices at every level of government have favored the corporate incentives driving the unlovable commercial spaces we use every day.

Joseph Lawler wrote a piece on this phenomenon. These rules and regulations have worked for their intended purposes. They have successfully turned much of the built environment into commodities, which are easy for buyers and sellers to understand, price, and transact.

They have made it possible for teachers in Ontario, policemen in Los Angeles, sheiks in Dubai, and millions of others to finance the convenience stores. Houses, hospitals, hotels, malls, and offices that Americans frequent every day. All kinds of people get access to a powerful investment vehicle, while builders get access to a vast pool of financing.

As a result, there is now a vast distance between the owners of the land and the families who live and work around it. That separation leads to worse quality of buildings and a level of commodification that debilitates the human residents who actually live there. We programmed our environment to be less lovely and less human, and that environment is now in turn programming us to be less lovely and less human as well. The systems we build shape the kind of people we become.

Ivan Illich, a 20th century Austrian-born Catholic priest, philosopher, and social critic, wrote that observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic, and apolitical. The political process breaks down because people cease to be able to govern themselves, and they demand to be managed. REIT-owned strip malls are the epitome, in many ways, of a programmed environment.

We design them around a limited set of consumer behaviors—driving, buying, and departing—to profit people who never step foot in town. Local consumers might feel like they now have more choices when a REIT-owned shopping center goes up. I can now shop at Trader Joe's, Aldi, or Whole Foods.

But we gave up in return the freedom to determine the actual shape of our hometown. We've allowed town planning that actively discourages neighborly behaviors like lingering, conversation, visual appreciation, and civil discourse. Sure, you might run into someone you know at a self-checkout, but nothing about that environment is conducive to just catching up, offering help, or really listening.

There's always someone in line behind you, and they're bothered. Now, the villages that dotted the English and American countryside for hundreds of years were not all beautiful. The scars of economic revolutions, population decline, or years of local mismanagement have left many worse for wear. But regardless of how we used it, the land was an unchosen gift and responsibility. Wendell Berry, the great philosopher of American culture, once wrote, A human community, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory.

In place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this. A REIT-based single-use zoning community is one that operates by deliberately forgetting why a particular town was built, forgetting who built it, and forgetting what made it a good place for a person to be born, live, and die. The only attitude toward the land that is worthy of a human person is that it is not a place for a person to live, but rather a place for a person to live.

Is an attitude of legacy. What will I leave behind when I go? The good news? We're actually starting to remember this. The strip malls are still generating money, but small groups of Americans are increasingly saying there's more to life. David Horwath runs a company, which Landon highlights in his article, called Land Innovations. He aims to create town centers that include retail, commercial... And different kinds of residential, including mixed-use buildings. His central insight for town councils is this, slow down. He has developments currently planned in Tennessee and Alabama, with timelines from 15 to 40 years.

If he worked for a big national development corporation, he says, he'd be forced to work on a 5 to 10-year timeline. He told Landon, but when you're trying to create a meaningful place, You can't work under those terms. In other words, companies like his can only help us recover a sense of place and legacy if we choose a government that will relax its regulations.

More good news? This is also slowly starting to happen in isolated pockets around the country. In May of 2024, after a century of Euclidean zoning, a Cleveland City Council committee approved a new approach. Instead of focusing primarily on what happens inside of a building, these new rules pay more attention to how it fits into the neighborhood as a whole. Apartment residents could walk to a cafe or a grocery store, parking should be relegated to behind buildings, and street trees would be required every 20 to 30 feet.

And there was a lot of excitement about these changes. The initial council meeting drew a full house of residents. All armed with their own ideas about what could make Cleveland a friendlier, lovelier, more human city. In June of 2025, Cleveland approved its first project under its new form-based zoning code, a three-story building with 55 affordable apartments for seniors in the Huff neighborhood. The new rules made a visible difference, and approval time was, the developers estimated, cut in half. Plan submitted in May, won unanimous approval on June 27th.

The revised design brought the building up to the existing sidewalks, added trees and greenery, and hid the parking lot away from the frontage. Now, the designs are hardly a triumph of American architectural style, but the presence of the building is decidedly less ugly than another parking lot on Main Street. The speed of approval... Coupled with the movement toward more greenery and some aesthetic consideration, is the kind of direction that hopefully more neighborhoods will take. Now, these efforts are few and far between, and, as with all early-stage revolutions, fragile.

Are you aware of the conversations going on at your city zoning council? And have you checked your 401k for REITs? The powerful pull of lucrative commercial real estate investment is, for the most part, still unseen by most of us who have investments in them. But it's not only government bureaucracy and financial inertia that we will have to overcome to start building places with loveliness in mind. At this point, we have been habituated to assume that the places we shop, where we meet, and where we work have to be nondescript.

As in, it's a cosmic inevitability. We are destined, we believe, for box stores. A hundred years of regulations, laws, and a deference to large-scale developers have conditioned us to believe that wealth and stability inevitably come at the cost of beauty, loveliness, and neighborliness. And as the system stands today, that might be true. But as a result, we drive through what Wendell Berry called the defeated... Landscapes. And we don't expect any pleasure from them. I don't go to CVS expecting lovely scrollwork around the doors or an Ionian column out front.

To be honest, I don't even expect cleanliness anymore. Our daily errands have become wholly transactional, and we put off the search for loveliness and beauty to European vacations or images on our Instagram feed. But I believe that beauty is not a luxury. It is a necessity, and that when we love where we live, we can make it beautiful, too. We should expect that our buildings, which are built with our money, offer refreshment and promote the kind of civic space we want to live in.

We should expect that developers and investors, who also use our money, take the time to ask how their services can draw from local memories stretching back centuries. And look further ahead than the next fiscal year. Wealth is more than just growing our 401k faster.

It's also in the places we build that are worth passing on to our kids. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.