Anybody who has entered the retail business as a renter for the past 15 years has made a mistake. Because land lords do this to everybody. If their goal wasn't to suck the lifeblood of people and businesses, then they would have invested their money into something different than becoming landlords.
If you have a great retail idea, then you need to get investors behind you so that your company can outright own the stores. Otherwise you will be leeched on endlessly. It's incredibly hard to get on top if you're depending on the good will of landlords.
Solution: Online shopping until the bubble collapses.
That's a nice just so story for the cases in which a landlord benefits due to the success of his tenant. Now do the ones where the property value goes down because of any of a zillion other factors.
CRE has historically provided very good and stable returns, especially compared to retail businesses who face extreme failure rates and risk; trying to compare the two is insulting.
So retail business owners are just dullards who can't figure this out like you can?
I imagine most people are not capitalized, confidently practiced in it, or interested in that kind of business. Took 10 seconds to think about it.
What about it? Do property investors deserve guaranteed increase in asset value? Do other investors deserve that?
Of course not. It's your apparent assumption that property investors are not providing value because it's certain to go up or something.
They aren't selling in urban places.
Spitballing solution: In addition to LVT, rental tax? Nah, that just drives the purchase price to a higher level. Hmm. Also it drives up the cost of the minimal viable business (hence the coffee sheds in parking lots).
Allowing more supply is the only good answer.
We are in commercial zoning oversupply to be honest. New retail units going up all the time under apartments failing to lease because there is only so much retail demand, at least at the prices offered but we know people would rather take a loss from an empty unit they can write off than actually lower rent and underlying asset value they use for collateral for loans.
Really depends on local markets. NYC by comparison has a lot of new condos that go up with zero street level retail space.
It all gets filled up with an expansive lobby and amenities.
Makes the surrounding street life dead.
Could we fix that with a vacancy tax for retail?
There are too many factors that intersect to lead to these outcomes that make it easy to detect any one silver bullet. Valuing a property based on rents seems to be another big issue since it sets up incentives to increase rent and valuations even when the real estate market doesn't support that rent increase.