GoKawiilYou are probably one of the landlords of this 7-Eleven in Williamsburg, Virginia. Do you care about how it looks? How it fits into the landscape? Of course not, since you did not know it existed. Also, it’s apparent from looking at it that no one else particularly cares.
From the Special Series: The Lonely Neighborhood
It’s located on a classic “stroad” — that is, not quite a highway but also not a street of the kind that would allow for walking from place to place. One would not normally walk anywhere to or from this 7-Eleven. The 7-Eleven is surrounded by chain hotels that are only accessible by car and have nothing distinctive or memorable about them. Also nearby are a bank branch and a weed dispensary, and behind it is a single-family housing subdivision, all nondescript. It’s nowhere in particular. The landscape is laid out without much intention. No one would have designed it to be so boring and faceless.
You would not have. And yet, you likely had a hand in it, passively, as a part owner of this 7-Eleven.
This building and the land it sits on are not owned by 7-Eleven, or by an individual. Instead, this 7-Eleven is the tenant of a real estate investment trust, a financial structure that allows huge numbers of people to invest in real estate without having to worry about the details of what it is they are investing in. That trust, named Agree Realty Corporation, also owns the properties for a dialysis center in Hilo, Hawaii, a PetSmart in Port Arthur, Texas, a grocery store in Augusta, Maine, and nearly 3,000 other retail properties spread across all fifty states. It’s located in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Agree Realty Corporation, in turn, is about one-eighth owned by Vanguard, whose diversified funds of trillions of dollars in assets are bought into by tens of millions of investors, including through 401(k)s and other ubiquitous savings vehicles. If you have such a retirement plan or market account, it’s quite likely you have a piece of the 416 Bypass Road 7-Eleven.
It is unfair to single out this location. There are thousands just like it. And that is the point: it is interchangeable. That quality is an advantage for its marketability as a financial product — but it is a problem for the character of its neighborhood, or lack thereof.
It exemplifies a shortfall of American urban design, namely that the system of property ownership has created too much distance between the owners of a given plot of land and the families who live and work around it.
“That enormous amount of separation leads to tons of qualitative issues and really leads to a lot of commodification,” Ward Davis, a founding partner of an Arkansas real estate company focused on traditional-style development, told me in a phone interview.
The U.S. has separated landowners from neighborhoods through regulations and tax laws meant to make real estate markets accessible and liquid — that is, easily bought and sold among investors. 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, sheikhs 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.
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