You Probably Own This 7-Eleven (and That’s Why It Looks So Sad)

Subscriber Only You 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. 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. But there has been a cost. Commodities aren’t lovable. All the qualities that give a place charm or loveliness are ones that are best stewarded by people who live there. Someone who owns the plot from afar, without even visiting, can never understand the subtle details that give it life. And the middleman property developer or manager just will never care. No one will ever cherish a plot of land as much as someone who has a long-term ownership and residence interest in it. Yet more and more of the built environment we live in every day is owned by people far away who don’t even know they own it. Madison Heights, MichiganRiver North Photography / iStock The relationship between the land and its owners wasn’t always this way. Nor is it this way in other places. Take the classic British village as depicted in Downton Abbey, which gripped large audiences in part because of the strong sense of place and belonging it evoked. The plot of the show is driven by the problem of who will become the property’s future owner: Downton Abbey is set to pass to a remote relative because of property laws, developed over the course of centuries, that ensured that estates not only stayed within the family but specifically passed on to a male heir. The family’s efforts to keep control of the manor and village, despite the lack of a son, lead to all the adventures that follow. Under this medieval system of ownership, generally known as fee tail, the house and surrounding town had a special relationship to the noble family who claimed it. Not only did they generally own the land, but they expected it to remain in their family for generations to come. The physical layout of the town to a large extent reflected their family’s influence. Thus English nobility had a strong interest in not just the functionality but also the beauty of their family village. The look of Downton, with its church, post office, pubs, market, and houses all within walking distance of the manor, is the classic English layout. The downsides of the law were that it would be difficult or impossible for English lords to sell off the land — and also hard to finance improvements on it, since the land could not be used as collateral. Land-use laws, such as zoning or environmental laws, would be minimal. Yet in the absence of modern planning, these villages that dot the English landscape evolved to a form of beauty we find hard to replicate today. The United States has always had more liberal property laws. Fee tail ownership was abolished early on. Instead, the U.S. generally has had a system of ownership known as fee simple, which essentially means that owners have an absolute right to use or sell their property as they see fit. But in the early days of the colonies and the republic, there was still a strong connection between the owners of land and the residents. Most of the East Coast’s charming neighborhoods were built in that era. For example, the street known as Captains Row in Virginia’s Old Town Alexandria is a tourist destination. Visitors flock to the cobblestone streets and rowhouses, just steps from restaurants and cafés in brick buildings that date to the time of George Washington, to have engagement or wedding photos taken. Captains Row, Old Town Alexandria, VirginiaElizabeth Lankes / Alamy Captains Row is so named because it was built and financed by the boat captains who lived there and made their livings shipping goods (and slaves) in and out of the port of Alexandria. The captains didn’t have planning degrees or access to today’s star architects. They also weren’t constrained by the zoning laws and building codes that now govern Alexandria and the U.S. But they somehow managed to create a street and neighborhood that is one of the loveliest in the country. What makes a neighborhood or place inviting or charming is not necessarily expert design and planning. It’s not even aesthetic merit. Instead, it is a variety or density of features that can be appreciated by people on foot. It is an attention to detail at the level of the individual building. “If you had to pick one thing you could do to make human settlement more walkable, it would be to build small,” Emily Talen, a researcher at the University of Chicago and the author of Neighborhood, said in a phone interview. Take, for example, the lively neighborhoods of modern Tokyo. Many buildings individually lack architectural value, in that they are the kinds of concrete and steel blocks that critics often bemoan in other settings. But because Japan has a combination of zoning and highly adaptable ownership, it has created settings where blocks often feature retail, restaurants, convenience stores, and everything else right near or below residences. You might not agree with the aesthetic choices made on each block, which might appear garish to some Western eyes. But there is no denying that they are interesting — and that at least they are choices, made by someone. Property and land-use laws have an overriding influence on such outcomes. What casual observers, or even real estate industry participants, might ascribe to culture or design are in fact often the result of policy choices. Another example that shows this point clearly, from the opposite direction, is the famed ‘ashwa’iyyat of Cairo — brown and gray near-uniform multi-story apartment buildings that stretch out from the Nile over distances shocking to most Westerners, housing millions of people. Egypt has weak property rights. Only a small share of properties are registered, and a World War II-era rent control law pushed construction out of the formal sector for generations, forcing it onto the margins as people — illegally and incrementally — bought land from farm owners and converted it to housing. The lack of property rights means that families cannot get mortgages to finance homes. Instead, they build them piecemeal, as savings allow. The shortage of rain makes it possible for homes to be built in a cheap way over time, uncovered, using inexpensive materials. They often must be built in stealth to avoid the government blocking construction. All these factors lead to a certain uniformity. At the same time, the fact that families own the developments directly means that there is thought put into them. As the urban planner David Sims writes in Understanding Cairo, an earthquake in 1992 saw relatively few collapses among these buildings. And although they are often described as “slums,” they are actually relatively decent