It’s because of minimum parking requirements. This isn’t because developers enjoy buying more land and pouring more asphalt than is necessary. Now ask yourself-how many times have you seen any of these lots full? Maybe Black Friday? Or the weekend before Christmas? Usually, a vast majority of spaces sit empty. These routes will be peppered in with individual smaller stores that also have dozens of spaces.

As in Charlottesville, your strip mall is likely defined by multiple autonomous, adjacent shopping centers that each have massive, multi-acre parking lots. 29 just north of my hometown of Charlottesville, VA. Wherever you are reading this, close your eyes and visualize the strip mall arterial you’re most familiar with. People still shop on these strips because they have no other choice, but don’t celebrate the areas themselves, often finding them distasteful and congested. It's as if the government has taken uses that are fundamentally ugly, and crammed them together, causing the ugliness to spread. So that’s where most of the retail ends up. They usually allow commercial retail on just a handful of key roads that run from downtown to the suburbs. Most cities’ comprehensive zoning maps separate residential, commercial and industrial uses. But along many American strip malls, fast-food chains-and other low-budget retail-are clustered side by side, extending into infinity with their loud signage, cookie-cutter design, drive-thru windows and parking lots. The visual impact of these places is nonetheless minimal and sporadic in mixed-use, urban settings, where they bump up against different building types, or sit at ground level within buildings. Let’s assume, just for the sake of conversation, that nobody finds a corporate fast-food establishment particularly attractive.

Below is a list of these regulations, which are enforced to various degrees across America, explaining the uniform look of our municipalities from coast to coast. Indeed, many of the regulations that prevent livelier downtown areas also harm the potential of low-density, outlying, suburban ones, by mandating that retail stay confined into this strip mall model.

Strip mall building cost