Ask Lemmy

That last sentence is worryingly close to conspiracy theory territory. There is no unified 'They' controlling what gets built in your town. Different places have different reasons for different things to be built. If you are seeing gas stations, it's because someone with access to money, or pseudo-money in the form of debt, thinks they can make more money by building a gas station.
Chain A coming up directly across from Chain B might be one company trying to take over the area from the other. It could be Chain A management stupidly thinking 'we made $1,000,000 from our station at 5th and B, so if we open another at 6th and C it will also make $1,000,000. It could be upper management telling them to spin up more locations so they can go into next quarters investor meetings and say 'Pay no attention to the debt on our balance sheet. Pay attention to the fact we just built 1000 new locations! We're expanding! Please value our stock higher!' It could even just be money laundering, criminals paying themselves $2 for every $1 of construction they do and then running the business pretending to sell gas for $8/gal. The one thing you can be assured of is, absolutely no one is sincerely saying 'People need more banks and gas stations.' The kind of person/organisation that spins up a dozen gas stations does not care what people/society need(s), only what they can do to convince people to give them more money.

Where I live most of the "banks" are just kiosks located inside of grocery stores.

I'm not really seeing a lot of new buildings at all. So many places have gone out of business that they just keep re-using the old ones.

Apartment complexes. Lots of apartment complexes

No, banks are closing braches in Australia all over the plave and moving online and digital. In the nearet big town to me, 2 gas stations have closed but a thrid one was refurbished. Australia is rolling out elecrric cars slowly and they don't have partisan political support.

Yes. Banks and gas stations.

Also, self-storage facilities and car washes. And churches.

You know what they're not building? Mixed use, walkable anything.

In my town, the only new businesses are car washes, vape shops, and drive thru coffee franchises.

We had plenty of all three to begin with, but now there's far more than anyone could ever need.

No new banks or gas stations in the last 5 years here.

No. Most banks barely have physical locations anywhere and every single gas station I can think of has been there for as long as I can remember pretty much.

My city is building anything but what humans want. Benches, parks, trees are not built

The only fuel station built near me is a huge electric charging one with a few fuel pumps as an after thought and every bank branch has closed except one

For a while it was Chase banks specifically. Looks like they maxed out on those. What I see now are car washes, self storage facilities (a seemingly disproportionate number of), and car parts stores.

Where I live there's this crazy new obsession with car washes. Like, 3 brand new ones being built on the same street. I get that they became way more profitable when they figured out the subscription model thing, but I feel like so many is unsustainable.

They've been closing them down here and replacing them with pizza shops. So many pizza shops.

Somebody's paying for it..

Seems deranged, to me..

Simultaneously debanking the politically intolerable WHILE increasing the saturation of a place with banks .. doesn't make any sense.

& the basic rule about "a market can only support a certain amount of a given kind of competition" .. means that whomever it is who's getting loans for building those things, is going to be defaulting on those loans, which will, itself, be bringing-down banks, in your region.

Again, deranged.

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Dispensaries

A bunch of gas stations and car washes. Car culture in my area is out of control. Feels like half the city's land area is dedicated for parking...

Around me, it's car washes and storage units. Literally half of all the new commercial construction around me.

If there's a new strip mall or commercial area in my city, it's a combination of these: mattress store, vape/smoke shop, liquor store, carwash, dentist.

Nope, I think most banks are actually closing some branches in favor of online service.

We build betting shops and fast food places.

My village has a moratorium on new banks and is actually using eminent domain to take over a building from one. I have not seen any new gas stations going up. If you think it's excessive it's time to get involved in your municipal government, there are no doubt public hearings on zoning approvals where enough loud voices can stop or slow down overbuilding. That's what happened here with banks. We have limited real estate and people got fed up.

Market demand. They get built because the capitalists think that people want them to be built. If people don't want them to be built, they would go out of business and shut down.

But to answer your question, my city is sprawling and growing vertically at the same time. For the new neighborhoods, yeah, gas stations, bank branches and other such businesses do get constructed in the central commercially zoned part.

Car washes and tire shops.

No. Horrible houses, if you can even call them that. Townhomes on narrow streets. Shared walls and driveways too short to contain the full length of a mid to full size vehicle. Postage stamp yards slightly bigger than an apartment patio or balcony. Over half a million for that pleasure.

The SFH community nearby is already complaining about cracks and other problems in their new houses. And their HOA complaints mostly border on yelling regarding space encroachment by others into their tiny bit of yard and driveways. Scuffs and such.

The majority of new builds I drive past are of that nature. In addition, grocery stores get built. More utility work. Road work. Other businesses closing, mostly restaurants.

Probably says something about the lack of disposable income, restaurants closing and more grocery stores getting built.

High col area means buildings are disappearing and being redeveloped as condos around me.

Gas stations are slowly dying as the land gets too expensive to justify a low traffic gas station, and increasing EV popularity is further shrinking their appeal.

Banks seem to be infiltrating stupid places now, like fucking indoor shopping malls.

There’s nothing like seeing a fucking BANK to make you not interested in visiting an area. If I don’t bank there I will never walk in. If I do bank there I will walk in once or twice a year. Such a shitty use of high visibility retail space.

One wing of my dying mall is entirely banks, dentists, and cell phone stores. Why would anyone want to stroll through that?

This can happen when companies are making massive profits but want to hide them.

i.e. if they're getting government subsidies, either direct ones, or indirect policy support, then they risk losing it if they post record profits and draw attention to their lack of need. So instead they will increase capital spending: buy up more properties, renovate their stores with nicer fixtures etc. On paper this keeps their profits down as their costs have gone up, however, in reality their overall valuation has increased because they now own all these assets that they can use, lease, or sell in the future (assuming they didn't buy junk).

Some of it is also just normal expansion. If a new neighbourhood is built, banks and gas stations are often the first to try and get in. For gas stations it's to get the ideal corner, and for banks it's because people often switch banks when they move houses to whatever's closest, and then never switch again.

Some of it can be specific government policy. The current US government has crafted policy to boost the gas powered vehicle market for years to come, which may give more confidence in building gas stations and having them be profitable long term.

And some of it can just be normal market adjustments. i.e. they stopped building banks thinking that everyone going digital would eliminate them, but their projections were wrong and they're seeing more people then expected who still want to go into a physical location and talk to a person, so now there's a wave of buildout.

Also, yeah the landgrab aspect is real. It would work differently for gas stations and banks, but look up the history of McDonald's, they're mostly a real estate company: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/

No new gas stations, but there are enough of them. If anything new EV chargers. Banks are closing.

Not here. We mostly get redos. Bigger and shinier hospital, bigger and shinier engineering hall, replace a warehouse with a big and shiny apartment building. It’s crazy. We’ve got people doing drugs and sleeping on the streets, and we spend millions of dollars on a new library renovation.

No, but we're a village of ~11k people spread out over a fairly large area.

Hmm, nope. A bunch of bank branches got remodeled after a merger and a local gas station is being torn down and replaced, but nothing new.

The only time I have seen new service stations is when a new area is being developed. Generally 5 years after because of how much work goes into getting an OK for a station.

As physical money is becoming less used I have seen fewer banks. My own bank has left my town entirely and is now a dentist.

Yes. My town was 5k people in 2000, 20k in 2020, and expected to be over 100k in 2030. Everyone is trying to get into the grab. People who move in are more likely to find a new bank, so the banks want to be here early to get the customers.

Gas stations are not something people are loyal to, but they still need to go in to support all the people moving into a car centric environment.