The Core

>landbanking

One of our local cities bought up square blocks of downtown.  Tore down all the 100 year old buildings in the 1980's and 1990's hoping that they could lure strip malls or big boxes or slick corporate offices or something. Nobody came so they have big vacant lots and huge gaps in the main street.  They destroyed all the urbanness that Millennials want, destroyed the neat urban character, drove out the businesses that had stuck it out through decades of decline and now they got empty blocks of weeds.  They were a little too fast on the trigger and a little too top down in their planning.

Urban gardens and urban farming are a more grass roots form of landbanking. 

Related:

This is a bit of a puff piece, but it may identify a new trend.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44349211

Given the perpetual craziness and gridlock in Washington, and inaction by states, many talented young people are going back home to small town America and bringing new ideas they discovered while living on The Coasts.

The also mention the Third Wave of the Internet, but don't go into detail, but it sounds interesting.

>>urban farming are a more grass roots form

So to speak ;-)

many talented young people are going back home to small town America

I think in-migration from the coasts is a big force. Perhaps more culturally right now, but perhaps a major economic force eventually.

Demographers say that it is almost unprecedented for people to be moving from high-wage areas to low-wage areas in large numbers as they are from the Bay Area, but they are.

A study by real estate brokerage Redfin found the Bay Area remains the top region for outward migration in the country.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/08/packing-up-and-moving-out-bay-area-exodus-continues/

I keep wondering where the baristas, teachers and cops for all the wealthy Silicon Valley engineers and business analysts are going to come from.

As for California as a whole, I heard one commentator say California could start losing US Representatives, probably not in the 2020 census, but possibly in the 2030 census.

California as a whole as substantial net out-migration, fueled primarily by lower income and younger people.
http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265

If that keeps up, California is going to have to follow Vermont and pay young people to move there: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2018/06/03/vermont-wants-to-pay-you-10000-to-move-there-and-work/

As it is, farmers in California are moving their operations to Mexico, because, even at $21/hour, they can't find celery pickers and some farmers have stopped growing strawberries and vine-ripened tomatoes because there is not enough labor available to harvest them.

One farmer on a recent Planet Money episode said (roughly, from memory): "I'm hiring Mexicans to pick my crops either way. I'm either doing it by bringing Mexicans here or by moving my crops there, but one way or another, a Mexican is harvesting your food."
Full episode: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/04/608578696/episode-839-the-indicator-goes-to-california

[I think my mind has been destroyed by Wikipedia]

But the problem these farmers are having is not with demand, but with finding enough labor to meet the demand.

>>hydroponics

Quick question: what nation is the second largest ag exporter in the world in value, after the US?

The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/

Which, perhaps, might serve as a model for what could be done with all these shopping malls in America. If you turned every closing shopping mall into a Dutch-style farm, what would that do for local produce? These farms require a fraction of the labor, pesticides, land and water as an American farm. More upfront investment. Possibly more energy, I don't recall about that (but if you have enough solar and wind, that doesn't matter).

Won't work well for wheat, but people keep telling me that stuff is poison anyway.

>>hydroponically just for Costco

I saw a video looping in Costco. It's impressive. Very similar to what the Dutch are doing at scale.

>>California

My real estate agent in Spokane said one of the big drivers of the real estate market is people moving from California and specifically the Bay Area. They can sell their small house for $1,000,000 and put a cash offer on a $250,000 house. And the house is bigger and in a better neighborhood. That is driving the prices up and hurts people who can't put that kind of cash offer on the table. Makes it hard for the guy making $50K a year to afford a decent house let alone someone making $15 an hour.

So California is not only pricing itself out of the market, it is making it tough on the places where the people are moving.

Makes it hard for the guy making $50K a year to afford a decent house let alone someone making $15 an hour.

This has been hitting the news lately
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/14/us/minimum-wage-2-bedroom-trnd/index.html

Incline Village, Lake Tahoe NV and HATE followed.

It's the entire Tahoe region. Last winter while visiting friends, almost every retail outlet had "Help Wanted" signs, but at $15/hr it doesn't pencil out for people. They often have to sleep four to a room to make it work. Meanwhile, for merchants, paying $35/hr for cashiers means they are not price competitive.

Everything there feels like it's at a breaking point. There are some initiatives for affordable housing, but these are tough too. They used to have a stock of houses in Mammoth that could only be purchased by Mammoth residents. You got some subsidy to buy the house, but had to sign a contract that you would only sell it to someone with a full-time job in the community. But during the peaks of the drought, there was no skiing, tons of people lost their jobs and there were not enough locals to buy all the houses that came on the market, so they had to let people sell them on the open market. Now the affordable housing stock is much reduced.

That was when I first started asking, "Who is going to serve latt駸 and sell groceries to all the wealthy people coming up from the Bay Area?" If they want to vacation in Truckee, they are going to need to get used to $12 cups of coffee, etc.

All these huge projects, like this mall and sports stadiums and stuff are a joke.  Real progress is more bottom up: take a couple of blocks of downtown buildings and rehab them to their former glory as part of a plan for that district for leasing.  Has a better chance for lasting success.