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[deleted] t1_j4383j4 wrote

Reply to comment by WalkerBRiley in Mardens closes in Rumford by Stonesword75

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AssumptionLivid6879 t1_j467gar wrote

That isn’t our reality. Our reality is that there hasn’t been any new tenants in many of these structures and many current tenants are renting shithole end-lifecycle properties.

Easiest example is the Airport Mall in Bangor. Every drop panel is brown from water damage at the dollar store, and 90% of it is vacant. The Bangor mall has like 4 out of possible 40 tenants. The landowner will keep running it into the ground and shorting the value of neighboring structures.

These landowners waiting for “someone to bite” are creating blight and butterfly effects the surrounding community. Blaming blightingly buildings on the lack of tenants is like a vacuum salesman blaming the customer on not wanting to buy a vacuum.

All of these pseudo-commercial shopping districts are heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, from the wasted land use within the city limits, to the extra road/sewer/power maintenance. Rather than incentivizing the repairing of these structures, it’s incentivized to just build more 30-year big boxes and let the old ones rot.

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[deleted] t1_j46m6md wrote

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AssumptionLivid6879 t1_j46oab3 wrote

Just as the energy industry is accountable for their life-cycles, footprint, infrastructure impact, future big box stores need the same accountability. It should be incentivized to refurbish and repurpose and decentivitized to blight for hedging tax recoup into portfolios.

Building without contributing to road / sidewalk infrastructure, building without contributing to the expansion of services, building and blighting without consequences needs to go. These buildings created in the 80s and 90s are destroying communities and driving further why Maine and other big box centric infrastructure across the country have brain drain issues

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