Could these be built new in your neighborhood today? Noooooooo. If they burned down tomorrow could they be rebuilt right where they are? Probably not. These are grandfathered in, but they’re not reproducible. Full stop. Let it go.

A little context is important here. Last night a group of regular suspects came over for dinner. One of the guys sells Tyvek House Wrap for a living. He walked me through the economics of his little sliver of the building industry. He has a monthly budget of $950,000. A “budget” in this case is what they used to call a “quota.” In other words he needs to sell about a million dollars worth of product each month to be successful at his job. He described a theoretical 4,000 square foot house which is relatively high end, although not extravagant by today’s standard. That’s an $800 sale. He can’t afford to waste his time on such tiny projects. Instead he focuses on corporate clients where 3,600 units are all going up in one master planned development. If he can sell to a few of those each month he can advance in his career.

The other guests around the table were visiting computer geeks in FinTech (financial technology.) They line up all the ones and zeros for the suits in New York, Singapore, and London from their digital outposts in places like Montana. Their jobs involve lubricating massive international capital flows through computer algorithms. It’s all about taking already insanely complex overly leveraged systems and extracting just a little bit more yield by adding additional layers of complexity. The scary part is that each person focuses on a wee bit of the process in their little corner, but no one fully understands the whole. Our dinner conversations encapsulated what IncDev is up against: economies of scale, international consolidation, vertical integration, and ever more creative financing.

Can ordinary people be taught how to navigate a dozen opaque unresponsive agencies and corporations in order to eventually build a mom and pop shop or a duplex? Maybe. Could all the rules be changed to make traditional incremental development legal again? In theory… sure. But the process is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks: slow, tedious, and thoroughly unsatisfying. Count me out.