What we can plainly see is that the big box store pays a minuscule amount in taxes when compared with the downtown building, especially when we consider how much land it takes up and how many utilities it uses.

If we constructed just one more downtown building next door to the one above, the two structures would offer more tax revenue for our city than the entire Walmart currently provides — all while taking up a tiny fraction of the space that the Walmart uses (around 4/10 of an acre vs. 34 acres).

This is not important because we love multistory buildings or density. It doesn’t have anything to do with aesthetics. Rather, it's important because that simple six-story building uses just a few dozen yards of street and sidewalk and pipe while generating tons of revenue for the city. And the Walmart, as we’ve already explained, uses massive amounts of public infrastructure, all to service just one store.

What’s more, the Walmart also requires people to drive to access it—which means they each have to own a car and money for gas and insurance—whereas the downtown store could be accessed on foot by the thousands of people whose homes are within half a mile of it for free.

For the last seventy years, most cities, suburbs and towns have based their development—whether housing or retail or office—around cars. We’ve built extensive road networks and parking lots in front of every store and house. We’ve built it all brand new, beginning as soon as cars became available to regular consumers. It has its benefits of course, but it is also costing our communities far more than we could ever have imagined.

If we zoom out from this small example of the Walmart vs. the downtown store, we can see how these two types of buildings impact entire cities and regions.