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Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

Zoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing.

Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.

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Zoning is only part of it. If a plot is already zoned industrial, but is empty, you still need to get the permitting for building construction, utility hookup, waste water & stormwater, environmental inspections, etc.

It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.

Or better yet, farmer Johnson lets his D rate hay plot grow over because he never really thought it was worth it and the son that was managing that plot left for college.

Someone buys the plot 30yr later. They can't clear it and farm it without spending a quarter mil on environmental permitting because the government sees it as a pre-existing forest and the drainage ditch farmer Johnson's dad dug back in 1988 is now a stream (i.e. protected wetland) so they want the new owner to get the same permits that someone bulldozing a swamp for a strip mall would.

You see comparable fact patterns on every axis of regulation.

The community hearing is the easiest and cheapest part if your use is mundane.

The government will still screw you out of hundreds of thousands (mostly in the form of "pay these other people four figures for study X and plan Y" type requirements) to even get to that point though

Also for a large enough utility hookup you will need to coordinate with the utility and or government since you can’t just plop down a large consumer on any old power line or pipe.

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