In SF, which has alot of old buildings (relative to US suburbs), most daycares run out of the first floor of a house. Same for many of the local, walkable neighborhood retail corridors, it's just not as obvious because the first floors were converted to retail and restaurants 80-100+ years ago and it looks like they were always there. Sometimes an extra floor of residential was added to make way for the ground-level commercial; cheap at the time as you only needed to meet basic safety codes.

Then zoning happened and the process stopped, particularly for retail and dining. Zoning means it's expensive to convert residential spaces to commercial, and vice-versa, if you're allowed at all. So to make it work you gotta build new and bigger. But that's expensive, and the way commercial financing works means new commercial construction only pencils out for chains. The numbers work even if the space would stay empty, because even a bunch of small shops couldn't afford the rent that needs to be advertised for the space to make the financing pencil out.

Basically, zoning causes problems that are then addressed with more regulations, which causes more problems.

And also, people need to adjust their expectations. Small commercial and services spaces will rarely be able to bring in enough revenue to pay rent in a brand new multistory steel building, no matter the floor area. These businesses can only thrive in old buildings, at least in advanced, high-labor cost economies. But you can't build new old buildings. All you can do is make it cheap and easy for the market to repurpose existing spaces to meet demand, and do this everywhere, not just in a corridor you're planning for (otherwise you're not actually allowing low-end spaces to emerge; a Starbucks will snap it up; there's needs to be enough of these spaces to allow the entire market to shift down). But zoning and approval processes create an economic environment antithetical to this.

If you want to keep your zoning and planning but are frustrated the free market doesn't do what you demand it to do, the state needs to build the darn spaces themselves and rent them out. But they don't like to do that because, shocker, it's really expensive to do things the way they demand. When the state (and community via taxes) has to internalize the costs of these demands directly rather than point fingers, it turns out they have trouble justifying the expense.

Where do those kids go to daycare now?

> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default

I feel like the absurdity is the other way.

Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.

With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.

With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.

They can, and my statement is a bit of a caricature (it's not like I expect the person pouring concrete to be mixing baby formula a year later) but it seems like "but amenities!" is mostly a way to make sure any new arrivals have to pay for things for existing local residents. Development charges are similar.

> It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.

I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.

I get that if building homes somehow created more people. What we have now is people living in cars, people and their kids living in 1 room apartments, etc. and we're telling them "it is better for you to live in horrible conditions than it is for us to build new homes because we won't have all the amenities (half the time this is just code for 'parking') built by the developer"

So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?

That happens because development is so absurdly regulated that the only way to get it done is to amortize your fixed costs over the whole "village" and then once that's done there's no subsequent infill development because those little things can't absorb the fixed costs.