Have you ever heard of the 15-minute city concept? As defined by Wikipedia, it is:

an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city. This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.

I will admit it: I hadn’t heard of this idea until seeing an article on it by William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove. Upon reading about it, and the concept, I was reminded of a couple of articles I read in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

What happens after a Philly neighborhood’s last chain pharmacy shuts its doors

After the Grays Ferry Rite Aid closed this fall, residents there said they felt abandoned and had to devise new ways to get their prescriptions. Seniors without cars struggled.

by Erin McCarthy | Sunday, February 4, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

Ronald and Onelia Doughty joke that they have their own pharmacy of medications inside their Grays Ferry home.

He takes pills for heart failure, COPD, and asthma. She takes liver, nerve, blood pressure, and antinausea medication and is on oxygen at night.

As for their actual pharmacy, Ronald Doughty, 64, used to walk around the corner to Rite Aid a couple times a week to pick up their medications. Then this fall, a pharmacist there told him news that he said felt like “a knife in the heart.”

The 30th and Reed Streets store is among dozens of locations that the Philadelphia-based chain has closed in recent months as Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Nationwide, pharmacies have struggled with decreased reimbursements, staffing shortages, and other issues. CVS recently announced it would close dozens of its pharmacies inside Targets early this year.

In Grays Ferry, a historically working-class neighborhood where about half of residents are Black and many households make less than $44,000 a year, their Rite Aid’s closure has caused logistical struggles and stirred up what some residents describe as feelings of being abandoned and forgotten. Their stories represent a snapshot of the reverberations that are occurring across the region and the country as more pharmacies close.

There’s more at the original. It continues with the human-interest parts, telling readers of the struggles neighborhood residents are having getting to and from the pharmacies to which their prescriptions can now be filled, including an hour-long round trip via a SEPTA bus.

And this points to the problem with the 15-minute city concept: Rite Aid and CVS pharmacies are not closing because they’re just meanie-hoonies, but because many of their individual pharmacies are simply not making enough money to stay in business. As ‘urban planners,’ a term I absolutely hate, try to design cities and neighborhoods, how will they deal with the fact that some businesses just plain fail?  We previously noted the now-deceased Philadelphia chickenhawk Josh Kruger’s lament that Wawa was closing a couple of stores:

You might remember this dastardly move as Wawa announced the closure of some Center City locations, citing public safety concerns. Just recently, it announced the impending July 16 closure of the landmark Second and South Streets location, too, following neighborhood complaints of public disorder and crime.

After news of the first two closures, The Inquirer’s own Editorial Board somberly wept that the action was a “dire statement about public safety in Philadelphia.”

To me, it was more a dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership.

One would hope that this alleged “dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership” is a statement that the corporation’s executive leadership doesn’t want to see its employees assaulted, injured, or even killed. Such would seem to me to be a pretty positive statement about the leadership!

Mr Kruger combitched that, Heaven forfend!, Wawa was moving into more suburban areas, and starting to sell gasoline. As we have previously noted, at least some Wawas are also installing Tesla charging stations. Gosh, moving into areas with less crime, and meeting a potential customer demand? How evil is that!?!

Businesses close for many reasons, but the inability to make a profit is the primary one. How would anyone do a 15-minute city concept in some of Philly’s rougher neighborhoods? How does it deal with the problems in even overall prosperous cities like Portland, Oregon, and its huge homeless population?^[1]Philadelphia population: 1,567,258, Homeless: 4,489 Portland population: 635,067, Homeless: 6,600. Doing the math — and yes, I realize that math is raaaaacist! — 0.286% of Philly’s … Continue reading Where does a planned 15-minute city put the homeless?

Mr Kruger complained that Wawa closing stores due to crime was “a dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership,” which perfectly reflected the failure of liberal thinking^[2]Yes, I understand that the term “liberal thinking” is something of an oxymoron. when it comes to business and economics: businesses exist to earn money for the owners! When you have “urban planners” trying to decide how other people will live and conduct their lives, you run into, at the very least, the problems of Soviet economic planning, and the fact that the economy is, at bottom, the literally billions of economic decisions taken every day by 250 million economic actors.

So many people simply don’t realize that even the decision to buy your morning coffee and sesame bagel, dark-toasted with butter, from the privately owned store on the right-hand side of the road rather than the Dunkin’ Donuts on the left-hand side is an economic decision. Yes, that decision may be triggered based on nothing more than the easier convenience of turning into, and again out of, a store on the right-hand side of the road, but it’s still an economic decision as well. And these are things that “urban planners” just do not understand, and cannot quantify.