There is risk in choosing tenants for sure, though it is usually the case that the retailers themselves are putting in the expense and sweat equity into renovating a space. Sometimes this is cost shared, often it isn't.

I know my retailer friends painted their store themselves.

It is in the scarce retail environment where landlords have the least amount of risk around choosing a tenant because if one fails they can easily get another. So a city adding more retail zoning would increase vacancy, increase risk to landlords and hopefully reward good retail tenants.

>This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money.

Nobody develops the sort of organic small scale anything anymore because the caricature informs the local government who then sink their teeth in at every turn and the end result is that the only people doing new development or refreshing stuff at great expense are corporations capable of fending off the government or rich enough to play along.