Aster Station was never just another commercial project. It was a vision for a vibrant community hub—a modern café, open gathering spaces, solar panels, EV and e-bike chargers, and bike repair infrastructure—meant to transform an eyesore at the iconic “Y” into a sustainable, welcoming space for residents and visitors. Short of emitting unicorns and rainbows, it was as close to the perfect project as you could get, enjoying broad community support. While it may not have been the highest and best use of a prime intersection, the Asters’ altruism and commitment made it a rare, promising venture.

Despite years of planning, investment, and a small army of experts and consultants, Aster Station was ultimately abandoned. The reason? Bureaucracy so dense and unyielding that not even a self-financed, community-minded team could survive it. Every step forward was met with new, often arbitrary, hurdles from city ordinances, TRPA standards, and overlapping state and local jurisdictions. The final blow was a convoluted permitting process involving the City of South Lake Tahoe, Caltrans, and the TRPA, each imposing shifting demands that made the project unworkable.
This is not how things are supposed to work. At its best, capitalism (with some guardrails) rewards innovation and competition, creating the most good for the most people. But in South Lake Tahoe, development isn’t a contest of ideas—it’s a test of endurance against a bureaucracy seemingly designed to repel improvement. If even philanthropic developers can’t transform a 60-year-old auto shop into a solar-powered community hub, what hope is there for private investment in other blighted parcels like the Sun-Ray site or the infamous “hole-in-the-ground” near Stateline? In this environment, many properties are worth less than zero, as the costs in time, money, and legal risk far outweigh any potential benefit. And that doesn’t even take into account any competitive forces vying for those same dollars outside the Basin.

If this is what the City calls “working diligently” with an applicant and a project “proceeding normally”—as Zach Thomas, Director of Development Services, claims—then we need to find City employees and Councilmembers who have a different definition of “diligent” and “normal.” Diligent and normal projects don’t take five years to entitle. Diligent and normal projects don’t require an army of consultants just to navigate bureaucratic hoops. Diligent and normal projects move forward and get completed in a cooperative partnership between the developer and the City. This is not normal; or rather, it shouldn’t be.

Aster Station is a textbook casualty of “everything bagel liberalism”—Ezra Klein’s term for well-meaning progressive policies that pile on so many overlapping requirements and reviews that even the best projects become impossible. In trying to satisfy every conceivable goal and placate everyone who may complain, South Lake Tahoe’s bureaucracy has created a system so tangled that not even the most dedicated, community-minded efforts can succeed. We need billions of dollars in investment just to meet the needs of housing our workforce (much less our commercial corridor), and that money will never be invested here so long as these people, regulatory structures and regulations are in place.

In his role as COO of NexGen Housing Partners, Seth Dallob helped build hundreds of market-rate and market-financed workforce housing units in metro Seattle. He and his wife are full-time South Lake Tahoe residents.