Under this comparison, the foolishness of an investor has resulted in a comparative net loss for themselves and the community.
USSR tries to optimize business from top but selecting what would be produced and how much. Didn’t work well for community or customers.
The point is that a "Local" government deciding on how many of one kind of business shows up in one spot isn't optimizing from the top (you could consider that the state or federal government). Instead you could consider it optimizing it from the middle. The local people are electing officials and having them implement their will. Trying to call that communism would be... odd.
The difference is here the people making the guess are also taking on the risk of what if they are wrong. When someone else makes the decision they don't have the risk and thus less incentive to get it right. Also that "someone" making the decision tends to be making a lot of decisions and so are unlikely to spend enough time researching it, or alternatively since they don't feel any pain they will spend far too much time on research. (there is no objective way to say what is enough time in research)
As opposed to a central planning model in which a foolish planner can cock up the entire thing because they are usually far less accountable for failure and recieve little reward for success other than continued survival.
"Local people electing a local government choosing what gets built locally is communism"
And for whatever it’s worth there aren’t nearly enough car washes where I live.
If the local government can simply declare "there are enough X, no more are allowed" then the rich, powerful and well-connected elite can solidify their privileged positions forever. Raise prices, lower wages, provide poor service - it doesn't matter, their buddies on the city council will guarantee no one is allowed to open a competing business.
If you want to protect the lower class and middle class, you don't want to hand the elite a tool to turn their business into a local monopoly for the price of a campaign contribution.
The elite have all the tools they need already, they always have had that. Representative government is the modern change that keeps them from dominating everything.
This exists in America, in ways that have generally escaped the label of "Communism". The most basic example of this most will be familiar with is zoning laws, but there is significant precedent otherwise. There will always be a gradient of control, and claiming that a singular government action in expansion is therefore communist is not intellectually honest.