Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

https://www.fastcompany.com/90530672/with-downtowns-staying-abandoned-put-tiny-businesses-back-into-residential-neighborhoods

by apsec112 • 6 years ago

593 390 6 years ago

fastcompany.com

madamelic7• 6 years ago

Mixed use zoning is just about the best case situation for everyone.

- Less reliance on cars, which results in less parking, which results in less traffic... it becomes self-perpetuating.

- Better walkability

- Knowing your corner store clerk or at least having a rapport with them

- Healthier citizens, due to them walking everywhere (Go to NYC and see how few overweight people you see... not many unless they're tourists. I gained like 10lbs after I moved out of NYC, you get exercise constantly in that city)

- Happier citizens, due to them walking everywhere, things are nearby, their life is more integrated...

etc etc.

I think basically all spaces should be residential / light business mixed. This idea of sprawling suburbs with light business being 10 - 30 minutes away is horrifying and bad for everyone health-wise, time-wise and economically.

---

Where I live, the city doesn't really hesitate to shut down sections of roads for festivals, farmer's markets, whatever.

Currently we have a bunch of one ways because all of the restaurants took over half the road for outdoor dining... and honestly, it's pretty nice. The traffic is slightly more congested, but meh... don't drive through the center of the city as a transit option, go around.

amatecha• 6 years ago

Heck yeah, there used to be an amazing sandwich shop just up the street from me. Was super nice being able to walk half a block to pick up something from them. Unfortunately they relocated to a more densely-populated area, but it was good while it lasted. There are other food shops nearby though! Very cool having this :)

bezmenov4• 6 years ago

The issue is that the residential density of suburbia (the vast majority of Australia, Canada, NZ and the US) precludes mixed use zoning.

RockIslandLine2• 6 years ago

Meh. There's plenty of density for "a strip mall every four blocks". And you can make that structure totally walkable instead of requiring cars. The important thing is not to jack the rent through the roof.

Most suburbs don't, for no obvious reason. I did complain to the Mayor a few years ago that the grocery store four blocks from my house has only street access and no sidewalk access.

I'm not at all sure why the author seems to think that converted garages are great business incubators. That's a terrible idea. It's what my uncle did for his cabinetry business, but that's largely solo. I can't imagine wanting significant business traffic on residential streets.

elgenie2• 6 years ago

If you mean zoning that requires first floor retail or whatever, sure. But mixed use zoning also means zoning that just doesn't ban small business, multi-family housing, and single-family housing coexisting on the same block.

The causality in your statement is backwards, because the lack of the latter kind of zoning is exactly what prevents inner suburbs from densifying organically. The current zoning in most of (at least US) suburbia is what artificially caps density.

Spooky234• 6 years ago

In theory sure.

In reality, the financial system is oriented towards big capital. My aunt ran a coffee shop that was established by grandparents in 1939. It was in the lobby of a office building in he central business district of our little city. The building was bought by a Chinese investor. Like other similar stores, her rent went up 5x and she shuttered.

I live in a mixed use urban neighborhood. 50% of he storefronts are vacant or populated by death businesses like karate dojo’s.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

Investors have proven willing to keep homes and apartments empty as well. The behavior seems bizarre to me, but it seems you have to set tax policies to discourage it.

hirundo• 6 years ago

Teaching karate is a death business? In my limited experience the martial arts are overwhelmingly about defense and fitness. Making them predominantly a life business. A donut shop would be a better example of a death business.

kilroy_jones2• 6 years ago

Assuming you're in America, most areas are not dense enough to accommodate mixed use zoning unless they start building up. The other half is getting priced out like your grandma.

brendoelfrendo2• 6 years ago

Pretty much. Modern mixed-use developments are basically born again shopping malls. We don't have the density for "real" mixed use, so it's just a development project like any other; I'm sure there are real, integrated, mixed-use projects, but the ones I see in small urban/suburban areas are detached from the surrounding area and often detached from public transport, basically to sell overpriced apartments to lifestyle-minded HENRYs.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

The only way this story makes sense to me is if some other business took over the coffee shop space and paid the 5x rent.

AnthonyMouse3• 6 years ago

The problem is people want to call it "mixed zoning" but still have Karens on the central planning committee making stupid rules, e.g. they'll have "businesses" next to "residences" but a given plot will be explicitly designated as one or the other.

What you really want is the small businesses which start off being operated out of the proprietor's residence. A hair salon in a converted living room, a restaurant serving food from the owner's home kitchen. Something that can start off as a side business yet can advertise without getting into legal trouble and grow into more if it's successful.

You get a few of those in an area and someone decides it's a good place to knock down a house and put up a five story building with condos on top and a coffee shop and a bakery on the ground floor.

You have to let it grow organically like that or you just end up with abandoned "commercial" buildings because businesses fear moving in when they know their success would lead to increased rents as a result of the limited amount of designated-commercial real estate in the area.

jrd259• 6 years ago

It's not obvious why you have to call out the nationality of the investor.

AmericanChopper3• 6 years ago

Like other similar stores, her rent went up 5x and she shuttered.

Want to know the best way to protect against exceedingly high prices? Increase supply. If the market had enough supply to meet its own demand, then that situation wouldn’t be possible. The number one thing that holds back the supply of real estate is insane zoning and planning regulation.

The idea that permanently preserving nonsense like the “character” of neighbourhood, at the cost of affordable housing and business rent has to be one of the most anti-social mobility, anti-equality, openly classist ideas we have in our society. “But what if somebody builds an apartment tower next to my expensive Victorian house?”, good! Maybe there’ll be less people sleeping on the streets and in their cars because of it.

bananamerica• 6 years ago

Why is karate dojo death business? Do they kill a lot of people?

neutronicus2• 6 years ago

The corner store kinda sucks. We always used to go when I was commuting and my wife was pregnant because we were strapped for time.

But now that the governor says to go once a week she makes the trip out to the big, nice grocery store and we get better food for less money.

bobthepanda11• 6 years ago

Different strokes for different folks. The corner bodega in my old New York neighborhood was open late into the night and made a good bacon egg and cheese sandwich.

The important thing is that we should not legislate these out of existence.

bfieidhbrjr• 6 years ago

Here's a crazy idea: no zoning. Let people decide what they want to do.

function_seven• 6 years ago

That is crazy. I do not want a concrete plant to open next to my house. Or a Yoko Ono Scream Therapy franchise :)

But yeah, the insane detail that many cities have in their zoning plans is stifling.

The link[7] monkeypizza included elsewhere in this thread is what I'd like to see as the norm

[7] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

baggy_trough2• 6 years ago

What I wanted to do was move to a place that had rules which would keep the neighborhood the way I like.

conductr• 6 years ago

Houston is like this. I like it, but I grew up there, many people are so scared that it means a oil refinery or something could pop up next door one day but that stuff rarely happens. The market naturally seems to fill most of the voids in terms of demand, so it’s not like you have to go far to find a liquor store or something specific. That said, we built our cities in Texas for cars.

My adult life has mostly been in Dallas which is very different. I’ve attempted land development myself so know more than a layman but Dallas and especially surrounding suburbs have what feels like an insane level of zoning. I say “attempted” because there have been a couple dozen times where I see a building or raw land parcel and feel it would be perfect for some use. Do some research and find it wouldn’t be allowed. On some occasions I have a specific aesthetic (tasteful, but I like unique/artistic structures) that I’d like, only to find the town requires all buildings to be made/finished of no less than 80% red brick or paint 1 of 6 predetermined shades of brown. It’s killed my endeavors every time and honestly, makes the DFW area an architecturally soulless Place to be IMO. Just recently, maybe 2018, the state banned these local aesthetic requirements. But I think locally it’s still a fight to get something too far from the city planners vision built.

all_blue_chucks• 6 years ago

Restaurants, accountants, lawyers, and such may do fine with mixed use zoning, but retail simply can't compete without economy of scale.

opportune• 6 years ago

Mixed use zoning is good for specialty retail like niche/designer clothing. Also even for things like groceries people (like me) will be willing to pay a slight premium for being able to get those goods from a short walking distance.

cameldrv3• 6 years ago

Generally, I like this a lot. The key is that for it to work, you must build taller, but it doesn't have to be all that tall. I've lived in several places that had great walkability, and they all had one thing in common: They were built before the invention of the automobile.

The best for walkability was Berlin, which, in the inner part, is mostly 5-6 story buildings. Within two blocks there were numerous stores and about 8 restaurants and a few bars. I also lived in an older suburb of mostly single family houses, but the lots weren't that big, and every house was two stories.

The key to walkability is that you need density. For a business to get much foot traffic, you need a good population in the walkable catchment area, and for that you need density. To get density, you need to build up. Unfortunately, building up is more expensive. Another thing that's helpful is alleys. If you put the garage behind the house, you don't need as much frontage width for driveways and garage doors.

dgellow3• 6 years ago

I’m not sure about your argument of “you have to build up”. Lot of places in Europe have strict limits regarding how high a building can be and they do have lot of small stores around, Berlin, that you mentioned, is very strict on this. A few examples: Hamburg residential areas seem to have ~4-5 floors max. Groningen has neighborhoods where apartment building are limited to only 2 floors (So just two apartments). They both have enough density to have small businesses around.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the US situation you’re comparing to, and people there just build flat, so even a few floors is already building up? That would be strange though...

qwerty4561273• 6 years ago

The idea of separating business and living into distant zones and forbidding trading within residential areas has always infuriated me with its absurdity. Who could possibly come up with it? It only makes sense when it's about noisy and air-polluting businesses, grocery/whatever stores and offices are absolutely great to be dispersed within residential areas!

Matt3o12_• 6 years ago

It only makes sense when it's about noisy and air-polluting businesses, grocery/whatever stores and offices are absolutely great to be dispersed within residential areas!

Grocery stores (even small ones) can be very noisy, especially with extended business hours these days. I used to live In an apartment above a grocery story with a small parking lot for a long time. This was also in a mixed zone area (mostly residential, a few shops, barber, etc).

At 6am, trucks start rolling up and delivering food (although they are only supposed to do that at 7am, on some days they’ll start at 6). That means very loud beeping from the trucks backing up and shouting to the grocery employees above engine noise. Throughout the day, there will be random noise (honking in the parking lot, people slamming their cart into the barrier, etc) and sometimes people get drunk in the parking lot and start shouting (usually until 11pm, the grocery store closed at 10). And once in a while, their security system went of and the police show up and make some noise at 4am. With an open window (which you had to have in the summer — air conditioning is an exception in the part of Europe where I lived) you can hear all that noise almost as if you are standing next to it.

I never minded it too much since I’m a very heavy sleeper but I can definitely see that some people would get very poor quality sleep. And no landlord ever wants a store to be built above their apartments because it lowers the value dramatically due to the mentioned reasons.

jhatemyjob3• 6 years ago

Some people actually like cars/driving, some people dont want random people walking in front of their house, and not everyone wants their city to turn into NYC

Sometimes it feels like the people on this site have only lived in SFBA/LA/NYC and nowhere else in the United States. Cars/suburbia work pretty well in most places

sparsely3• 6 years ago

Mixed use zoning isn't about becoming like NYC, it's about being able to walk to the cornershop at the end of the road to buy a pint of milk. Maybe there's a cafe and a accountant's office there too.

freeone30003• 6 years ago

Suburbia straight doesn't work. Requiring a car for transit means kids have to continually be chauffeured by adults to anywhere meaningful. Lack of local business means there's limited economic potential for the city - it's all in one tax district and redistributed around. Sprawl increases the cost of providing services like fire and police. You're taking on some significant burdens in exchange for not having your neighbors walk past your house.

modo_mario2• 6 years ago

Some people actually like cars/driving

I live in a small town but in a very spread out relatively densely populated country. Still with the closing of the old bakery and little grocery store due to the people who ran it retiring I have to go to a nearby city or supermarkets on the outskirts for stuff.

I'm not saying this out of spite or annoyance because of that. It's not that far. Hell i'm even moving soon. But I do see it for what it was. A good thing to have around. It made for local economic activity, it had locals meeting up and having talks there, not driving all the way out if they were missing something minor and very local events were advertised there. There's no reason, 0, nada to do spatial planning to purposefully have people driving more and longer. It's not good for the environment, it's not good for the people, economically, what have you. If you love driving you can do so without a reason. And no by advocating for having spatial planning that allows for local small stores people aren't pushing for everyone to live in a big city either.

rorykoehler• 6 years ago

Just had this conversation with an architect friend who lives in Palo Alto. The whole idea that there is a "residential zone", "commercial zone" etc needs to go away. Now with people leaving cities in droves there is an amazing opportunity to introduce mixed zoning into office areas by converting many of the empty offices into lofts. This will solve our urban housing problem. Despite what people are saying now about remote work I don't think the majority of people will leave cities long term. Cities offer facilities, infra, amenities, network and culture. We need to make cities livable and walkable.

gcc_programmer• 6 years ago

Europe is as you described.

barnabee2• 6 years ago

As far as I can tell, "zoning" is just a bad idea. There's no such thing in the UK [1] and it still surprises me that it's quite a common approach. (As a kid I thought it was a game device employed to make urban planning in Sim City manageable. I still wonder if that series of games hasn't increased its prevalence.)

Instead, in the UK you require 'planning permission' to change the land use of any building. This is discretionary and may refer to some overall plan realting to the feel, density, etc. of an area but is not prescriptive over specific types.

As a result I don't know anyone in this country, urban or rural dwelling, who can't walk to a shop or a pub, though I'm sure some such unlucky places exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#United_Kingdom

pjc503• 6 years ago

I don't know anyone in this country, urban or rural dwelling, who can't walk to a shop or a pub

The average walking distance to a pub has gone up a lot in recent years due to closure, and walking on rural roads at night where there is no footpath is horrendously dangerous even if you carry lights. It's a nice idyll but it's no longer really true.

What you say about Simcity is absolutely true though. It doesn't correspond to traditional UK or most European cities at all. Medieval mixed walkable core, maybe not driveable at all; industrialish area down by the wharves now repurposed as offices and residential; Simcity-ish bit on the outskirts where somebody decided to build a grand scheme, like La Défense.

Zoning is starting to leak into urban planning a bit more, when huge housing estates are built with no shops, pubs, or facilities. As far as I can tell demand for housing outstrips everything else.

save_ferris3• 6 years ago

As far as I can tell, "zoning" is just a bad idea.

Spend a week in Houston, TX and see if you still hold that opinion after. That is one of the least walkable cities in the US and doesn’t utilize zoning as far as I’m aware.

m463• 6 years ago

I remember being in mexico city, and in one neighborhood, they would talk about "las minas", which were mines, right next to and in a residential area. Most of the people in that area got their water for showers from groundwater.

be careful what you wish for.

rland• 6 years ago

When I visited Japan, I went to an izakaya with room for maybe 9 people in it, it was smaller than my living room at home. I was hungry and I saw the sign lighting the alley about 40 yards off the main road. I was thinking at the time, if I lived in that area, you bet I'd be there a couple times a week to talk to my neighbors. I wanted to ask those inside if they were all neighbors, because they seemed to know each other and the barman well. It felt almost intimidating, since I don't know any Japanese, but of course Japanese hospitality is top-notch.

0xCMP• 6 years ago

Japan is what made me realize how this is the answer. Zoning and making businesses possible inside neighborhoods makes areas much more walkable.

davesque• 6 years ago

Yes, this! This is one of the stupid-simple reasons I love traveling in Japan.

jkhdigital• 6 years ago

I had the exact same thoughts upon reading this article, having spent quite a bit of time in Japan. Businesses are liberally sprinkled all over residential neighborhoods, from bars, cafes and grocers to home electronics and repair shops. The density (and corresponding walkability) of Japanese cities is a big factor that supports this kind of development. The armchair economist in me wants to theorize that this might be a contributing factor in Japan’s exceptionally low unemployment rate: the ease of starting a micro business from your doorstep.

ehnto• 6 years ago

There is another quirk to Japan that seems to make this work so well, and that's how quiet it can be. I am sure there are exceptions, but for the most part even in packed areas with dozens of people walking the street, it is mostly quiet. I think low car density plays a pretty big role in lowering the the overall sound levels, but there must be more to it than that. It was surreal at times.

prawn• 6 years ago

In Australia there'd be concerns about parking, neighbours would complain about customers dominating street parking, etc. Or if it was a small restaurant/bars there'd be fears of drunken louts as we collectively have an alcohol problem. It's a shame because there are lots of originally-corner-store-type properties which have been used as houses and shut off from the street. Ideally, they'd be quiet businesses like architects or studios or galleries or a classy deli or anything like that, but they're effectively boarded up and used as another living room by the occupants.

On the alcohol subject, the smaller the place, the fewer problems typically occur. Small bars rarely attract crowds big enough to have fights or get rolling as aggressive meat-markets.

SECProto• 6 years ago

Japan uses inclusive zoning, and most urban areas are zoned for high density residential/commercial. The only zoning that is truly exclusive is industrial

oftenwrong3• 6 years ago

The cities in Japan are, of course, walkable in the extreme, but what really impressed me there was the suburbs and rural villages. Even deep in the countryside many people still can visit local businesses without a car. I think it is not a coincidence that it is so common there to see children walking or biking on their own to school.

BurningCycles• 6 years ago

Yes, correlation is not causation and all that, but when I was there I was struck by how very little obesity there was. I later learned that Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world.

tlear2• 6 years ago

It is standard for kids to walk to school. Every elementary school student does it starting grade 1.

If there is a taiphoon passing or blizzard you can give your grade 1 kid a ride. Otherwise it is looked down upon

m_mueller3• 6 years ago

Btw. the US is probably more of an exception when it comes to children being driven to school. Swiss kids tend to walk themselves from age 5 to 6 upward, schools are usually within 30min of a child's walk. But Japan is certainly special thanks to very liberal zoning laws. Even in rural areas it's common to find warehouses and small shops right next to or beneath homes. Europe's laws are somewhere between Japan and the US, and so is the walkability. Turns out, just allowing humans to try things will make markets solve this issue.

monkeypizza• 6 years ago

Excellent blog about Japanese zoning: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

tkgally2• 6 years ago

That's a good reference.

In adding to zoning, there are other factors that contribute to the large number of viable tiny businesses here in Japan. One is that small shops aren't bound by as strict accessibility and fire regulations as in some other countries. A restaurant or bar, for example, that seats no more than a dozen customers and is staffed by just one or two people will often have a correspondingly tiny restroom that could not be accessed by someone in a wheelchair; the shop itself might not be wheelchair accessible, either. And often there is only one exit, the front door, even for shops on upper floors of buildings. In many cases, I suspect, adding requirements for wheelchair accessibility and a separate fire exit would increase the construction costs and unproductive floor space so much that the shop would no longer be economically viable.

I was a freelancer here for twenty years. While I didn't run a shop, I did run my business out of my home, and my impression was that it was much easier to do that in Japan—in terms of taxes, relations with neighbors, etc.—than it would have been in the United States, where I was born.

hinkley• 6 years ago

There was a stone carver, two tofu makers, a convenience store or two, a bath house with a tiny laundromat on the side (with HE units 20 years before we got them in the States), a pachinko parlor, and who knows how many other businesses my illiterate ass couldn't identify on, or just off, the route from the suburban Tokyo apartment I was a guest in and the train station.

If I got up at a decent hour, I would hear the plink plink of chisel on stone, and then the sound of the propane torch browning the tofu as I walked by.

bezmenov4• 6 years ago

The worst part of visiting Japan is it spoils your enjoyment of every other destination thereafter.

earthboundkid• 6 years ago

Lol, can’t talk about the NY subway with my New Yorker wife. “I mean, I guess if you consider it compared to the rest of the US, it’s a good system…”

tayo42• 6 years ago

since I don't know any Japanese, but of course Japanese hospitality is top-notch

I'm actually really surprised you're saying this. Maybe your Asian? There were a few izakaya I wandered into and got welcomed with a harsh no gaijin. I loved most of my trip to Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka) but that was jarring and off putting.

tlear2• 6 years ago

It is not Asian/non Asian thing. It is language thing.

Some shops do not want to serve you if they can’t speak language. Uncomfortable for them, you and other customers (that is their thinking), they might not even have menu you can understand and they speak no English except Hi bye

It is also possible you wondered into a snack shop which is kind of like hostess bar but not. Basically part of the service is a conversation which is hard to do if you do not speak the language.

vmception2• 6 years ago

That happened to me in golden dai, I went on a rainy sad and sketchy night, and the people in the tiny restuarant were just the happiest and curious, they could have been tourists from another part of Japan though, who knows

I mean Japanese can keep to themselves too

But the point is that the intimidate, accessible nature has other redeeming qualities

TheAdamist2• 6 years ago

Some that size in japan have earned 3 Michelin stars, as jiro dreams of sushi famously did, before the stars were withdrawn due to lack of public access.

gyc• 6 years ago

Your description reminds me a lot of the restaurant in Midnight Diner.

throw7373• 6 years ago

I have liquer store under my windows, it is open 24 hours and has outside benches. Basically loud nonstop pub with many junkies. I am going to move soon to get better sleep

frank2• 6 years ago

Is this in the US or some other country?

throw7373• 6 years ago

Hungary

alexashka• 6 years ago

Alcoholics hanging around liquor stores is a universal.

Animats• 6 years ago

It's like having a convenience store in the lobby of an apartment building. Seems like a great idea, but it takes a huge apartment building, or a city block of modest ones, to support a convenience store. Vending machines, maybe.

We see this with all those "mixed use" buildings going up in Silicon Valley, with retail spaces on the ground floor. It's really hard to fill those retail spaces.

zip12342• 6 years ago

The problem is that all of those places are planned. I get major 'Soviet Central Planning' vibes from the USA when it comes to zoning and planning out cities. Of course the people making the decisions on planning have no idea what will work. They only know what will work in the most rudimentary, scaled up, sense. Small shops need to be allowed everywhere, rules about minimum parking, lot sizes, use, etc need to be relaxed to allow those things to even be possible.

madamelic7• 6 years ago

Suburbs are literally rooted in racism.

That sounds hyperbolic, but the first suburb in post-war US was a planned whites-only community to escape the city. (Levittown)

---

With that said, yes, the US purposefully planned blocks of cities to be dedicated to one purpose. This promotes car culture which, surprise surprise, car and oil companies were big into lobbying to shut down mixed use and public transit, and continue to be.

Mixed use areas are typically either big cities, have pre-war origins where it has basically always been mixed use or typically both.

aahhahahaaa4• 6 years ago

Well of course, who can afford the rent? It's not like a little four-employee computer repair shop can show up and fill the space.

jwkane• 6 years ago

Even if the rent was subsidized or more likely rent-controlled -- you still have to pay those four employees enough to live in commute range. That forces the margins you have to charge for computer repairs to shot up to a level that would make the Geek Squad blush.

SaltyLemonZest• 6 years ago

The mixed use buildings you're referring to are approaching from the wrong direction. They're 1960s style office parks - sometimes a modern reinvention of them, sometimes literally a redevelopment on the same land - and you can't get a meaningful mixed use space in an area where everyone drives in at 9 and drives out at 5.

pcwalton• 6 years ago

We see this with all those "mixed use" buildings going up in Silicon Valley, with retail spaces on the ground floor. It's really hard to fill those retail spaces.

Yeah, I think this is because (1) Silicon Valley's housing shortage far exceeds any retail shortage; (2) such retail is often added just to encourage NIMBY city councils skeptical of new housing to acquiesce as part of a "community benefits" package, not because there's any actual market demand for retail; (3) in places like San Francisco, there are so many bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of retail such as the formula retail restrictions, discretionary review, and hostile neighborhood organizations like Calle 24 that act as gatekeepers to opening, that a lot of potential small business owners just won't bother. In a healthy market, I suspect you'd see these spaces get used more.

fiblye• 6 years ago

Cities virtually everywhere in East Asia have convenience stores on almost every corner. They manage pretty well.

rgacote• 6 years ago

I've found that it is typical for people who run these small types of businesses also live in the neighborhood, or close by.

Another improvement is that people who both live and work in the community have time for more community engagement, but it their children's schools, local government, or local volunteer efforts.

Local businesses improve the community.

oftenwrong3• 6 years ago

When people spend money at a locally-owned business, that money at least has a chance of staying in the community. When people spend money at a big national or multi-national chain store, a lot of that money is leaving the community, and never returns.

jamestimmins• 6 years ago

The first chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities touches on this topic a lot. Community safety is enhanced by mixed use, because there are reasons for people to naturally be there at all hours of the day/night. This contrasts with single use areas, which are essentially ghost towns in their off-hours.

aahhahahaaa4• 6 years ago

How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years.

Maybe the industrial revolution made cities too unpleasant? Were we too spoiled by the automobile industry and government roads? White flight from cities into the suburbs?

lotsofpulp4• 6 years ago

People wanted their children to be separate from people of other socioeconomic classes (and races), and the way to do that in the US is to move to a school district they others can’t afford.

chills• 6 years ago

This has also been the case for hundreds of years though.

munk-a2• 6 years ago

Not just afford - often time those suburbs specifically barred non-whites from owning property. Additionally red-lining and racist loan practices forced that wealth gap to grow.

But I think that's separate from the car issue, mostly. Originally satellite communities had commercial services - local shops and the like. But those were phased out due to a lack of demand, I think due to societal shifts that were egged on by marketing "cool kids have cars" - and the like.

wincy• 6 years ago

Heck yes I want to move away from socioeconomic classes that could potentially put my daughter in harms way. We lived in a lower class neighborhood and while my two year old daughter was playing with a shovel in the front yard a drug deal went bad at the house across from us and the kid (he was maybe 16) started shooting his gun into the air. I’d stopped his mom from strangling him two years before that. Before that, I’d stopped his mother from being assaulted by her boyfriend a few years before. And until my daughter was born, I didn’t really care.

But thinking of my daughter getting hit by a stray bullet was terrifying, and we got a mortgage and moved to a house worth 6x the price a few months later. It was sad because our neighbors behind us were Venezuelan refugees with two kids and we got along really well.

I’m not ashamed of wanting to keep my children safe, and I’m not going to put them at risk so I can fulfill others vague notions of “inclusiveness”. The police took 45+ minutes to show up any time I called.

Funny thing is, the middle class neighborhood I live in now is much MORE diverse, not less. We have Africans, Southern Asians, East Asians, Spaniards, Russians, and all manner of professionals from all over the world. We bought the house from some Pakistanis. Heck, my neighbor is a convicted felon for dealing in his younger days but even him and his wife and six kids are okay.

didip• 6 years ago

My first guess would be the car lobbyists doing.

They are powerful enough to tear down so many street-car rails all over America.

munk-a2• 6 years ago

Indeed - car lobbyists and marketing... and likely that torch was picked up and carried further by oil lobbyists. America has been slowly pushed toward viewing walking places as being abnormal so instead of cars being for trips and vacations they are seen as standard and necessary for commutes and runs to the store.

There is only a very small segment of the population that benefits from constantly driving everywhere and they aren't the ones in the cars.

refurb2• 6 years ago

Makes for a nice conspiracy theory but from what I’ve read many of them were going under and consumers wanted cars, not street cars.

epistasis3• 6 years ago

Yes, basically it comes down to racism and classism, and a bit of the fight against communism.

There used to be racial covenants that ensures racial segregation. As soon as those were rendered illegal, people started zoning for "public safety" and such. The original decision (Euclid?) that rendered zoning legal explicitly states concerns about lower income people degrading neighborhoods if multi-family residences are allowed.

And as soon as you start allowing such restrictions on what sort of construction is allowed, you start outlawing small business next to residences. And home buyers appreciate these restrictions because there's chance of a business growing and causing more traffic and "outsiders" (those that can't afford to buy a huge parcel of land) coming into their bucolic suburban life.

Subsidized FHA loans were also envisioned as a strong anti-communist play; who would fall prey to the temptations of socialism if they own their own home and can use it to keep out non-whites? (Redlining restricted these subsidized mortgages from being used for any home that had a chance of becoming racially integrated.)

The rise of the automobile and destruction of commuter rail lead to a ton of land accessible to people who worked in cities. And in conjunction with the exclusionary zoning that was used to protect the capitalistic gains of property values, the idea of mixed-use zoning became antiquated and counter productive to financial and social interests.

So a century later, we are finally realizing the massive health costs, societal costs, and economic costs of our unsustainable suburbanization; infrastructure is aging out without the tax base to maintain and rebuild, and the suburbs--filled with wealthy residents paying lower taxes--have drained the economic centers of cities, while those wealthy suburbanites benefit from the commerce that high density cities enable, and which low-density suburbs disallow.

We have subsidized an unsustainable style of living for the white middle class, and as white middle class boomers have benefitted, they have declined to allow for basic investments in the future that would extend prosperity to future generation.

This, I think, is the story of the decline of the American empire, just as much as mismanagement by a fascist-leaning a factual political party. During the decline of the USSR, even with massive amounts of state propaganda and misinformation, at least they were able to muster state power to clean up Chernobyl. I'm the twilight of the US, we have hollowed our our scientific institutions like the CDC and FDA because they don't serve the political goals of the ruling political class, and we can't even muster a response to a pandemic that countries with widely-regarded corrupt governments such as Italy have dealt with handily. I think this rot comes from our racist segregation which lead to our poor century of city planning.

(This, of course, would need several books to fully justify my wild claims, but one book that starts to is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

winter_blue• 6 years ago

That was really insightful, well-written and convincing. Thank you for sharing that.

(I've upvoted and favorated your comment.)

Cogito5• 6 years ago

The rise of the automobile and destruction of commuter rail lead to a ton of land accessible to people who worked in cities. And in conjunction with the exclusionary zoning that was used to protect the capitalistic gains of property values, the idea of mixed-use zoning became antiquated and counter productive to financial and social interests.

This is a solid argument, but I don't see the link between this and racism/classism.

Perhaps it implies a link to some kind of 'systemic classism', as when individual people make decisions to benefit themselves, those with money tend to have more agency.

It seems like everywhere cars and rail allowed suburbanisation people jumped at the chance to get a comfortable home on large lots at a cheap price. It turns out massive, exclusion-zoned suburbs were short-sighted, and many places are now pursuing a 'city of villages' planning strategy.

It's not obvious to me that, if you take out any explicit class or race biases, the world wouldn't have followed the same path with respect to businesses in these suburbs.

baldeagle• 6 years ago

I think that people underestimate the generational effects of the FHA loans being locked to suburbanized white neighborhoods. The rise of the automobile combined with the post-war FHA loan restrictions allowed one group of people to 'invest' in their homes and land, while excluding (mostly) another group. Check out https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history... for an overview of 'The Color of Law' mentioned above.

smoe3• 6 years ago

Never been to an US residential area and only "know" them from tv shows. Are they really pretty much completely devoid of businesses as this article indicates? No grocery / mom and pop stores, bars, restaurants, hair dressers etc.? That sounds very inconvenient. I always assumed you'd get some basic commercial everywhere.

tspike• 6 years ago

Hugely dependent on the region and age of the city, but yes. It is quite common to have to drive 5-10 minutes to get to the nearest shops, which are all concentrated in strip malls. Take a look at this satellite view of a Denver suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9426077,-104.9504212,3545m/d...

vidanay2• 6 years ago

Perfectly normal for there to be a thousand houses with no commercial.

Not a good idea, but still normal in many suburbs.

osdiab• 6 years ago

I grew up in a wealthy American suburb, the nearest grocery store was a 40 minute walk from my home, and I would have looked like a madman for simply walking on any street in the entire city because literally only beggars don’t ride cars. I’m glad to be living in Tokyo now!

tinyhouse3• 6 years ago

It depends. There are different types of cities in the US. In general, if we're talking about suburbs, there are businesses but they are usually all centered at the same place. Usually referred to as the city center. This can be a smaller or big center, depending on the town. Then there are towns that have those big shopping plazas you usually have to drive to. The city center concept is much nicer in my opinion.

bezmenov4• 6 years ago

A greater shock for many is the complete lack of footpaths/sidewalks virtually anywhere outside of commercial districts or inner-most metros.

The idea of walking anywhere is insane. To get from a typical suburb to the nearest business district or strip mall would usually require walking several miles along the shoulder, with frequent illegal crossing of arterial roads.

tfehring• 6 years ago

I live about a mile from the middle of downtown in a mid-sized US city, in what is ostensibly one of that city's most walkable neighborhoods. I don't think there's a single mom and pop store within comfortable walking distance, the closest grocery store is about 3/4 mile away (though there's also a farmer's market about 3/4 mile away in the other direction), closest barbershop is about a mile away, etc. Lots of restaurants, bars, and breweries nearby though.

aahhahahaaa4• 6 years ago

Yes. It's very normal to not have any business within a 30 minute walk (or more), and even if you did want to walk there... it's also normal for there to be kilometers of roads without sidewalks. They just don't bother.

Often the businesses get crammed together on some busy streets with fast-moving traffic, large parking lots, and few sidewalks.

RockIslandLine2• 6 years ago

You get all kinds, possibly depending on when the town was established. For many of the Chicago suburbs, there is a defined "business district" where most of the restaurants, bars, barbershops, etc are. This may very well be a couple of streets that run all the way across town. Frequently, every 4th or 8th street is "arterial", and the bulk of the businesses will be on those streets. So you have a few to several blocks of "internal" streets where there is indeed only residential housing.

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

For any given population density how the suburbs looks varies WILDLY based on the specific area and the economic/demographic situation since 1950.

In some places you'll have continuous miles of nothing but housing. In others it's an organic "spread out and up" from a core area. It basically comes down to what the local economy can support and the level of development that happened between 1865 and 1945.

Having hard cutoffs from "most residences are apartments/duplexes/multi-family, businesses on every corner" to "residences and residences only, 99% single family" to "tractors commonly seen on the road" is pretty distinct to the areas surrounding major cities that were formerly sparsely populated until they were built out rapidly in the 1950s through 1970s.

maxsilver2• 6 years ago

No, as a US citizen, they are not anything like described above.

An American suburb is, basically by definition, never more than 15 minutes drive from a grocery store, a doctors office, a dental office, some sort of clothing store, at least one bar, at least one restaurant (usually 2+), at least one hair dresser, etc. It will usually all be ugly (strip malls are common), but it will be affordable and economically sustainable. You can walk or bike anywhere (sidewalks are usually nicer than in the UK), but usually only car-based public transit is actually convenient (mainly because suburbs prioritize saving cash, and car-based public transit is always the cheapest transit).

If you truly need to drive 40+ minutes to get to a grocery store, you don't live in a suburb. You are either in an exurb, or just plain rural area.

srj• 6 years ago

I have no idea if this has always been the case, but people seem to look at their house as a bank account. They defend it and try and raise prices by blocking new development, keeping residents deemed undesirable out, and enforcing a consistent cookie cutter look with trimmed lawns and just the right number of cars in the driveway.

With that mindset a business could bring in outsiders and be bad for their property value.

digitalsushi2• 6 years ago

With aggressive reverse mortgage programs, many people use their house as a retirement account. A house is generally the most expensive thing the average person purchases, and is the most obvious source to convert into an income. With a finite amount of land, and lots of increasingly desperate retirees with excellent positions to relax a claim for some temporary relief, someone is always ready to point out their house is their paycheck.

rodgerd• 6 years ago

How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years.

Capitalism. Economies of scale. Taxpayer subsidies for car infrastructure. Nowadays Amazon, Uber Eats, etc.

Try actually running a local dairy or restaurant or electronics store and see how long it takes for you to be crushed out of existence by people driving to the supermarket 5 km away, or just ordering from VC funded loss-making delivery companies, or the like.

refurb2• 6 years ago

Yup. Currently live in a walkable neighborhood and yeah, it’s awesome to walk 2 min to buy some milk or grab a bite to eat.

My weekly grocery run? Grab the car and go to Costco, otherwise my grocery budget would double.

jackcosgrove• 6 years ago

The suburbs grew because of some legitimate reasons. In the mid-20th century cities were very crowded. It's one thing to live alone in a 1000 sq ft condo in a city now. 70 years ago that equivalent space was housing a family of five. More space for less money was enabled by automobiles, and it was a great improvement for many.

That said many suburbs botched their expansions with tract housing and poor urban design, because that made the most money for developers and appealed to a now diminishing taste for dispersed living.

However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.

lotsofpulp4• 6 years ago

However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.

Optimizing for individual transport in cars and public transport are not compatible goals. The first reason being that if individual transport is made available to most people, they will opt out of public transport and therefore all political will for maintaining and increasing quality of public transport will disappear.

And optimizing for cars means you can't optimizing for walking or other forms of transit.

madamelic7• 6 years ago

There is also that whole thing about how suburbs were invented to escape "the city" (read: non-whites).

Look up Levittown.

momokoko• 6 years ago

Because if you moved to a new town you were in a different school district.

The great migration to the suburbs happened right after schools were desegregated in the US.

White Americans moved to the suburbs to avoid their children from attending school with black children. Milliken v. Bradley was the last nail in the coffin.

The return to cities has coincided with white people having less children and children at older ages along with less racist views.

titzer2• 6 years ago

This started happening already in the 1950s before desegregation. The rise of suburbs is directly related to the boom years after WWII and how much development happened outside of cities, where throwing up a new subdivision was much cheaper, and the booming auto industry absolutely loved new demand for commuting.

titzer2• 6 years ago

I could give a long, detailed answer, but basically, the 1950s happened.

csomar• 6 years ago

No. It's an inferior solution to someone having a car and driving around for shopping. Most people here seems to draw from their experience traveling to a place for a short period of time. The reality is that living near a small business (especially restaurant/cafe/bar) is crappy. You'll have people walking around, being noisy, drunk people, people parking in front of your drive way because the didn't see the signs, garbage, etc...

dotandgtfo• 6 years ago

It's a bit crappy for people living in the immediate vicinity but that's just a tiny fraction of the people who get value from nearby local businesses. The housing prices also reflect that and it's usually cheaper rent if you're above/next to a popular grocery store, bar or restaurant.

I am extremely biased as I'm in my mid twenties and don't even have a driver's license as the only time it comes in handy in Oslo is if you're moving furniture.

orthoxerox2• 6 years ago

Bars are a problem, but I live in an apartment and there's a bank, a few cafes, a liquor store, multiple drug stores, an optician's, an orthopedic shoe store, a pawn shop, a shop selling kitchen furniture and god knows what else in the same building. The biggest issue is public urination, but these people aren't the customers, but people leaving the subway.

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious?

People got rich enough that the noise from the bar on the other side of the block or the mechanic shop across the street made their list of "big problems" and they complained to local government until government restricted everyone's property rights.

oftenwrong3• 6 years ago

The more people within "walking distance" the less need for a parking lot. There are a number of successful businesses in my neighbourhood with zero parking or minimal parking. Many customers can arrive by foot (or bike or bus). Even a small scrap of land can be a prime location.

If you visit the outskirts of the city, there is a large difference. The parking lot is like an ocean. After all, every customer must arrive by car. You need a massive tract of land to have a successful business in such an environment.

Next time you visit a business, pop open your maps app on your phone and look at the satellite view. Note the size of the building in relation to its parking lot. It is not unusual for the parking lot to occupy more land than the actual store, even in urban areas.

toofy2• 6 years ago

For a few years I’ve wondered how possible it would be for large neighborhood associations to own a neighborhood grocery store.

I haven’t bothered yet to run the numbers, but I would expect if the association was large enough it wouldn’t add much cost.

Residents could get a substantial discount while non-residents could pay normal prices. Residents could put in subscription style orders for things they would always regularly need. It would make it easier to order specialty things that normal groceries stores wouldn’t carry, etc...

bri3d• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_cooperative ?

The problem here is that eventually rent-seeking becomes appealing, someone realizes there's skim/margin/"arbitrage" to be made, and so the capitalism progresses.

toofy2• 6 years ago

Yeah, food coops but strictly limited to a residents of neighborhood would be close to what I had in mind.

I wonder if you could put in the association bylaws that it must remain free of profits/margins/“arbitrage” to mitigate against something like this.

I haven’t looked into it closely though since I ultimately have a strong distaste for home owners associations anyway.

lykahb• 6 years ago

Vibrant downtowns of many American cities were built before the zoning laws. Their desirability is the most obvious proof that mixed zoning has benefits.

jungletime• 6 years ago

I liked whistler village when I visited. All the cars are parked on the outside. Inside there is only walking, restaurants and shopping. Creates a really nice atmosphere.

Outdoor malls seem to be the closet thing to that. And are pretty great spaces to be in. Maybe will be more prevalent because of covid now. But they even work in cold places, there is one in Michigan that I know off.

I used to live across from a 3 story apartment building, maybe 20 apartments. Pretty run down place, with drug dealers, and just low income people.

Then the apartment building owner decided to do some landscaping. Planted a few trees, and put out some adirondack chairs on the front lawn. Which attracted a guy wanting to play his guitar outside. Which then attracted an audience. Which then turned into a nightly gathering of people on the front lawn playing music from the apartment building. People with drug and alcohol abuse problems still live in that building. But now that place has real sense of community. And actual happy moments are shared outside nightly. Where as before everyone would rush through the front door to their apartment, now they stop and say hi to each other.

cwkoss• 6 years ago

Japan has "shopping arcades" which I really like. It is like a wide pedestrian-only alley with the retail density of a mall, but outdoors and the path is covered. Then side streets are local access only and often have small restaurants or izakayas

toastal• 6 years ago

This ends up being one of the biggest reasons I enjoy living in Thailand. The unplanned layouts of cities makes for a colorful and convenient experience everywhere you go. Most every building in towns is at least two stories with shops under the tenant's quarters. You also can't forget about the prevalence of street carts for food and other small things. It's usually worth exploring alleys as there will be some curious little shop or restaurant. It doesn't match my you-must-have-a-car, strip-mall experience in the US.

You can contrast this to Laos where the LPDR has focused on zoning on new development. One example was ປາກເຊ, Pakse, where multilane roads were built whigh probably not be fully utilized for another 50 years. When you go to a residential area, there's much less businesses. From what I gathered, the government there was looking across the Mekong at it's developing sister country and is trying to 'correct' her mistakes when trying to emulate growth. However, there's much more beauty in allowing the natural chaos.

hnarn2• 6 years ago

Most every building in towns is at least two stories with shops under the tenant's quarters.

Compare this with modern (past five/ten years) architecture in Sweden: concrete, "modern" flats with zero expression that mostly are composed entirely of residential units. You might literally see a block of 8-10 buildings, maybe five stories high, that has one commercial unit at the very end of one of the buildings. It's ridiculous.

This type of architecture is killing newly produced areas completely unnecessarily, and I suspect it's because the one time income of selling a flat is preferred over the monthly income of renting to a business.

wastedhours• 6 years ago

This ends up being one of the biggest reasons I enjoy living in Thailand

Only visited briefly, but was going to post that they seem to get it right in Thailand. Some of the best restaurants are on the porch of someone's house, there's usually some kind of corner shop below most large buildings, most places are walkable or have adapted some kind of small persona transport.

dhosek2• 6 years ago

This was once common in the inner ring suburbs of Chicago. There used to be a small grocery store in the middle of a residential block near where I lived and a bar in the middle of another residential block close to my elementary school. There are houses whose former mixed use (shop in the front, house in the back) are still obvious.

Here's one surviving neighborhood grocery in Berwyn, IL:

https://goo.gl/maps/NCd45ghd6ajfPvLB6

Unfortunately, I'm drawing a blank on the locations of some of the surviving retail-to-residential conversions that I've spotted.

These are all largely a relic of an era in which housewives often didn't drive, or if they did, didn't have access to a car while their husband was at work so grocery shopping needed to be within easy walking distance of home. Many of the minor commercial streets in the inner ring suburbs have vanished as well, their customers having been consumed by larger supermarkets. It's somewhat miraculous, really, that there are still a handful of these neighborhood markets still in business.

adamredwoods• 6 years ago

Just a block away from a 7-11.

vidanay2• 6 years ago

I've always liked the fact that nearly every major street in Chicago is lined with small businesses and the residential streets are no more than 4-5 blocks away from a major street.

tropdrop2• 6 years ago

The housewives aspect of it is a strange thing to focus on - this is a relic of a time when most people did not drive, i.e. this style of living was natural to everyone, housewife or no, prior to Eisenhower-era financial incentives to build highways everywhere[1], and especially in areas of "urban blight," which, of course, were also usually the densest parts of neighborhoods/cities since the poor did not have cars. Some cities, e.g. New York, succeeded in preventing the demolishing of some of their most historic places in the name of "cleaning up." Most other places were not as successful, though many tried[2]. Chicago's aptly named Eisenhower Expressway is a great example of activist efforts often not being enough[3].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs#Struggle_for_Green... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Urba...

3 - https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/eisenhower/

dhosek2• 6 years ago

Berwyn and Cicero weren't directly impacted by the Eisenhower (although Oak Park was—something that the local populace still resents which is evidenced by the fact that the exits for the Ike (much to my wife's confusion, I-290 goes by multiple names) exist only on the borders of the village and are the only left-side exits for the entirety of the Congress Expressway's (like I said...) run). More impactful was perhaps the replacement of streetcar lines with buses and the shortening of the Douglas Park "L" to end at 54th instead of its former terminus at Oak Park Avenue. Stickney, just south of Berwyn and Cicero, was still semi-rural into the 50s when my parents' house was built and, although it has had bus service from West Towns Bus Company (now Pace), it was never not a place where cars were essential (I suppose in its pre-incorporation days and first decade, one could have gotten by with a horse and wagon). This is not a Greenwich Village situation.

I mentioned housewives walking to the neighborhood store to do shopping because this was an aspect of the local culture that persisted into the 70s and early 80s. Most had their own little carts for hauling home their groceries (similar to these https://www.amazon.com/customerpicks/Explore-grocery-carts-f... it's interesting to see that these are still sold, although I've not seen one in use for 30 years or so).

goda902• 6 years ago

Its interesting that that neighborhood could be defined as low density, but it's at least twice a dense as my neighborhood, and I can quickly drive to neighborhoods that are half as dense as that without even hitting millionaire neighborhoods.

kbos87• 6 years ago

Better yet, outlaw a business like amazon and create an instant market for tens of thousands of small local businesses.

heidegger• 6 years ago

good idea but we can do ever better than that by build co-ops in residential neighborhoods

what we need are goods and services where people are, but that doesn't necessarily mean provided by businesses when they could be provided to and by the people who are already there

itisit• 6 years ago

Seems like an invitation for loitering among other nuisances. A great idea for some places, but I feel there are many who prefer their neighborhoods truly remain residential.

frequentnapper• 6 years ago

I live in Tokyo, and pretty much every neighborhood has some cafe/izakaya being run from the back of a home by a grandpa or grandma. Usually these places are extremely tiny and can seat max 4 people. I've seen some of them open all night. Not sure if they have to deal with some sort of licensing especially for liquor.

duxup• 6 years ago

I like this idea mostly, except maybe the restaurant with outdoor seating.

Not sure I would want that to pop up next door / be loud late into the evening....

At least I wouldn't expect it to just pop up.

Cogito5• 6 years ago

In my experience, the licensing laws typically deal with this. If a restaurant or bar, they can't serve alcohol or have live music after 9pm, or similar rules.

Works pretty well, and I'd much rather have the small restaurant or bar next door than not!

holler• 6 years ago

In Seattle this is prevalent, part of the charm.

lazyasciiart2• 6 years ago

Only in parts of it. There's a lot of the city that is just not suited to a walking lifestyle.

siosonel• 6 years ago

My wife and I got electric bikes about 8 weeks ago and they have been great for running errands in lieu of single-occupancy car trips. We live near the Interurban Trail/Aurora and the e-bikes enable much easier access to a variety of stores, restaurants, and parks, which are not easily walkable. We now appreciate the nearby bike lanes and quiet streets for making longer trips to bigger parks or neighboring downtowns like Edmonds. We recently had wanted to return to Capitol Hill to enjoy a more walkable neighborhood, but so far bikeabilty has been an excellent substitute. Plus, in four years there will be a light rail station near us to offer yet another alternative to car trips. We feel lucky to have these options in our "suburban" location.

y2bd• 6 years ago

Fellow Seattlite here. Seeing folks in this thread talking about grocery stores being 40+ minute walks away from grocery stores is making me sweat. I like the idea of moving somewhere cheaper, but I refuse the idea of being forced to drive everywhere.

mberning• 6 years ago

I would love to own a true neighborhood pub. A literal “public house”. Nothing fancy but a nice watering hole for the locals.

tinyhouse3• 6 years ago

In the Boston area many of the nearby towns are what I call "urban suburbs". Very family friendly, many single- or two-family homes, but also very walkable and many shops throughout the town. I'm talking about towns such as Brookline, Cambridge and Arlington. They are really nice towns to live in and in very high demand.

murrayhenson• 6 years ago

Cambridge

"Our fair city!" -Tom Magliozzi

digitalsushi2• 6 years ago

Imagine how much better your life would be if one house on your suburban cul-de-sac was a sleepy pub.

I can't tell you any of my neighbor's names. I've been here ten years.

But if I could walk for 6 minutes and get a beer, we'd all know each other's names. We'd all have babysitter coverage, neighborhood watch, a reason to keep the car in the garage, and slightly bigger bellies, overnight.

ed312• 6 years ago

Having lived in a dense suburb outside of Providence RI with a local pub just one large parking lot away, I can tell you: it sucks. Noise at all hours, drunks everywhere, broken glass, constant smell of cigarette smoke. Replace pub with "well maintained park with children's play area" and you might be on to something.

jamil7• 6 years ago

It might be a cultural thing but my home country Australia and the in the UK the local pub in smaller towns is often a much more family oriented place. Often there is outdoor seating and families go for dinner together, often there is live local music. People also go just to drink but it’s all mixed together, of course this varies depending on what part of a town or city you’re in, some are more family oriented than others. I think that kind of pub would fit well with OP’s description more than yours.

asveikau• 6 years ago

You might not have as big a belly if you need to walk a few minutes to get the beer and go home.

j45• 6 years ago

This would be great to see, even if they were pop up spaces that could cycle through providing what a neighbourhood might need at any given time.

cletus• 6 years ago

So I've lived in a number of cities and seen many variations on this.

In Perth, Western Australia, there are pockets of this but the extraordinarily high cost of real estate (true across all of Australia since the early 2000s), which existing property owners are keen to protect, slowly kills local businesses. Particularly in popular cafe strips where all the businesses that made the area popular get priced out and commercial property owners would rather sit on empty property for years than notionally devalue that property by taking less rent.

Anecdotally I've heard all the WFH with Covid-19 has been a boon to local businesses.

London as a general rule was (it's been 10+ years since I've lived in London at this point) good for this. It never seemed like no matter where I was (within Zones 1-5 anyway), I was ever that far away from a Tesco and a high street.

NYC is of course excellent for this, at least the more central areas. The more outlying areas tend to resemble more typical Northeast suburbia with 2 car households and the like.

Northeast commuter towns tends to be good for this around the actual train stations although some stations weirdly have nothing around them at all (eg Manhasset).

Most US cities tend to be terrible for this to the point of not even having sidewalks and you might be 10 miles from the nearest shop, even in a large city (eg Las Vegas seems to be like this).

It does seem like public transportation really helps here because it seems like the northern suburbs of Dallas, for example (at least those on DART), have recognizable downtowns such that they more closely resemble tri-state commuter towns.

Large lots really seem to kill any of this. Like there are parts of the Greater Atlanta area where a "normal" lot is 1 or even 2 acres. This is an amount of space that is simply incomprehensible to any European. Even an Australian.

And of course the US has Walmart, which has been a pretty effective way of killing all the small businesses in local neighbourhoods.

spicyramen• 6 years ago

Coming from Latin America,this was the best way for someone to get their business started and get some extra cash. From selling candies, to food and groceries. All that came to an end when Walmart and other chain companies such as 711 or Oxxo appeared..

seiferteric• 6 years ago

Yes! When I lived in an old house in the outskirts of Chico, there was a random little coffee shop right down the street. Seemed totally out of place but I loved it. I would really like small cafes and shops inside the Suberbs!

Causality1• 6 years ago

I suppose this would work very well for people with a particular outlook. I'm not one of them. My neighborhood is a refuge from commerce; I don't want stores within earshot of my front door. I don't want people I don't know walking past my yard at night.

scarface74• 6 years ago

Not totally on topic...

I have to admit the one thing I miss about moving out to the burbs from the relatively upscale apartments we lived in for awhile was that we had restaurant and major grocery stores within walking distance

moltar5• 6 years ago

I hate North America’s zoning laws with a passion. They just create dead zones and forces everyone to travel distances.

I love Europe and Southeast Asia so much for this very reason. You step out of your house and everything is nearby.

I’m sure there are parts of both Europe and SEA that have the same problems, but majority is mixed zoning.

jojobas• 6 years ago

Downtowns may be abandoned, but the shopping malls aren't (where I live).

Local businesses still can't compete with big box stores.

egypturnash3• 6 years ago

I currently live in New Orleans, which is very mixed-use if you're in the city proper. It's really, really nice. I bike everywhere. Groceries, bookstores, head shops, cafes, bars, hardware store (with a super nice housewares department on the second floor), plumbers, auto shops, restaurants, snoball stands, parks, schools[1], dentists, optometrists, lawyers, there's pretty much everything I need in a 20min cycling radius. A lot of these businesses are in buildings that are pretty much indistinguishable from the houses next to them; there's signs and various adaptations for whatever they're selling but so many of them started out as a house rather than something built from the ground up to be A Store.

Leave the actual city and it starts turning into suburbs, where every distance is designed for a car and all business is concentrated on one big road that's got giant parking lots and big boxy buildings all along it. I go out there when I absolutely must. There really aren't many reasons to do that.

1: sadly the city's schools have gone to hell in many ways since I was a kid, but hey, I ain't got kids so I only get to worry about that in the abstract...

juniper_strong• 6 years ago

If you bike everywhere why are you going to the auto shop?

cawlin• 6 years ago

I'd guess for auto supplies. You can bike "everywhere" and still own a vehicle for visiting places outside a city proper.

egypturnash3• 6 years ago

I don’t, it’s just one of the many businesses lurking in my neighborhood. I pass it regularly on my way elsewhere.

webninja• 6 years ago

Yeah the state government is too poor and devoid of tax dollars, so they can’t do anything about that unfortunately.

Jugurtha2• 6 years ago

I live in the suburbs. In a radius of 200m from where I live, 2 minutes on foot, here are some of the businesses there are:

- Car accessory workshop for aftermarket accessories

- Car mechanic

- Car tire shop (they check, patch, and change your tires)

- Bycicle and bike repair shop

- Car electricians (3)

- Car wash (3)

- Carpenter

- House appliance shop

- Travel agencies

- Accountant

- RV home maker

- Shop to print motifs on shirts/clothes

- Opticians

- Sauna (3) one with a gym, a swimming pool, etc.

- Showers

- Bathroom

- Kitchenware shop

- Barbers (2)

- Bakeries (4)

- Pharmacists (2)

- Dentist (2)

- Pediatrician

- Generalist MD

- Gynaecologist

- Endocrinologist

- Medical analyses lab

- Insurance company

- Printing shop

- Children's clothes shops

- Adults' clothes shops

- Internet café

- Coffee shops

- Grocery shops

- Tailor

- Pastery shop

- Kiosques

- Jeweler

- Electronics shop

- A blacksmith

- A small theme park for kids

- Food joints (pizzerias, burgers, grills, others)

- Protective equipment shop

- Office supplies/Stationery/Chairs/Tables, etc.

- Electric motors repair shop

- Minimarkets (3)

- Gyms

Others:

- Primary school

- Middle school

- Police station

- A football stadium converted to a gymnasium

Bigger:

- Cheese factory

- Yogurt factory

- Other industrial stuff

- Car dealerships

Farther (300m): fresh produce market, pharmacy, and a bunch of other shops.

Farther (10 minutes):

- A green space of about 350 acres

The catch: a lot of them live there. By there I mean they own the house. The shops are on the street level, and they live in the upper levels. Some others live nearby, as in are either the owner's neighbor from a few houses away or 5 minutes down the road. But you can pretty much do a lot without moving.

laxk• 6 years ago

Where do you live?

Jugurtha2• 6 years ago

In Algiers, Algeria.

ApolloFortyNine• 6 years ago

I live somewhere that has tiny businesses like this. I still end up driving to my local discount grocery store because, despite having a very well paying for the area, I just can't bring myself to spend anywhere form 30% more to even double for 'the good stuff' when I can get generics for so much less.

So sorry, guess I'm part of the problem, but I'd rather spend money on stuff I actually want.

ilaksh• 6 years ago

http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/

rwhitman• 6 years ago

Of course the daunting obstacle is changing the mindset of suburban planners and nimbys. The zoning ordinances that have dominated planning in the USA since the 50's ban this in large swaths of America..

New Urbanism made progress creating denser planning in the last 30 years, but focused too much on high density mixed use. Adding small shops to residential streets is definitely the one area that they've really failed on in my opinion. It's the reason older towns and cities still trounce the 'burbs on walkability and will for a long time.

But while we're at it we should also think about other human-scale improvements, like narrow streets. Worth a read for anyone interested in retrofitting the suburbs: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130131.php#.Xxptm...

goda902• 6 years ago

When I lived in Chile, I really enjoyed the little tiendas everywhere, particularly the ones that were bakeries. I have a hard time imagining how well something similar would work in my suburban neighborhood where everyone has cars. Maybe a destination like a cafe, but it just makes more sense for people around here to get a bunch of shopping done at the grocery store 5 minutes away in their car.

senojretep356• 6 years ago

Good idea, I like mixed zoning and supporting small local businesses rather than behemoths like Walmart.

HeadsUpHigh• 6 years ago

The USA is the only place I know that doesn't have businesses in residential neighborhoods. I really don't understand why it is that way. We have mini-markets with a small stock of most commonly bought items, fridges with water iced tea etc, cigarettes newspapers on almost every corner. And it doesn't need to stop there. Why not laundry shops? Small cafes, etc.

99.99% of any potential issues can be taken care of with simple laws such as noise limits etc.

pmlnr• 6 years ago

:: insert ancient aliens meme with 'americans' overlay ::

acd• 6 years ago

This kind of city planning design was popular in Sweden in the 1950/60s with close community mini centras torg, happy that its re surging. There would usually for example be a grocery store, a hair dresser and a flower shop, usually also a local restaurant.

With a good local community one does not need to use a car very often. There is also spontaneous social interactions with locals, this is something we do not get when buying online. We may also build repair centre for our things. This would be like a bike shop but for devices.

hnarn2• 6 years ago

I'm Swedish and while I'd love to take credit for this type of structure, surely this is much older and more widespread? If you travel to France you notice immediately that there's a bakery, a butcher etc. in every town, so some part of it is down to culture and political decisions (like Sweden in the 50's), but if we move back in time this was the absolute default for a very simple reason: any other setup than the "close community shops" was untenable until the introduction of the automobile.

So this model that we now consider exotic has actually been the standard for 99% of human history, but since the early 1900s we have been caught in a feedback loop of increased mobility -> lower real estate prices outside of the city -> cheaper goods which to this day is killing city centers commercially all across Sweden.

I absolutely welcome this change, but I think it's important to point out that the reason it now seems so attractive is because this mobility that fueled the entire change has now essentially disappeared. I can only hope that with increased environmental consciousness, it becomes even more outdated, because I really dislike it.

Here's to hoping we get a future composed of small local stores, and "big-box" corporations with excellent shipping options instead of expecting you to come to them. It can't happen soon enough.

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

It's not viable unless they get an x amount of foot traffic, which is why these shops tend to be in city / commercial centers instead.

That said, back in my hometown we used to have multiple businesses on wheels visiting once a week; ice cream truck, fish, a grocery shop, a mail-order frozen-products guy, etc.

I've seen the same happen in a commercial district, mostly big office buildings with underground parking, but there was an ice cream and a coffee trike doing the rounds. The coffee one would set up shop at the local train station in the morning, then move to an urban park thing later in the day. The ice cream truck would move around, stand in front of the building and ring the bell.

_0o6v• 6 years ago

This sounds great in a utopia where everybody is quiet and considerate, delivery drivers don't throw boxes and crates around, people don't get drunk and smash bottles in the street or have arguments.

Having lived next to and above commercial properties I can say it doesn't improve quality of life, it drastically impacts mental health, stress, and sleep. There's a reason that we have commercial districts and residential districts.

habosa• 6 years ago

When Americans talk about how great European cities are, they are often talking about exactly this. Mixed-use neighborhoods full of charming small businesses and dense housing within walking distance to daily needs.

dutch3000• 6 years ago

love it. economic localization.

louwrentius• 6 years ago

For whoever cares about this topic:

Strong Towns may be of interest. They address this topic, and put everything in a bigger picture.

https://www.strongtowns.org

ourmandave• 6 years ago

My parents ran a small business out of their home and the UPS truck came by for pick-ups every day.

They had a yes/no sign in the window to signal if he had to stop or not.

This was before the internet and easy scheduling.

bigbizisverywyz• 6 years ago

Here in Zurich this is really well done - I just wished we did it more back home in the UK too.

Small businesses, e.g. coffee shops, hairdressers and florists occupy the bottom floors, and accountants and dentists the upper floors.

It keeps a nice mix of building use and means some services are nicely scattered throughout the city.

blue52• 6 years ago

This would be an amazing solution to implement and would benefit so many who were hurt during this over reach over government into business and private lives.

lazyjones2• 6 years ago

Tiny businesses aren't disappearing because of zoning, it's the economy of scale and heavy taxation/regulation that made them (or the lower-margin ones) unviable in places where they used to be common (like big European cities).

One of the more memorable stories about a tiny waxing studio giving up here in Vienna was them being required to have employees working in rooms with windows only and the only big enough window was the storefront one.

naveen99• 6 years ago

Isn’t work from home basically putting business back into neighborhoods?

mdavis6890• 6 years ago

The fundamental problem is that we (in the US) live in a permission-based system, not a freedom-based one. In this example, you have to ask for permissions related to running a business and using land.

The system that you have to ask permission from has a particular vision about how things ought to be done, and does not handle change or non-conformity well - even seeing them as a threat.

One hallmark for identifying such a system is that when there is not a law about something, it is referred to in terms like "legal grey area" or "outside the law."

We need to change the system to allow for freedom and individual decision making, without asking permission from the system. Freedom is what is left outside the boundaries of the law.

cpfohl• 6 years ago

I spent about 6 years in Poland when I was a kid. They had little kiosks (15'x15' ish?) all over, it's where you bought your daily stuff you didn't want to buy in bulk: bus tickets, gum, newspapers, bread, vegetables. This feels like a no brainer to me.

Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

Related Stories