Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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…”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

(I've upvoted and favorated your comment.)

> 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.

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.

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...

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

Look up Levittown.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Hungary

Alcoholics hanging around liquor stores is a universal.

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.

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).

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.

In Algiers, Algeria.

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.

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.

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.