Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods • Hacker News Board

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#201

Post by analog31 » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

opportune wrote: post #172

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Ah, but the more niche it is, the more likely they depend on car traffic to bring their customers in.

I'm fortunate to live within walking distance of a supermarket. It's nice to get fresh produce and things that we run out of or need on a whim. A little Ace Hardware store serves in a similar way. It seems like the fairly sizable population of retirees in the nearby apartments provide these stores with a lot of business.

I don't expect those stores to have everything, but they really reduce the number of car trips that I make.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#202

Post by HeadsUpHigh » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 6:49 AM UTC

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.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#203

Post by corty » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #158

gotoeleven wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It truly is the golden era of officious busybodies.

And misogyny apparently. Let's not pretend that all people like that are women.

Why do you assume its gender from its first name?

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#204

Post by corty » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:02 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #194

dgellow wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). The…

~4-5 stories is totally sufficient to be "dense" compared to most of the US. Cities in the US sprawl absurdly flat. Consider that Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and famously has almost no tall buildings.

Paris also has famously tiny, cramped and frankly unlivable appartments. Has had for ages. The three musketeers even contained references to it...

If Paris is a model for the world, I don't want this world.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#205

Post by cameldrv » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:03 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #163

cameldrv wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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). The…

A very large portion of houses built in the past 70 years in the U.S. are single story. My point was that even going from single story, single family housing to two story, single family housing makes a big difference in density, and that can enable walkability.

I specifically don't mean that you have to build up to Manhattan levels to get walkability. Personally, I find the skyscraper jungle of Manhattan to be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there, at least at my stage in life.

If anything, perhaps Manhattan levels of density are not great for nice retail businesses. If the average building is 8-10 stories, there is relatively little ground level space available, rents are high, and so there is little room for experimentation. The 5-6 story Berlin (and to some degree Paris) level of density is maybe a sweet spot.

Now, this doesn't necessarily work as well for families with children. However, Berlin manages to be decent for this by having very wide sidewalks, a lot of parks, and hinterhofen. Some parts of Chicago and Brooklyn manage to achieve a similar effect with single family housing by having tightly spaced three story row houses.

Like I said, ultimately a lot of cities that are nice to live in in this way are that way because they were built before the invention of the car, so people valued this much more than they do today when the alternative is to get in their car and go to some big box store with a huge parking lot that doesn't need to be very near by.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#206

Post by cameldrv » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:04 AM UTC

bezmenov wrote: post #168

dgellow wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). The…

~5 floors is as high as you can go before needing an elevator.

You can do six, but the sunlight at the top really has to be great for it to be worth it...

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#207

Post by brobdingnagians » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:07 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #101

Spooky23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 storefro…

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 servi…

Can anyone explain how the term "Karen" isn't both racist and sexist at the same time? I hadn't heard of it until a few months ago, and now it seems everyone is using it to refer to a certain kind of "middle class white woman". A term like that to describe a certain kind of middle class asian or black man would be very offensive. Are the days where we try to exercise civility and empathy gone? It feels like society has gone from "let's tolerate people" to "let's ridicule people we don't like, without logical argument".

Blaming the disappearance of tiny businesses in residential neighborhoods by saying "It's all those middle class white women" seems both very shallow and specious.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#208

Post by BurningCycles » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:07 AM UTC

oftenwrong wrote: post #29

rland wrote: post #3

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 o…

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.

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.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#209

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:14 AM UTC

madamelic wrote: post #2

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 touri…

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!

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#210

Post by jabl » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 7:15 AM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #159

Spooky23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 storefro…

> 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 “charac…

> 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?”

I'm sure there's that too, but a lot of it is a result of an "unholy alliance" of democracy and economics. For most people their home is the single most valuable asset they have. So they have an interest in maximizing the value of it. One way of maximizing the value is by increasing scarcity. And thus you have the well off people (as in, the ones who already own property in the area) packing the local planning boards, preventing higher density development. Or home owner associations with all kinds of anal rules how your house and yard is supposed to look and what you can do there, etc.

Of course, these types of incentive problems are everywhere. E.g. in my country, like I suppose in many developed countries, there's an under-supply of medical doctors. So how many doctors do we need? Hmm, lets ask the experts, the national medical association. Who of course has no interest in inflating the wages and job opportunities of their members..