Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 427 posts

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#221

Post by rorykoehler »

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…

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.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#222

Post by csomar »

aahhahahaaa wrote: post #13

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?

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...

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#223

Post by Matt3o12_ »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #209
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!

> 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.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#224

Post by unishark »

tinyhouse wrote: post #62
smoe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Businesses also tend to line the major roads (or at least be clustered at major intersections) whether it's city or suburb. And suburbs are apparently planned to have major roads running through them with fairly regular spacing.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#225

Post by AmericanChopper »

jabl wrote: post #210
AmericanChopper wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dem…

I always thought it was explained by local government elections generally having a low voter turnout, and homeowners having the strongest incentive to vote. But I’m not really sure that’s it, if you look at places like LA, local elections generally have very poor turnout, but in SF its actually not that bad.

The cynic in me thinks it’s just run of the mill political corruption. The cities where these problems are the worst have essentially been run by the same group of politicians for quite a long time, and they’re generally elected on platforms of caring about societies less advantaged groups. But time after time they get elected and incrementally make things a bit worse before being elected again. Which could suggest that you win in politics by simply saying the right things rather than actually doing them. But I don’t find that sort of “people are just dumb” line of reasoning very compelling.

In any case, the problem has gotten so bad in many places that’s it’s not possible to fix over any reasonable period of time. If you too imagine the most extreme approach of simply abolishing all zoning and planning regulations over night, housing prices and rent would certainly sharply decline. But then you would have a new problem of millions of mortgages being underwater.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#226

Post by bobthepanda »

baggy_trough wrote: post #161
bfieidhbrjr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

If you're not paying neighbors to keep their land the way you like, why should you have any say in that?

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#227

Post by acd »

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.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#228

Post by prawn »

jkhdigital wrote: post #10
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…

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…

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.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#229

Post by bobthepanda »

titzer wrote: post #138
momokoko wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 olde…

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.

Also, the FHA and the GI Bill provided cheap loans to buy single use housing for veterans, which were a significant chunk of the population. You can't really get an FHA loan to buy an apartment in a mixed-use building.

(On paper Black people were also entitled to GI bill benefits, but in practice this didn't really happen.) From Wikipedia:

> In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs about 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white veterans.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#230

Post by dgellow »

cameldrv wrote: post #205
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…

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…

I see, that makes sense, thanks for the additional details, I see that I was missing context to understand your initial comment.
Post reply on HN