Build More Of Everything, Closer Together
Noah Smith says "shops" will save American cities. Nope. After Covid, the secret to vibrant American urban streets involves businesses that require face-to-face contact, like bars and restaurants
Noah Smith says shops will save American cities. But especially after Covid, the secret to vibrant American urban streets involves
The other day, the very popular Noah Smith wrote a Substack piece arguing that “shops make a city great”. By shops, he apparently meant retail of all types, including restaurants.
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He spent a lot of time contrasting the United States with Japan, going beyond his initial argument to say that the real key to a city – a walkable city – is small-scale, preferably locally owned shops and restaurants, not the warehouse-like stuff we have here in the United States. He also argued for a true mix of uses, saying that dense housing will inevitably be sterile and, in the U.S., auto-centric if it is built by itself. He gently criticized the YIMBYs for overlooking this fact in favor of just wanting to build housing everywhere.
Sidewalk dining in Chicago.
I’ll admit that I was slightly irked by Noah’s general I’m-first-person-in-the-history-of-the-world-to-discover-this-insight tone. But by and large he’s right. If you want to create walkable cities with dense housing, you also have to create destinations that people want to walk to. And you have to create more of those destinations closer to people’s homes and closer to each other.
The big question after Covid however, is: What are those destinations?
Some years ago I worked on a study of walking and driving in the cities in the South Bay of Los Angeles – Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Inglewood, Carson, and so on. (This study was the subject of several academic journal articles, including this one.) All of these L.A. suburbs had small prewar downtowns. The downtowns were of varying quality and usually did not have really dense housing nearby. People who lived nearby tended to walk more when they had someplace they wanted to walk to. And what they wanted to walk to most often was parks, libraries, cafes, and restaurants.
But not shops.
We Can’t Regulate Our Way Out Of This Situation
Even at that time, people who lived near downtowns and liked to walk places tended to drive to the grocery store or the mall, in large part because they want to have a vehicle to haul all the stuff home. Since Covid, of course, many of these folks choose to order all kinds of goods online.
What surprised me was that Noah fell for the idea that we can regulate ourselves out of this situation. “Limit physical size, not corporate size,” he wrote. He also argued that cities should zone for more retail – and should also create more walkable cities so that small-scale retail will thrive.
But just because you zone for something doesn’t mean it will happen. Just ask all those developers who view ground-floor retail as just another annoying expense because they don’t think they’ll ever rent it. Even in a dense, mixed-use city environment, the success of (usually undercapitalized) small businesses depends on so much more than just zoning. It depends on an affordable rent, a city that doesn’t wrap small businesses in red tape, and of course a savvy product mix that local pedestrian shoppers will find attractive.
A small-footprint Target store in Manhattan.
Which is increasingly difficult in the post-Covid world. Noah talks about providing retail opportunities to local residents in walkable cities, which suggests that we need to focus on small-scale everyday retail – pharmacies, hardware stores, what we used to call five-and-dimes. And, in fact, we do see successful small-scale retail stores in virtually every large city. Target has figured out how to build a 12,000-square-foot urban store, and Ace Hardware stores – which are individually owned by essentially part of a co-op – can be as small as 5,000 square feet. But the truth is the demand for these stores is in decline. Neighborhood-scale convenience and drug stores are closing at a faster rate in cities than in the suburbs.
But Noah also says small-scale retail with local owners also tend to provide a delightful spontaneous and serendipitous shopping experience. This is true – but it’s the kind of shopping that most people do when they’re tourists, not when they need groceries. So these kinds of businesses are more likely to thrive in tourist areas rather than your average Main Street (especially if parking is tough, since such a store can’t survive on purely local customers).
Bars and Restaurants, Not Shops
Which is why the future of dense urban locations is probably much more tethered to bars and restaurants rather than “shops”. To harp once again on one of the major themes of this Substack newsletter, the future of cities lies with activities that require face-to-face contact. With some exceptions, everyday shopping does not require F2F. And as I mentioned above, “experience” shopping requires tourists or at least people from a large market area to succeed.
A small restaurant or bar or coffee shop, on the other hand, is exactly the type of business that will thrive in a dense urban location. Such businesses don’t need an enormous geographical market area, they activate street life in a neighborhood (especially if they can provide tables outside), and as that study I worked on a long time ago showed, people like to walk to them.
I wish U.S. cities could function like France or Japan, where small-scale – and, as Noah says, adorably inefficient – retailers thrive and urban residents walk to get groceries and apparel and everything else they need on a daily basis. But outside of Manhattan and a few other places, the U.S simply isn’t going to work like this, and we can’t regulate such places into existence. Simply put, in order to activate urban streets in American cities, we need to focus on activities – business as well as civic – that make people want to come together face-to-face.
I’ve done market studies for about 40 years. We need about 3 sf of walkable retail per person. That means that 1000 dus will generate local demand for about 4500 sf, or 2-3 small retail spaces. On Vancouver’s downtown peninsula, which has about as much housing density as most places, the primary retail is coffee shops. Ot much more on most blocks. There are retail areas within walking distance of most residential buildings, but not many. Like the suburbs, those centers are anchored by supermarkets, about one per 8-10,000 people. There are formulas for what will work where. Today, most local retail involves food and drink. Tourists will find their way to picturesque places, not residential centers.
I think you're spot on with say we need more restaurants and bars, rather than retail shops (which are also important to meet daily needs). I'd add that anchors can be really important and are sometimes forgotten or misused. This can include a supermarket, a full service hotel, or a department store like Wal-Mart or target. That said, walkability is even more important. And the lack of walkability between residential and commercial is what we seem to get wrong way too often.