How Shops Can Help Revive City Neighborhoods
Big urban shopping malls and office-supported retail are out. But authentic urban bookstores and catalogue stores are in.
So, seriously, to what extent are shops part of the solution for cities in the “Future Of Where”>
The other day I challenged Noah Smith’s Substack post arguing that shops will save cities. As a reminder: Noah used Japan as his example, he said small-scale retail thrives there and should thrive here, and he seemed to suggest that part of the solution is to create restrictive land-use regulation to ban large stores and encourage small ones.
Godmothers bookstore outside Santa Barbara, which opened in 2024.
In my response, I said I thought Noah was being too simplistic. For one thing, you can’t regulate your way to business success. Beyond that, however, I suggested that “shops” probably aren’t the solution to everything: Bricks-and-mortar retail is in decline everywhere and, in walkable cities in particular, it’s being replaced by the food-and-beverage sector – bars, restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, and other establishments that help make up what is sometimes called “eater-tainment”.
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However, in spite of all this – and Amazon too – people clearly still like to shop for stuff. Almost 80% of all retail sales still occur in stores, compared to only about 20% online. They go to Walmart for bargains, to Target for everyday goods, and to upscale lifestyle centers to participate in “experience retail” (which kind of goes together with “eater-tainment”.) America may be over-retailed (and, according to many sources, “over-appareled”).
So how can urbanists and others who care about placemaking leverage this continuing appetite for retail? And how can these efforts succeed in places other than manufactured lifestyle centers accessible only by car?
Some Things Are Not Coming Back
Let’s begin with a few things that we know are not going to happen:
1. The whole downtown shopping mall idea – Horton Plaza in San Diego, San Francisco Centre, Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara – is now dead.
These things were a kind of an urban riff on experience retail. But they’re gone and they aren’t coming back.
2. Post-COVID workplace patterns are killing convenience retail in downtown areas.
Office workers used to keep all kinds of small retail alive – drug stores, convenience stores, greasy-spoon lunch spots, dry cleaners, shoe repair and shoe-shine stands. That’s gone for good also. (My shoe-shine guy – ironically, with a stand right near Horton Plaza – says his business has gone from $2,000 a day before COVID to $600 a day today. He’s basically down to the judges, the lawyers, and me. At least I still get some good gossip about the courts.)
Architect Jon Jerde’s Horton Plaza in San Diego was 1980s urban experiential retail at its most audacious. Now it’s one.
3. Pharmacies and convenience stores are going away.
The number of pharmacies in the US has dropped 7% since before the pandemic, and in 2025 CVS plans to close almost 300 stores (about 3-4% of the total). Like urban shopping malls, this stuff is going away.
With those caveats in mind, then, here are four ways that “shops” – as Noah Smith calls them – actually can help save cities in the post-COVID era.