4 ms·

One thing I keep wondering about is retail as a use for this office space. If you visit most parts of Asia you'll find that the North American focus on having

One thing I keep wondering about is retail as a use for this office space. If you visit most parts of Asia you'll find that the North American focus on having retail only on the ground floor is a self-imposed and arbitrary limitation. In other parts of the world there's nothing at all strange about having a restaurant on the 8th floor of a building, or a clothing store, or a hair salon, etc etc. Personally I find that retail businesses in Asia are far more interesting as a result - retail rents are comparatively cheap, encouraging an explosion of interesting niche retail businesses (a vinyl store selling only 70s vinyl? Sure!) that still pencil out financially. Retail in US urban cores on the other hand has been stagnant, with only major chains being able to afford the skyrocketing rents. This feels like an opportunity? Imagine the kinds of interesting businesses that can be created if we took off the totally arbitrary cap on retail space.

kevinmchugh 3y ago
I've never been to Asia but have heard about the mixed-use high-rises and am hopeful we'll get them. In Chicago our central business district has a decent variety of retail beyond just the chains: a small jewelers' row, a comic book shop, a record store, some independent menswear and shoe shops, and yes, all at ground level. Some buildings have a barber or gym somewhere in them, and that's pretty nice. I once heard an anecdote of two friends planning to meet up in the bar in a specific building in Tokyo and having to text to realize there were two bars, how cool is that? It seems like there's a bunch of businesses that could help make an office building more enticing - specialty coffee shop, bar, barber/salon/nail salon, dry cleaning drop-off/pickup (this one I've seen). And then the one that might really make a big difference: daycare. I'm not a parent so I assume there's a good answer why these buildings don't have daycares (commuting with the kid maybe is too difficult?)
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  what you've written here activated my nostalgia for playing SimTower. balancing the needs of residential, office and retail tenants... thanks for that
- potatolicious 3y ago
  > "It seems like there's a bunch of businesses that could help make an office building more enticing - specialty coffee shop, bar, barber/salon/nail salon, dry cleaning drop-off/pickup (this one I've seen). And then the one that might really make a big difference: daycare." A lot of the US already understand this, but they remain steadfastly bound to the idea that those services can only exist at ground-level (or in some basement level). The key conceptual gap is that it's totally fine for these businesses to be 10 storeys off the ground!
munificent 3y ago
It feels like entirely the wrong trade-off to me to make retail much cheaper and significantly increase it when housing is already so painfully expensive in the kinds of places where you could consider doing that. It's obviously a much harder transition physically, but I think the right thing is to turn much of this commercial space into residential.
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  There's no reason it can't be a mix of both, even in the same buildings. The single-purpose zoning in the US is a curse, and the lack of that is one of the elements that make a city like Tokyo so walkable. Sure, you can take a train to a shopping oriented area, but day to day you might have essentials close by. Even antipatterns like delivery for everything are less appealing if you can just walk a little bit down the street and pick up groceries or whatever.
  - potatolicious 3y ago
    Exactly this. For many reasons that are already well-trod, some commercial buildings are effectively unconvertible to residential. This is a potentially good adaptation for those buildings. In fact the specific properties that make them unsuitable for residential conversion (deep floorplates with low access to sunlight) are non-issues for many types of retail.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  The two go together, of course. In places where rent is cheap, more kinds of businesses are viable, because surviving is easier. Also I suspect a lot of places have really loose ideas about zoning, so a person might live in the back or above their store. Don't see much of that in the US.
  - munificent 3y ago
    > In places where rent is cheap, more kinds of businesses are viable, because surviving is easier. Rent goes down, but so does income when there are fewer people nearby to visit the business. It's not clear to me which factor dominates. My impression is that often the lack of customers is the main factor: small towns rarely have lots of quirky niche stores unless they happen to be a satellite to a larger metro area. I suspect specifics of zoning laws or other factors (demographics of nearby metro areas, taxes, etc.) end up determining which effect matters more. > Don't see much of that in the US. I think that depends a lot on where you are. I see a ton of 5-over-1s here in Seattle [1] and those often have retail on the bottom floor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

kevinmchugh 3y ago

I've never been to Asia but have heard about the mixed-use high-rises and am hopeful we'll get them. In Chicago our central business district has a decent variety of retail beyond just the chains: a small jewelers' row, a comic book shop, a record store, some independent menswear and shoe shops, and yes, all at ground level. Some buildings have a barber or gym somewhere in them, and that's pretty nice. I once heard an anecdote of two friends planning to meet up in the bar in a specific building in Tokyo and having to text to realize there were two bars, how cool is that? It seems like there's a bunch of businesses that could help make an office building more enticing - specialty coffee shop, bar, barber/salon/nail salon, dry cleaning drop-off/pickup (this one I've seen). And then the one that might really make a big difference: daycare. I'm not a parent so I assume there's a good answer why these buildings don't have daycares (commuting with the kid maybe is too difficult?)

tomjakubowski 3y ago
what you've written here activated my nostalgia for playing SimTower. balancing the needs of residential, office and retail tenants... thanks for that
potatolicious 3y ago
> "It seems like there's a bunch of businesses that could help make an office building more enticing - specialty coffee shop, bar, barber/salon/nail salon, dry cleaning drop-off/pickup (this one I've seen). And then the one that might really make a big difference: daycare." A lot of the US already understand this, but they remain steadfastly bound to the idea that those services can only exist at ground-level (or in some basement level). The key conceptual gap is that it's totally fine for these businesses to be 10 storeys off the ground!

munificent 3y ago

It feels like entirely the wrong trade-off to me to make retail much cheaper and significantly increase it when housing is already so painfully expensive in the kinds of places where you could consider doing that. It's obviously a much harder transition physically, but I think the right thing is to turn much of this commercial space into residential.

redwall_hp 3y ago
There's no reason it can't be a mix of both, even in the same buildings. The single-purpose zoning in the US is a curse, and the lack of that is one of the elements that make a city like Tokyo so walkable. Sure, you can take a train to a shopping oriented area, but day to day you might have essentials close by. Even antipatterns like delivery for everything are less appealing if you can just walk a little bit down the street and pick up groceries or whatever.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  Exactly this. For many reasons that are already well-trod, some commercial buildings are effectively unconvertible to residential. This is a potentially good adaptation for those buildings. In fact the specific properties that make them unsuitable for residential conversion (deep floorplates with low access to sunlight) are non-issues for many types of retail.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
The two go together, of course. In places where rent is cheap, more kinds of businesses are viable, because surviving is easier. Also I suspect a lot of places have really loose ideas about zoning, so a person might live in the back or above their store. Don't see much of that in the US.
- munificent 3y ago
  > In places where rent is cheap, more kinds of businesses are viable, because surviving is easier. Rent goes down, but so does income when there are fewer people nearby to visit the business. It's not clear to me which factor dominates. My impression is that often the lack of customers is the main factor: small towns rarely have lots of quirky niche stores unless they happen to be a satellite to a larger metro area. I suspect specifics of zoning laws or other factors (demographics of nearby metro areas, taxes, etc.) end up determining which effect matters more. > Don't see much of that in the US. I think that depends a lot on where you are. I see a ton of 5-over-1s here in Seattle [1] and those often have retail on the bottom floor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1