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People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots.

People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots. We just don't allow for the experiment to even happen due to zoning regulations.

ajmurmann 2y ago
The zoning also is way too specific. Not far from my house is a busy intersection that has stuff like pawn shops and a run-down 7/11 at it. Very close to the intersection is a lot that's been empty for at least a decade now. A few years ago my wife and I thought we should look up what it costs and see if we can just pave it and put a food cart pot down. Turns out you can't do it. You must build a two-unit building with a specific number of rooms and square footage. WTF?! It's like a planned economy for housing. Needles to say, the lot is still empty because nobody wants to build a home like that in that location.
- bombcar 2y ago
  The magic word is "variance" - the problem is it takes time (not even money, usually just time) to popularize an idea and get it publicly accepted and then pushed through the city council. I've seen it done; sometimes it takes a few months because it's simple and nobody cares, other times it takes years. And often the city council is itself playing the long game; waiting for the pawn shop and 7/11 to go out of business or sell, and then they snap it up, bulldoze it, and sell it to a developer who will build what they envision for the plot.
  - macNchz 2y ago
    Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed. It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      It's surprising how little effort is needed to move the needle on those kinds of things. If you started showing up at meetings and complaining about wanting the hair salon, it could be the difference between tabling for another month and letting it through. Especially if the number of people complaining keeps growing. I've seen it happen. The vast majority of these things go so far under the radar that it's no wonder the decision is often the "conservative" one (by which I mean status quo, the activity that requires no activity).
rsynnott 2y ago
So, as an ignorant foreigner... surely someone already _has_ tried this, right? Like, I gather US zoning is pretty localised; there has to be _some_ local authority who has tried it.
- alwa 2y ago
  Sure, to greater and lesser degrees! Prominent master-planned examples include Seaside, FL [0]; Celebration, the Disney-designed suburb near Orlando with its “town center”; and, in a less ambitious variant, The Villages, a collection of retirement communities notionally premised on “village”-scale lifestyle (and accessibility by golf cart) [1]. My impression is that people like them just fine when they get built, it’s just not The Way Things Are Done at the (rather local) planning level. Maybe more about inertia than malice—and, like so much of the built environment, planning today is accountable to the accumulated political weight of all the individual families’ and developers’ decisions that led up to this point. [0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradise-of-seaside-celebrates-25-years/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradis... [1] https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/ https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/
- bluGill 2y ago
  US zoning is complex. While final control is local, the state and federal government puts rules in place. The feds mostly if you do X you get some subsidy (loans for single family houses for example). States often set the rules that locals abide by - the local says some area is R1 (single family), R5 (apartments I think), C1 (retail but I'm not sure what type).... but state law says what those codes mean. The local can choose which of the zones an area is but probably cannot create new ones. The local can give a variance for you to do something not allowed, but everyone who wants it needs to follow state rules. Remember zoning has been around for around 100 years. The rules change all the time. What I gave as examples were true at some point in history when I looked this up but may not be today. There are 50 states with their own rules. Some states have things like counties that sit between the state and the local. Generally states look at what others are doing and follow that with tweaks, but not always (New York and California are most likely to do their own thing - and they are the most populas states so they matter even if a minority of the total.)

ajmurmann 2y ago

The zoning also is way too specific. Not far from my house is a busy intersection that has stuff like pawn shops and a run-down 7/11 at it. Very close to the intersection is a lot that's been empty for at least a decade now. A few years ago my wife and I thought we should look up what it costs and see if we can just pave it and put a food cart pot down. Turns out you can't do it. You must build a two-unit building with a specific number of rooms and square footage. WTF?! It's like a planned economy for housing. Needles to say, the lot is still empty because nobody wants to build a home like that in that location.

bombcar 2y ago
The magic word is "variance" - the problem is it takes time (not even money, usually just time) to popularize an idea and get it publicly accepted and then pushed through the city council. I've seen it done; sometimes it takes a few months because it's simple and nobody cares, other times it takes years. And often the city council is itself playing the long game; waiting for the pawn shop and 7/11 to go out of business or sell, and then they snap it up, bulldoze it, and sell it to a developer who will build what they envision for the plot.
- macNchz 2y ago
  Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed. It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    It's surprising how little effort is needed to move the needle on those kinds of things. If you started showing up at meetings and complaining about wanting the hair salon, it could be the difference between tabling for another month and letting it through. Especially if the number of people complaining keeps growing. I've seen it happen. The vast majority of these things go so far under the radar that it's no wonder the decision is often the "conservative" one (by which I mean status quo, the activity that requires no activity).

rsynnott 2y ago

So, as an ignorant foreigner... surely someone already _has_ tried this, right? Like, I gather US zoning is pretty localised; there has to be _some_ local authority who has tried it.

alwa 2y ago
Sure, to greater and lesser degrees! Prominent master-planned examples include Seaside, FL [0]; Celebration, the Disney-designed suburb near Orlando with its “town center”; and, in a less ambitious variant, The Villages, a collection of retirement communities notionally premised on “village”-scale lifestyle (and accessibility by golf cart) [1]. My impression is that people like them just fine when they get built, it’s just not The Way Things Are Done at the (rather local) planning level. Maybe more about inertia than malice—and, like so much of the built environment, planning today is accountable to the accumulated political weight of all the individual families’ and developers’ decisions that led up to this point. [0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradise-of-seaside-celebrates-25-years/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradis... [1] https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/ https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/
bluGill 2y ago
US zoning is complex. While final control is local, the state and federal government puts rules in place. The feds mostly if you do X you get some subsidy (loans for single family houses for example). States often set the rules that locals abide by - the local says some area is R1 (single family), R5 (apartments I think), C1 (retail but I'm not sure what type).... but state law says what those codes mean. The local can choose which of the zones an area is but probably cannot create new ones. The local can give a variance for you to do something not allowed, but everyone who wants it needs to follow state rules. Remember zoning has been around for around 100 years. The rules change all the time. What I gave as examples were true at some point in history when I looked this up but may not be today. There are 50 states with their own rules. Some states have things like counties that sit between the state and the local. Generally states look at what others are doing and follow that with tweaks, but not always (New York and California are most likely to do their own thing - and they are the most populas states so they matter even if a minority of the total.)