The commercial density and interesting streetscapes are one of my favorite things about living in Manhattan. The street level storefronts of small rise buildings can offer dozens of store varieties in a single block. Large scale developments have changed this feeling. Developers have (understandably) opted for the reliability of large box store footprints rather than multiple small scale vendors. Post Covid a record number of Walgreens/cvs/etc have closed leaving full intersections vacant. The economics of these stores have changed and I don’t see them coming back. My hope is that developers will convert these large single vendor storefronts into multiple varied and interesting vendors. Good for the street and ultimately their investment as it once again it becomes an interesting place to live.
This is a huge problem with a lot of newer attempts to recapture the magic of traditional urbanism. Even with dense populations and mixed-use buildings, a neighborhood can feel pretty dead when all the commercial spaces are too large.
I think this is a lot of what people are talking about when they disparage newly developed urban neighborhoods. Lots of people will leap to class-resentment based thinking, and think the neighborhoods are bad because the neighborhood is just too "bougie," full of evil "luxury condos." But the common use of descriptors like "sterile," "corporate," and "soulless" really point to the fact that the commercial spaces are all too large to make the streets feel proportionally vibrant to how tall the buildings are, and the leases on those large spaces are too expensive for any tenants but large chains.
Example neighborhoods from my most familiar cities are the South Waterfront in Portland, and Rincon Hill in San Francisco. These neighborhoods are the location of most of the tallest residential buildings in their respective cities, and these kind of high-rise residential developments are /crucial/ to solving these cities' housing shortages, but these buildings need more of those traditional hole-in-the-wall commercial spaces to really serve the public realm and make these neighborhoods into lovely places.
If you were dictator, would sort of constitutional amendment would be the simplest way to prevent the negative effects of zoning? Something like, "a property owner's right to conduct commercial business shall not be infringed by local, state, or federal government"?
The commercial density and interesting streetscapes are one of my favorite things about living in Manhattan. The street level storefronts of small rise buildings can offer dozens of store varieties in a single block. Large scale developments have changed this feeling. Developers have (understandably) opted for the reliability of large box store footprints rather than multiple small scale vendors. Post Covid a record number of Walgreens/cvs/etc have closed leaving full intersections vacant. The economics of these stores have changed and I don’t see them coming back. My hope is that developers will convert these large single vendor storefronts into multiple varied and interesting vendors. Good for the street and ultimately their investment as it once again it becomes an interesting place to live.
This is a huge problem with a lot of newer attempts to recapture the magic of traditional urbanism. Even with dense populations and mixed-use buildings, a neighborhood can feel pretty dead when all the commercial spaces are too large.
I think this is a lot of what people are talking about when they disparage newly developed urban neighborhoods. Lots of people will leap to class-resentment based thinking, and think the neighborhoods are bad because the neighborhood is just too "bougie," full of evil "luxury condos." But the common use of descriptors like "sterile," "corporate," and "soulless" really point to the fact that the commercial spaces are all too large to make the streets feel proportionally vibrant to how tall the buildings are, and the leases on those large spaces are too expensive for any tenants but large chains.
Example neighborhoods from my most familiar cities are the South Waterfront in Portland, and Rincon Hill in San Francisco. These neighborhoods are the location of most of the tallest residential buildings in their respective cities, and these kind of high-rise residential developments are /crucial/ to solving these cities' housing shortages, but these buildings need more of those traditional hole-in-the-wall commercial spaces to really serve the public realm and make these neighborhoods into lovely places.
Walkable City was the first book on Urban Design I ever read, it changed my life.
If you were dictator, would sort of constitutional amendment would be the simplest way to prevent the negative effects of zoning? Something like, "a property owner's right to conduct commercial business shall not be infringed by local, state, or federal government"?