Just move to europe you can. Where i live theres a pizza place under and the guy running it is literally one of my neighbours(apartments) and literally the next house on the street is on top of a bakery/cafe, all owned by a family.
In my last year at uni some of my mates lived over a curry house. It was brilliant as when I went round we’d inevitably put some videos on and order food from downstairs.
You can only live above a curry restaurant for one, maybe two months before becoming medically obese.
Zoning sounds terrible until your next door neighbor starts running an auto repair shop out of his garage.
“Mixed use” is also a thing. I know of plenty of examples here in the US, I have lived in one of them. New construction consisting of living space above retail is actually kinda trendy right now.
Also if you live above a greasy diner expect cockroaches
On the flip side, you’re stuck in a peaceful quiet suburb that’s a mile or more from any business.
Yes. Exactly.
sincerely,
the car manufacturers of America
That however is just bad zoning. You don’t want to have endless stretches of just living areas, instead you try to have organic town or area centres with mixed quarters. But you need to keep producing business and industry away from living areas.
Over here in Germany for example, auto repair shops are illegal in sole living areas, in normal living areas, they might be allowed under limitations and in mixed areas they are mostly allowed. This is the same for other businesses, but shops for local needs are allowed in every living area - your local grandmas shop
Zoning is a good tool used poorly. Restaurants and grocery stores being subject to zoning creates issues. My personal belief is neither should be subject to zoning (but still have the parking lots be.) Auto shops, manufacturing, and mining operation type things are examples of where zoning is good.
Zoning sounds great until you want to start a small business on your property, and you have to spend years convincing several councils and review boards that a photography business is not going to destroy the neighborhood character… and then you need to pay for a traffic study to prove it won’t negatively impact parking or meaningfully increase car travel on the street. And if it manages to get approved, then some retired busybody with no life will complain at every town council meeting that it’s attracting a bad crowd, and there’s too many people around now.
There is definitely a place for reasonable limits, but almost nowhere in the United States has that. People need to accept that neighborhoods change, and expecting them to be frozen in time is literally insane and fiscally irresponsible.
Why is a next-door auto repair neighbour bad? Do you not have laws on noise?
If you live above a proper restaurant expect no roaches ever, because they can’t afford for literally a single roach to be seen in their restaurant by their customers.
You’ve never seen a cockroach in a restaurant? I’m guessing you live somewhere cold, because in warm places cockroaches are just a part of life. I’ll still avoid anyplace I’ve seen a cockroach, but it’s not like those places get shut down. They just need to up their pest control.
You’ve never seen a cockroach in a restaurant?
I have never seen a cockroach in a restaurant in my life. But then I live in Europe.
FWIW, I used to take my car to an auto shop located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, next door to an ice cream and bait shop. It did not affect the neighbors in any way that I could see, and didn’t affect the property values.
I haven’t read it yet, but arbitrary lines is a very cool book about the subject, and the exact opposite of what you are saying. The author defends that zoning is the wrong way of going about things and proposes other ways of controlling this issue.
Unless they are a shitty mechanic… i see that as an easy way to get discounts on car repairs…
Exhaust above the roof and full revisions each month. Problem solved.
Somehow works in the rest of the world? Maybe if americans weren’t so disconnected and socially retarded you wouldn’t have these issues.
One of the things I absolutely loved in China was the almost systematic X over 1 buildings everywhere. It created so much life in the residential areas! A lot of residential areas would have some sort of pedestrian central hub, and then on the outer layer, business at ground level with convenience shops, fruit shop, noddle shop, etc. Coming back to France and its stupid zoning system is just so painful. Seeing all those lifeless suburbs, those lifeless housing estates, and everything concentrated in some shitty commercial areas separate from it all. Ugh.
Huh, what city in France are you talking about? Every city I’ve ever visited had mixed zoning with shops and restaurants in the ground floor and flats above. Of cause there are also blocks of houses without shops, but that’s mainly because you need more space to house a certain amount of people than for them to shop.
I there are also suburbs where every house has like a 1000m² of garden around it, and of course these houses don’t have a shop in their basement. But that’s because people choose to live like that and not because it’s the only option.
Yeah, it’s a scale thing. In Lyon centre-ville, you’ll see X over 1 along big avenues and boulevards. But I lived in the suburbs where it was tower after tower after tower, with all the shops only in the historic town center, which were just villages that had 100% residential areas tacked onto them. Sometimes you will have like a park or a commercial hub in bigger suburbs, but it’s all segregated. Very different from what I experienced in China.
That’s how portland Oregon feels. They have houses and such all throughout many areas with shops. I’m sure it could get annoying for home owners to have cars parked outside their houses all the time, but not needing a car to go into town is probably a great trade off.
The thing with that system is that all the people living in those areas don’t need to go anywhere to get their daily needs, they can just walk down and around the block. Food, deliveries, house services and utilities, it was all there. And these are small shops so people from outside wouldn’t really bother to come since they’d have their own where they live.
And whatever isn’t there locally, you can just get delivered from across town by the army of electric scooters. And of course the public transit system is crazy good so I can just grab a cab, take a bus or the metro. I never missed my car, is what I’m saying.
But of course that’s a giant city thing. The smaller the city, the less and less this is possible and the more people will use their car. I’m back in France now in a tiny town in the countryside (60k ppl) , and I couldn’t function without a car.
60k “tiny”?
Haha you’re right, sorry!
In France it’s a préfecture, and the biggest town in the department. But it’s still a small town, really, with mostly old people (avg age is 46) while the young flee to bigger cities.
In Ireland I was living in a town the same size (60k) and it was the most important town in the county, and felt a lot more “important” with a lot more business, more youth, more work… Basically if you needed more, you went to Dublin or Belfast. Or abroad, like many of my mates did.
But yeah, 60k is nothing when you live in a megapolis like Wuhan.
It’s all so relative, it’s a bit crazy.
I want every big box store and strip mall in America to be obligated to build enough housing on top and above as it would take to staff the store and their families at a minimum.
Im not living on site and working at the company store…
The number of managers that would come upstairs to knock on your door to get you to cover a shift; it angers me just imagining it.
Oh no doubt. The actual staff wouldn’t have to live there. They’d just have to have that much housing built up over the stores.
But also thinking strip malls that are often filled with small stores already owned and operated by a family. They’d only need one or two units overhead, thus being close to as described in the original post.
Also gives a solid advantage to the small mom and pop over the soulless profit machine, I like this idea :)
It would be harassment and it should be made very clear that if your manager keeps showing up at your door after being told he’s unwelcome and not to come back, you get to give them the old American ta-ta.
Imagine an America where managerial types are regularly legally filtered out from society by the combination of castle doctrine and their incessant need to bother staff.
I was under impression slavery was outlawed?
Its a neat idea. A lot of their workers are kids or youngings living with folks anyway. Gives a option for workers with fewer options. Depending how its played gives people not working there affordable options maybe?
There are those five-over-one constructions, which sort of fits, but they’re cheap as hell. The construction isn’t going to last.
Yeah, but I’m still glad to see those over the sprawling parking lot retail district approach we’ve been using everywhere for decades in the US. Maybe we’ll do a better job on the revision when the ones you described start to fail lol, one can dream!
I think inspectors in NJ already started cracking down on those constructions after a nasty fire. Those things are all stick construction for speed and cheapness. Minimum concrete.
Bar I frequented in my 20s had apartments above it. Thought it would be so cool to live there
I helped move some coworkers into an apartment directly over a bar in a decent sized bar district.
It was a cool pad, ancient, crazy 1800’s storage warehouse vibe, a dozen great food options and breakfast places.
WOMP WOMP WOMP WOMP till 2am most nights. A vagrant that liked to crash on their doorstep and peed on the door most days. If they want out between X and Y hour, they’d have to shoo him off the little porch to get in.
Yup. You can do any store that closes at a reasonable hour, not a bar or club.
My last place was directly over a karaoke bar. It was weird how the sound of drunk off key singing became a comforting sleep sound. I missed it when they shut down.
I used to live in an apartment building whose first floor had both a bar and a beer/wine retail store. It WAS so cool to live there!
Alcoholic coded
No fun allowed!
Square coded.
Zoning is one of the biggest issues facing major urban areas. Cutting down on it will be integral to facing the cost of living crisis.
I mean that person was wrong, there are absolutely places where mixed use setups like that are a thing. It’s rarer but it exists. Zoning laws suck and aren’t a good reason, but it’s also not a good reason because there are places that don’t have this issue. Also if it was like that when it was built and has been used like that since forever they allow it by grandfathering it in, not a forever solution but it does happen.
IIRC one of the few good things about Texas is that there aren’t zoning laws.
Soviet era commie blocks with stores and doctor’s offices in first floor go brrr
There’s a little town near me where they allow that zoning. My favorite restaurant has an apartment above it and it is my goal in life to live there and eat there every day, maybe every meal.
I lived in an apartment above a pizza place and they had parties every Sunday night until 11pm or later. It was not great for my sleep. Otherwise fairly nice
ITT: people who think mixed-use housing is way more common than it actually is.
Ngl I live in Chicago so to me it seems like the norm rather than the outliar
It’s not, even in Chicago.
41.1% of land area is single-family only. Mixed-use, non-single-family + planned development is 33.8% of land area. The majority of residential land area in Chicago is zoned single-family only.
41.1% of land. Not the places where people actually live. Take Marina City (AKA the corncobs); there’s a restaurant on the ground floor of one, and I think House of Blues Chicago in the other, and then, I dunno, a few hundred condos above them? Go into Wicker Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, and on, and on, and almsot every single retail establishment has at least 2-3 stories of apartments and condos above it.
If you map it by population, I would expect there to be a difference.
That’s possible, but not a given. Unfortunately, it would be complicated to calculate (and perhaps not even possible unless Chicago’s GIS system has good data for how many housing units are in those Planned Developments).
Even then, Chicago is probably close to a best-case scenario, not representative of the norm.
Take households from census data, divide by number of buildings. If the number is greater than 2 you’re wrong, less, you’re right. But I don’t know if that data is available
Considering it looks like every major arterial is zoned for mixed use, that’s not so bad. Or at least not as bad as it could be.
All along the waterfront is “no residential allowed”
Fucking stupid.
The old downtown area of the small town I had lived in most of my life had those kinds of buildings where there was retailers/restaurants/a bank below apartments. Shit, even the city hall building had apartments above it. One of my friends in high school lived in one of those above city hall.
Ok, now it’s driving me nuts figuring this out. I live in Oklahoma and yeah, minus some small exceptions, our commercial and res are strictly zoned, and maybe this applies to other places where the strip mall and Plaza are king, and there’s more room in general? Our ‘town squares’ are nothing but beauracratic stuff, bars, and historical buildings.
I’ve always wanted to live above a restaurant that had a dumbbell waiter into my apartment and I could just order anything on the menu brought up that way
Imagine the look on their faces if you’d ever decide to order a pizza and it gets delivered at the restaurant.
Oh, I want that too!
Yeah it’s coming back with 4 over 1s and 5 over 1s, assuming we do go into world war 3.
There’s also a variant where They take a plot of land, like 500-1500 acres. Put up Luxury condos, a gaggle of townhomes and a decent number of large single family homes then shove in a stripmall, gas station and grocery store in with it. The residents can walk to the grocery and a couple of food places, maybe a gym, shipping store, electronics repair store.
