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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.
Come to England! This is normal here!
Also New York. And a lot of places, actually.
You just gave the most famous outlier in the entire country as an example.
It’s normal in the US too. The person in the post doesn’t have a clue WTF they are talking about. There are mixed use buildings everywhere in the US. Most town squares and new apartment complexes are mixed use.
No, it’s not normal. In almost every US city, the vast majority of housing is single-family homes.
I mean, I get that suburban sprawl is bland and forgettable, but that doesn’t mean you can literally forget it exists when making an argument like that!
It’s not “normal” as in most housing is mixed used. It’s “normal” in that most towns have at least one building that is mixed use. At least county seats that have a courthouse square. It’s certainly not like they are hard to find in the US.
An example, here’s a pretty typical square in a small Midwest town surrounded by shops with apartments on top: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1348819217/photo/aerial-shot-of-small-town-salem-indiana-town-square.jpg?s=612x612&w=is&k=20&c=X3FM9YL2K9CEikXer7pmxC_imF2bx8VE5mMAU8qq_d4%3D
“Not completely unknown, but still relatively rare” is not the usual definition of “normal.”
Let me put it this way: if you saw somebody commuting to work on a unicycle one day, would you then claim that unicycling to work is “normal?” After all, you found “at least one” example of it…
I’ll not engage in an argument over semantics. I don’t care what you qualify as “normal”. Regardless, mixed housing doesn’t seem to me to be significantly rarer here than it is in the UK, and it’s becoming increasingly more common with new developments too. The person I responded to referred to it as “normal” there, and so I used the same term because i think it’s nearly as common here. If you have a problem with that, bite me.
Here’s the context of your example (I had to make a rough guess myself because I couldn’t find a proper zoning map.) Note that I was generous with how much of the town might actually match the land use you claim is so “normal:”
“Bob’s Burgers”-style buildings are almost certainly prohibited by law everywhere that’s not highlighted red. Frankly, they’re probably also prohibited in the areas that are red, and only exist where they’re grandfathered in.
I can say that with confidence because that’s typical of almost every town and city in the entire United States. Places that actually have decent amounts of mixed use, relative to the amounts of single-family houses, are very much the exception.
Fuck me, you’re good at missing the point.
Soviet era commie blocks with stores and doctor’s offices in first floor go brrr
Why drive to the shops when they’re just downstairs?
Entire neighbourhoods are being built on this mixed-use setup and are almost self-contained. I work from home in a new but small rez block built like this, for instance, right near a metro line, and I haven’t driven in about a year.
A lot of the new buildings in my city have stores and restaurants on the griund floor with apartments above. Also there are older places with apartments above a business in my city. It seems like its just post WW2 construction wanted to get away from it. We seem to be moving back towards that.
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
Somehow works in the rest of the world? Maybe if americans weren’t so disconnected and socially retarded you wouldn’t have these issues.
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.
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.
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.
Unless they are a shitty mechanic… i see that as an easy way to get discounts on car repairs…
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Even Bob still rents though.
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.
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’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!
