Earlier this year, Salt Lake City enacted new policy called the Downtown Heights and Street Activation Ordinance. As the name suggests, the ordinance addresses building heights, allows for taller buildings in the city, and works to improve ground floor animation. This is among other things.

If you'd like to read through the ordinance (because why not), you can do that here. But even if you don't feel like doing that, I think it raises an interesting set of questions around ground floors, namely: Should ground floor retail be mandated in all/some urban areas? And if yes, how should we go about it?

We all recognize that blank walls (at street level) are suboptimal for urban vibrancy. But the thing about retail is that it doesn't work everywhere. Even if we really want it everywhere, that may not be possible, at least in the short-term. Retail is usually a lagging indicator. The demand typically needs to be already in place for it to do well.

That said, in really central areas, the correct decision could be to just mandate it everywhere. And that is what SLC has done in its central business district:

However, things get trickier in transitional or emerging areas where you're kind of just hoping that retail might someday work. From a development perspective, if we weren't convinced that the retail would work and if we were being forced to build it, we would underwrite it very conservatively. This might mean applying zero (or even negative) value to it. This way if we can't lease the space and it remains empty, at least it isn't fatal. But it does mean that the rest of the project needs to carry this loss.

Of course, now you still have a ground floor animation problem. You have empty storefronts. Though one argument might be that at least you've provisioned for a future where retail does eventually work. And if this does happen, then somebody was clairvoyant and you're happy that you built it. But if the area doesn't ever support good retail, well then you're stuck with an underperforming ground floor.

One alternative solution that can work on non-obvious retail streets is live/work. This way you build in some flexibility for the spaces to move toward retail (or other non-residential uses) if/when it becomes viable. But it's not a perfect solution. It's hard to make live/work suites entirely interchangeable. The ideal design parameters for retail are usually different than that of a home. Still, it can work reasonably well and provide needed flexibility.

It’s all very tricky. But at the end of the day, I think we can all agree that the objective is to limit blank and non-active faces on our principal urban streets. How we do that is the question. And sometimes it's more art than science.