Over the years, we've spoken a lot about the benefits of cities permitting small-scale commercial uses in residential neighborhoods.
They increase overall urban vibrancy. They promote local consumption (reducing the need for people to do things like drive). And they can help reduce the barriers to entry for small businesses. These spaces tend to be more cost-effective and, in some cases, like here and here, they are spaces that the homeowner already owns.
But there are some important objections to consider. Perhaps the most common one is this: What happens if my neighbor opens a 24-hour taco stand next door? I'm fairly confident that I could single-handedly keep a taco stand in business if it opened up next to me — what an amenity — but I get the concern. It's a legitimate one.
In this part of the world, we have typically responded to this concern by restricting uses. We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by saying, "Nope, restaurants aren't allowed, because there's a chance it could be a 24-hour taco stand and that might annoy people."
But there are alternatives.
Japan's land-use approach, for example, is (1) generally focused on what you can do (versus what you can't do) and (2) organized around intensity and nuisance. I've never developed in Japan and I don't know the exact nuances of their policy framework, but directionally I think it's an interesting way to moderate this land-use consideration.
An accountant who wants to hang a shingle is different from a coffee shop that's only open from 8am to 3pm (and doesn't have a commercial kitchen), and a coffee shop is different from Peggy Gou DJ'ing next door at an all-night taco bar. But they are all non-residential uses, and that makes them illegal in many/most residential neighborhoods.
Thinking in terms of an intensity gradient is one way to create more mixed-use communities, while at the same time respecting the local context.
I like to think of real estate as a downstream industry. What I mean by this is that the demand for space — whether it be housing or office space — happens downstream from other underlying economic activities.
For example, if someone creates a successful business and then hires a bunch of new employees, at least two things happen. The company now needs to consume more office space, and the employees of this successful company will likely demand more housing. Maybe they're relocating for this new job, or maybe they just got a pay increase and now want to consume more housing.
Whatever the exact case, real estate is the tail of the dog, and the new and successful company is the dog itself. Sometimes real estate gets mistaken for the dog itself. Rising real estate values become a substitute (albeit a poor one) for genuine economic growth.
But this does nothing to help overall productivity and innovation. And eventually you'll need to find some bonafide dogs. That's why I think this recent op-ed (which was presented in partnership with Shopify) is an important one:
But nation-building isn’t only cranes and concrete. It’s also the builders who start companies and create new industries. If we want a prosperous future, Canada can’t just be a place that builds big things; it has to be a place that builds new things. A
Reece Martin tells it like it is in his recent post called, "Toronto: Congestion Isn't Going Away."
If we want people to feel less congested, they are going to have to get out of cars — and sadly sometimes onto crowded transit, but at least on transit we have a fighting chance of building the capacity so that congestion isn’t totally unbearable. The differential between the demand to use roads and the actual road space is so large that no matter what we do in the foreseeable future, the roads will always be busy, and even if we made it so that the auto fleet in the region barely grew at all (not going to happen), congestion would still be getting worse.
It's a perfect follow-up to my recent post about trains. And it's the reality we all need to accept if we are truly serious about managing congestion. It's time for some tough love, and for solutions over politics