Hair/nail salons, waxing and esthetician services, makeup and photo studios, etc.
Every nail salon in 10 square-block radius of me (in SF, SOMA) closed during the pandemic. SF residential rents aren't affordable for a trade/services businessperson. Tradespeople stopped commuting 2+ hours into the city when businesses fled. For a city to thrive, services/trade labor needs to live near their work.
On a personal level, I want to run a small manufacturing shop to dog-food my own product (https://printnanny.ai/ - automation for 3D printer ecommerce shops).
My options are currently:
* Move to a single-family home in surburbia, so I can work out of a garage/shed.
* Lease a business-zoned office suite in SF, commute every day.
* Live in a building zoned for business/residential, so I can legally run an office without inviting ire from an SF condo HOA.
* leave the Bay Area and go somewhere with higher quality of life and lower real estate prices (read: basically anywhere that isn't Tokyo or NYC), go for residential housing + commercial property
unless you have some reason to pick SF?
My wife and I made the opposite move. We had a house, a life, in the suburbs for more than a decade and now happily live in a 1 bedroom loft in SOMA. I would say that for our life, we live in a smaller (it's still pretty big, and not actually that expensive) in the city exactly because of the lifestyle/hobbies/family life we enjoy as a result. It's like the city is your living room.
Even though work and housing aren't in the same buildings, military housing can provide a good lens into this.
IMO, that's not really fair - at least for barracks. And I don't really think that "married" house style housing really applies since it's a suburb that just happens to be inside the base.
1. You don't own your barracks room. You generally don't have any ability to change furniture, appliances, paint, etc.
2. Barracks typically offer little privacy - there are periodic inspections, limits on guests, etc.
3. Military culture is a bit weird - there is often a very strong drinking culture, etc. It's not clear to me that the same social forces exist for a civilian live-work building.
4. The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty. This downside doesn't really exist in the same way for civilians.
Yet. "Ron, according to the security system there was movement inside of your company dorm room last night at 8PM when we emailed you. Since you were just at home anyway why did you decide to not be a team player?"
"The barracks are sometimes raided for off-hours extra duty."
Unless you work in IT and are on-call or the on-call doesn't answer (not fully the same, but still...).
I used to be in the city, in essentially a shoe box that cost 5k a month, but with a fancy gym and common area. I moved to Marin during COVID and while I miss the food and walking distance/public transit activities I could do, I don’t think I can go back to the extremely small for the money living area. I’m hopeful a glut of new housing, hopefully spacious, will change that calculus.