> In North-American zoning, zones clearly specify which use is allowed on it. In general, zones allow only one or two uses. For example, a residential single-family detached home zone tolerates only single-family detached houses. Don't try to put a convenience store or a school in one, nor a duplex.

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/japanese-zoning.ht...

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845

Here in the city, there are shops everywhere. Mix use residential is fairly common with retail on the ground floor and condos/apartments up top. This has created a glut of storefronts with varying results. Its nice to have all these shops, but the glut of small storefronts means much lowered rents than before so a lot of fly-by-night businesses take over, and in my opinion, hurt the neighborhood like pawn shops, yet another open 4am tattoo shop, yet another shitty independent cricket/boost reseller, yet another liquor convenience store, yet another e-cig store, yet another detailing/hand carwash, yet another gourmet-style restaurant that will fold in 12 months, etc. Desireable shops like Trader Joes or Nordstrom can't open in those tiny and no parking storefronts so its high margin retail junk.

This isn't as common anymore -- thank god, but when I was a kid, every other residential block in Chicago had a corner bar. A few nice, but most just depressing places full of serious drunks causing problems all through the night. So yeah, being too liberal with business licenses isn't so great.

So this kind of thing cuts both ways, but yes, in the suburbs its especially bad. But at least they have the roads and capacity to handle it and their shopping centers are massive, which is nice as you can park at a giant mall or strip mall and get everything you need done. I can't do that, I have no giant structures like this remotely near me. In the city, we need closer stores because of how bad traffic and parking are. If suburban driving was this bad then they'd have the political impetus to change zoning.

tldr; city planning is hard and political.

And Trader Joe's can and does operate in no-parking storefronts in sufficiently dense neighborhoods.

I don't consider pawn shops and e-cig shops keeping things vibrant. Nice bars and clubs, restaurants, and unique retail do. Personally, I think pawn shops and payday loan stores are predatory and should be highly regulated if not eliminated. High margin junk like that edges out nicer stores because condo associations just want to go with the quick cash. For example, a lot of women here would love more boutique stores but the rent these stores can afford is being edged out by the guy selling $50 e-cigs. Then the e-cig market will normalize, crash, and these guys will go away, but we've chased off the boutique crowd and our neighborhood is now known for e-cigs, pawnshops, and tattoo parlours. That isn't terribly appealing, especially in Chicago where we have world-class tattoo artists within a short CTA ride away. Why go with the local shady scratcher on the corner? In other words, we are already vibrant.

I do very much like that we have mixed zoning bringing some unique things like a very nice comic book shop and lots of interesting small restaurants that would otherwise have a hard time renting a proper stand-alone brick and mortar store. I think this is all working itself out or will in the long run. I've already seen multiple shady convenience stores go out of business, but that's largely because we won't give them liquor licenses as there are already enough liquor outlets within walking distance. I think one of the vape lounges died recently too and newer development seems to be attracting a higher caliber of business. Maybe the low end high margin stuff is maximized for our neighborhood at this point? Or maybe condo associations are learning that its within their interests to be more discriminating and vetting businesses that might affect their property values, the neighborhood feel, neighborhood safety, etc.

I'm okay letting the market sort it out, but I think its fair to say that all this sudden cheap retail space in an gentrifying urban neighborhood can be disrupting in a bad way until things get sorted out. The argument above that the suburbs should accept this model without criticism is weak sauce. I've lived in poorer suburbs that saw their city counterparts do well with heavy retail and became more liberal with business licenses and now these suburbs just became liquor store, payday loan, and fast food havens. Large blocks of residential with no retail in the suburbs is a feature, not a bug. They're trying to avoid these and other problems (noise, traffic, etc) by segregating the two. Its actually a smart approach if you have the land and the roads to pull it off. If you guys are unhappy in the suburbs because of that, then come join us in the city.

I don't understand, you just claimed the rent is too low, now you are saying it's too high for boutiques.

> I'm okay letting the market sort it out.

You just wrote 4 paragraphs on why you're not ok with letting the market sort it out. The "market" (people who live in your neighborhood) is obviously supporting this "high margin junk." Maybe your neighbors aren't interested in overpriced boutique crap?

> Or maybe condo associations are learning that its within their interests to be more discriminating and vetting businesses that might affect their property values, the neighborhood feel, neighborhood safety, etc.

Let me tl;dr your post for you - "I don't like poor people."

Retail creates undesirable traffic and crime (at least, that's their common assumption). The suburbs fight hard to keep that as far away from residential areas as possible.

Sometimes they push this to the logical extreme conclusion -- zoning commercial spaces almost exclusively at the edge of their limits.

Here's examples of the actual zoning permitted in Kentwood and Grandville, (suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan).

http://www.ci.kentwood.mi.us/CityOfKentwood/media/files/orig...

http://www.cityofgrandville.com/images/pdf/Zoning%20Map%20Ap...

On both maps, you'll see almost all of the red (commercial) areas are near various edge boundaries, and there's little-to-no commercial activity allowed near any central neighborhood(s).

This is an undisputed fact, as people in those communities will readily protest the "crime train" coming through their neighborhoods.[1][2]

[1]: http://lewwaters.com/2012/05/22/light-rail-likely-to-raise-v...

[2]: http://larslarson.com/would-you-trust-your-kid-on-the-crime-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81tihdzaecc

This is the same high school that has a huge active oil derrick in the middle of campus:

http://www.nileguide.com/destination/blog/los-angeles/2010/0...

That was the camel's nose under the tent, and organizations influenced by the Ku Klux Klan used zoning laws as a tool for enforcing segregation at a municipal level.

Zoning has been leaving its dirty mark since the 1920s.

Nowadays, you can probably just mentally substitute "colored" wherever you see "multi-family" or "high density", to get a sense of the original wording of the laws. The zoning map for my municipality actually uses the color brown for multi-family residential zones, and a light peach color for single-family & detached residential!

That may be an unfortunate coincidence. Zoning is probably much more about class boundaries than race now. Rich people don't want poor people walking past their houses. Or driving past them. Or seeing them. Or knowing they exist.

What's wrong with that? It's what they want.

Suburbs are unnatural and inorganic, and that's what people either hate or love about them.

This being said, there's frequently a "convenience store" that's sometimes closer than Big Mart. No veggies or actually even food, but they're there.

The British are big optimisers. That's why the supermarket oligopoly (Tesco, Sainsbury's etc) have taken over many -- perhaps even the majority -- of small, neighbourhood shops (Tesco Express, Sainsbury's Local etc). The distribution centres and large vehicle fleet that delivers to the big supermarkets is reused to deliver to the neighbourhood shops, and many people then walk (or cycle) to those shops.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+...

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+...

Milton Keynes is generally regarded as a boring, US-style city: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... (I've never been).

The British invented optimization in the WWII sense of the word, so yeah.

I don't know Britain beyond what I read of it, but I understand there's the concept of "little Britain" as a thing so maybe that's why small shops exist. In Montreal, I know there are actual bodegas in the city center and American-style convenience stores in the 'burbs.

No easy walking around town. All chain stores, very few independent shops. No hailable black cabs for some reason, everything involved calling a minicab and waiting. Just a terrible city to be in without a car and a designated driver.

Realistically, a person walking at 3 mi/h won't walk more than 0.5 miles to visit the local shop, and a person bicycling at 12 mi/h won't go more than 3. They won't, unless they are combining trips. If the shop is on the way to somewhere else, or a very short distance beyond their primary destination, they might go further overall.

But pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure is practically nonexistent anywhere in the US except for a bare handful of cities and suburbs. Many places don't even have sidewalks. Nearly everyone uses an automobile for personal transport.

As such, the "local shop" is right there at the gas station. We call them "convenience stores". They are most often placed at the intersection of arterial roads. So if you are lost in the back streets of suburbia, you will never see one.

It doesn't make sense from a planning perspective, but it does from a money perspective. When a developer subdivides a large property, they reserve commercial lots next to the arterial road, and build access roads past those into the residential lots. In theory, once the houses are 80% built, all that residential traffic will be flowing past the commercial lots at least twice per day, and a business will build there.

In practice, the developer exits after 95% of the houses are built, dumps the remaining 5% and the commercial lots on a strawman company, moving on to the next subdivision, and those businesses never actually get constructed.

So you end up with huge areas of houses and very few businesses. There might be one strip mall every 3 miles, filled with businesses that usually last a few months before failing from lack of customers. (The exception is the pizza delivery, which will be absolutely thriving.)

Residential buildings simply have a higher profit margin. Think about that before you decide to trust the developer's "phase IV" plans, when you're buying in "phase I".

The USA would be a much nicer place if no new residential development could be built without sidewalks. It would only require a little vision on the part of planning & zoning boards, with perhaps a little empathy for children, the elderly, and others who can't drive.

Besides that, have you ever read a zoning law? Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it, good and hard.

I live in a burb thats a bit over fifty years old and there's no spot more than maybe 6 blocks from the arterial retail/commercial/restaurant strips? In some new burbs you can easily be over a mile from anything other than residential.

I will say that when I was a kid there was a lot more to do in big zones because obviously there's more basements and garages and back yards and just plain old more kids. I mean, there's only about 200 kids in my current subdivision so with a distribution of ages its quite likely that there's no one to hang out with in the neighborhood for my own kids, whereas that's never an issue in a bigger zone where there's always a friend in the same neighborhood to hang out with. Some modern zones are so big that entire elementary school districts live within the borders of single zone! Obviously those kids always have someone to hang out with in the neighborhood.

And of course the bigger the zone, the crazier the traffic on the roads between the zones, which sucks.

Middle levels have the money to burn and often prioritize time over money. Plus complaining about paying $3 for an apple at the gas station quickie mart is a rare and cheap conspicuous consumption opportunity for them. I only have about 2 hours "off" unallocated tonight and I'm not going to spend 1/4 of my time off today saving $2 on the cost of an apple by going out of my way to shop at the food store.

For poor people its a poor people budgeting thing. As per the previous recent discussions on HN, poor guy has $3 in pocket, gas station has $3 apple on shelf, he buys it because 1) he doesn't have $5 to buy a 5 pound bag from the supermarket 2) no idea when/if he'll ever have an extra $5 again to spend on an extra luxury like an apple 3) travel isn't free when you're poor so bus fare and hours spent taking public transit to the store and time spent not working means that $5 bag is more like $15 total systemic cost and thats a bit steep for a poor guy who just has a taste for an apple today?

Upper levels have their personal assistant / admin assistant buy the apple for them. Its all going to be expense-d and its a rounding error anyway and the admin assistant is in a hurry so fine here take this $3 convenience store apple and I need a receipt for that thanks.

And thats how we love our $3 convenience store apples. Despite most apple sales being in 5 pound bags at the supermarket of course.

I couldn't help but read the rest of this paragraph in Cartman's voice.

What's interesting is this trend seems to be reversing a little bit in clusters. Younger people are migrating back to the cities, and more developers in the suburbs are building apartment complexes with shops and restaurants mixed together, giving it the feel of living above a really nice mini mall. :)

The ultimate convenience store is attached to a gas station and has a drive-up window so you don't need to get out of your car.

While the ones with drive through windows are rare, I'd be hard pressed to think of a convenience store within a 30 mile radius that was not also a gas station. As far as I can recall, I only see c-stores that don't sell gas inside cities.