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Soviet era commie blocks with stores and doctor’s offices in first floor go brrr
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.
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.
Come to England! This is normal here!
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.
Also New York. And a lot of places, actually.
You just gave the most famous outlier in the entire country as an example.
There are lots of places with apartments on the 2nd floor and businesses on the 1st floor?
Nearly every old town square I’ve seen in the Midwest and the south has businesses on the first floor and apartments upstairs. And there are plenty of new urban apartment complexes being built with like 4 floors of apartments over restaurants and various shops. What idiot told this guy that this wasn’t a thing?
My guess is that this experience is very true in suburban North America where you need to drive everywhere and commerical real estate is usually a strip mall. In cities it is very common for lower level of condo towers to have shops and things.
Not even that. I have lived in various small town and suburbs around Indiana and Tennessee. They’re really common here. Almost every small town’s main square is surrounded by mixed use buildings and mixed use condos are not uncommon either, especially the closer you get to urban areas.
Almost every small town’s main square is surrounded by mixed use buildings
Pick any of those towns and actually look at it from an aerial view. You’ll see that that development pattern extends for a few blocks, at most, and is surrounded by a desert of single-family houses.
Yes, a little bit of mixed use exists in each town. But to say that it’s “really common” in the US overall is absolutely false.
Towns that have them ARE really common, which was my point.
Yes, a little bit of mixed use exists in each town.
Glad we agree on the only thing I actually claimed.
So your point was vacuous, got it.
Interestingly, those main squares were all built before zoning. If they were destroyed in a disaster, they could not be rebuilt.
In cities it is very common for lower level of condo towers to have shops and things.
In cities, it is very common for everywhere except for the actual downtown core to not be condo towers at all in the first place, and instead be mostly single-family homes.
Yes, in cities-proper. Not just whole metro areas including suburbs and exurbs; even the core cities themselves are mostly single-family.
For example, here’s the City of Atlanta (not Metro Atlanta; just the core city in the middle of the metro area):
The entire light-yellow area is only single-family houses. (Note: using light yellow for single-family zoning is a common convention among city planners, so all the maps below are going to use that color scheme too.)
Here’s Los Angeles:
Here’s Austin, TX:
I could go on all day. There are only a tiny handful of cities in the United States that aren’t like this.
I think OP is talking about a single building with single-family occupancy and commercial storefront. At least in the US, a lot of single-family residential zones exclude commercial use.
Is it ‘Firetrap’? Because when Mike in 302 leaves his stove on again, y’all get 3 minutes to get out before it burns up.
\clothes-on-my-back house fire survivor. No wood houses; never again.
in firefighting, there’s also the Taxpayer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_(building)
This kinda shit is why I fear for my sister-in-law more when she’s a volunteer fireman than when she’s a mountie. You can reason with an armed resistor, but wood is fire’s favourite food and it will hurt you if you’re in its way.
Yeah I don’t know what this post is really talking about. Unless it’s not in the US or something? I used to live above a restaurant in my early 20s. There were like 4 or 5 apartments above it
Obviously different cities and states have different laws and such, but generally speaking, it’s pretty common for people to live above businesses/in commercially zoned buildings. In fact in my experience commercially owned buildings have the most flexible usage whereas residential zoning has a lot more restrictions/auditing traps If you try to operate a business out of them
In america it entirely depends on local laws and how recently the law way changed to disallow it. My town does not allow mixed zoning in new buildings but all the older buildings can still keep their status.
Even outside of the US, it’s been pretty common in my experience. Especially in cities that are a lot older where there isn’t a lot of space for new builds and they generally went up instead of out.
I would say the US is the one with the most restrictive residential zoning.
I had a friend who rented a storefront. For 5 years, the “store” had a ladder, a bucket of paint, and a picture of the Pope. He lived in the back in a gigantic barely-converted “studio” space.
Interesting guy. I think he’s clean now.
Yeah very common in small towns around the square. Many of them are offices upstairs now too.
It’s where the small town lawyer always lives in a John Grisham book.
Yeah very common in small towns around the square.
Yeah, “around the square.” As in, only in the oldest part of town that existed before zoning.
If that’s “common” relative to the total housing stock of the town, it means the town has stagnated for the past half-century or more. If it hasn’t stagnated, then that building type is relatively incredibly rare compared to the single-family sprawl that would make up the entire rest of the town outside the square.
Pff, much nicer to invent a situation and use that to justify destroying your country.
This is a real thing, though. Most mixed use in the US falls into one of two categories: either it was built before zoning codes (like most of the small apartments over businesses) or it’s large apartment/condo buildings. Mixed use has become a more popular concept in the past decade or so, but most residential zoning prevents the building of commercial buildings within the area and largely limits the size of dwellings to single family homes.
It’s also why 2 and 3 unit housing is a rarity as well. You mostly see either single family housing or large apartment buildings/condo complexes because it’s hard to get approved to build anything else - either through zoning laws themselves or NIMBYs killing any project.
You can thank Euclidian Zoning for that.
No, there really aren’t. Not compared to the vast swathes of suburban sprawl where they aren’t allowed.
There are lots of places with apartments on the 2nd floor and businesses on the 1st floor?
Yes. You may not believe it from the incredulous-sounding question as you’ve written it, but ‘mixed-use’ is the standard for new buildings here, for instance.
- pedestrian-targeted commercial on main/ground
- professional services - lawyers, accountants, physios, clinics, tech - on levels 2-5
- potentially hotel or low-income housing on 5-10, depending on need
- residential above that,
- rooftop patio/common space
Newer buildings here are getting loading bays in the garage: so 5-ton trucks just go into the parkade for a loading dock and a freight elevator. Buildings targeted to ‘market rental’ will often have a loading bay JUST for moving trucks.
The brand new 35fl building in this region may be targeted at new doctors interning at the local teaching hospital: they’re just across the street. Rumours abound about posh SROs with in-suite W/D (perfect for new docs) and a skybridge connecting the pro-serv level to the hospital.
There are lots of places with apartments on the 2nd floor and businesses on the 1st floor?
Yes. You may not believe it from the incredulous-sounding question as you’ve written it, but ‘mixed-use’ is the standard for new buildings here, for instance.
There’s a vast difference between mixed-use being “standard for new buildings” and having “lots of places” (measured relative to the decades upon decades worth of existing housing stock, which is almost entirely Euclidean-zoned and single-family only) be mixed-use.
Even Bob still rents though.
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.
ITT: people who think mixed-use housing is way more common than it actually is.
Ngl I live in Chicago so to me it seems like the norm rather than the outliar
It’s not, even in Chicago.
41.1% of land area is single-family only. Mixed-use, non-single-family + planned development is 33.8% of land area. The majority of residential land area in Chicago is zoned single-family only.
Considering it looks like every major arterial is zoned for mixed use, that’s not so bad. Or at least not as bad as it could be.
41.1% of land. Not the places where people actually live. Take Marina City (AKA the corncobs); there’s a restaurant on the ground floor of one, and I think House of Blues Chicago in the other, and then, I dunno, a few hundred condos above them? Go into Wicker Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, and on, and on, and almsot every single retail establishment has at least 2-3 stories of apartments and condos above it.
If you map it by population, I would expect there to be a difference.
That’s possible, but not a given. Unfortunately, it would be complicated to calculate (and perhaps not even possible unless Chicago’s GIS system has good data for how many housing units are in those Planned Developments).
Even then, Chicago is probably close to a best-case scenario, not representative of the norm.
Take households from census data, divide by number of buildings. If the number is greater than 2 you’re wrong, less, you’re right. But I don’t know if that data is available
Is this actually illegal in the US? If so, where is it legal? There’s British comedy series called Black Books where the protagonist ran a bookstore on the first floor and lived on the second floor. My wife and I have thought about opening a coffeeshop/bookstore hybrid and live right above it.
Is this actually illegal in the US? If so, where is it legal?
It varies by city, but typically the vast majority of land used for housing (upwards of 90% in some of the worst cases) is zoned for single-family detached houses only.
Small live-work places like this, with a single business on the ground floor and a single dwelling unit above, are likely typically in the single-digit percentages, in terms of land area zoned for that use.
(Even the vast majority of non-single-family detached housing wouldn’t usually allow stuff like this, but would be medium to high-density apartment/condo buildings instead. The phenomenon of having a gap in housing density is so prevalent it even has a name: “missing middle”.)
It’s totally a thing in the downtown of some older cities, and occasionally in some apartment complexes that have popped up recently, but I’d say that throughout the majority of the country, residential and commercial zones get drawn without overlap.
I live in a town in the west that is a population of about 13,000 but is well within the Seattle metropolitan area.
All of the new build in the city is apartment buildings with commerce on the street level. Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city but downtown is all mixed use for new builds.
Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city
Which means it’s going to be decades before enough redevelopment happens before mixed-use can be considered “common” compared to that sprawl.
It’s not “common” per se, but if you wanted to live above the store you owned, as the poster was talking about, it would be easy to do so in the United States today.
It would not be “easy!” You would be severely limited in your choice of location due to lack of availability compared to other housing types, and what places you do manage to find would have an inflated cost per square foot compared to other housing types because they’re bid up by demand outstripping supply.
Maybe there are certain cities where it’s common enough to be “easy” in that particular city, but you can definitely not extrapolate that to claim that it’s easy on average in the US as a whole.
The US is a huge and diverse country, and you cannot make ANY generalizations that will apply to everything. You are right that “easy” isn’t the right word, but there are places where it is possible.
I guess my original point was that there are communities that are starting to prioritize mixed use buildings and it IS at least possible now. I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
Or the '50s, '60s, or '70s. Maybe not even the '40s.
And that’s the problem: because it was illegal to build for like half a century, there’s a huge pent-up demand unmet by supply, and that’s what makes it very often inaccessible as per the meme.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Somehow works in the rest of the world? Maybe if americans weren’t so disconnected and socially retarded you wouldn’t have these issues.
Unless they are a shitty mechanic… i see that as an easy way to get discounts on car repairs…
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.
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.
