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Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024)

(www.nber.org)
118 points WasimBhai | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.436s | source
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picardo ◴[25 Jun 25 13:22 UTC] No.44377037[source]▶
I'd be interested to see an update to this study in the coming years. Starbucks has been pivoting towards take out and mobile orders and removing tables and chairs entirely from some of its stores lately.
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walterbell ◴[25 Jun 25 13:58 UTC] No.44377424[source]▶
If neighborhood entrepreneurs would benefit from seating, cities can require a minimum number of chairs per square foot, starting with a non-zero number to address US Starbucks locations that have removed all chairs.
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sorcerer-mar ◴[25 Jun 25 14:38 UTC] No.44377865[source]▶
Or they can just get rid of Euclidean zoning and allow people to create small commercial enterprises in their actual neighborhoods so actual neighbors can easily spend time there.
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picardo ◴[25 Jun 25 14:46 UTC] No.44377960[source]▶
Mixed use zoning is quite common in major American cities. It's much more complicated to implement than Euclidean zoning, though, so I assume it faces some adoption challenges in smaller cities.
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1. potato3732842 ◴[25 Jun 25 17:20 UTC] No.44379723[source]▶
Mixed use zoning is better than not allowing it at all but almost always results in the activity simply not being economically profitable due to the other restrictions.

The problem with that is that the "rich enough to have no real problems" people know that for every upscale coffee shop they like there will be five people doing heavier economic activity that they don't like and because they're the only ones with the free time to care they drive the conversation and they limit it to light consumer businesses which of course can't work because that hypothetical coffee shop or sandwich shop needs the foot traffic from all the other business (that doesn't exist, because it's not allowed) in order to actually turn a profit without insane prices. And so then nothing actually gets developed in the up-zoned area and it's still a glorified bedroom community.

The people who could actually provide the political will for a proper removal or liberalization of the zoning don't get involved, because they all have other shit going on that's more important.

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2. sorcerer-mar ◴[25 Jun 25 17:31 UTC] No.44379828[source]▶
This would be clearer if you actually described the relevant stakeholders directly instead of these oblique references. Really not sure who does what here.