Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.