Place breaking versus place making: Making people places | independent coffee shops, small business spaces, outdoor spaces

One of the major precepts of Jane Jacobs Life and Death of the Great American City is that cities need "a large stock of old buildings."  

East Ohio Street, Allegheny City, Pittsburgh.

This wasn't because she was a historic preservationist, but because old, mostly paid off buildings were cheaper to rent space from than new buildings ("Big Data Backs Jane Jacobs: Cities Need Old Buildings," Smart Cities Dive, Older, Smaller, Better Measuring how the character of buildings and blocks influences urban vitality, NTHP).

1. Older, mixed-use neighborhoods are more walkable. 
2. Young people love old buildings.
3. Nightlife is most alive on streets with a diverse range of building ages. 
4. Older business districts provide affordable, flexible space for entrepreneurs from all backgrounds. 
5. The creative economy thrives in older, mixed-use neighborhoods.
6. Older, smaller buildings provide space for a strong local economy. 
7. Older commercial and mixed-use districts contain hidden density.  

What she didn't anticipate is that in strong markets, either at the city-wide or sub-district scale, regional, national and international real estate actors would bid up the space and improve it, so that even "old buildings," became the equivalent of flashy and new and not cheap to rent.

Early on when I got involved in commercial district revitalization, I believed that only historic buildings were capable of supporting the kind of innovation that Jacobs wrote about.

But later I came to understand it was more about the building as an envelope.  I came across really cool businesses in 50s and 60s strip centers in Phoenix and West Seattle that were in "modern buildings" but older and cheaper, and that innovation was dependent both on rent pricing and the capacity of the business proprietor to be cool.

Place breaking.  Years ago, charlie commented on how gentrification changes places, business proprietors, businesses, amenities etc.  It's not a new concept but I didn't pay it enough attention.  Recently, I came across the term "place breaking" as opposed to "place making" in terms of maintaining vital and interesting places, neighborhoods and commercial districts ("How might the concept of ‘place-breaking’ challenge and support the practice of place- making?").

For example, there used to be a cheap Chinese quick service restaurant up from Dupont Circle Metro Station, where you could buy dinner, with extra rice, for less than $5.  (Yes, this was the 1990s.)  That space got bought by a national REIT and upscaled.

Supreme Taste is located at the corner of Broadview and Gerrard in East Chinatown. Nick Lachance Toronto Star.

Karon Liu of the Toronto Star makes a good point about how Chinatowns are defined in part by great Chinese BBQ ("This Toronto restaurant keeps Chinese barbecue alive").  That without it the experience and opportunity is lacking.  That's a simple example of place breaking.

I've come across a book on the topic, Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City, although it's more about the process of upscaling a place and how its changed.  I do look forward to reading it.

It reminded me of the book It's Hardly Sportin' about Wrigleytown, the commercial district adjacent to Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play.  

The book describes how "capitulating" to night baseball changed the business mix towards nightlife and entertainment away from serving neighborhood residents.

Strip centers.  Unfortunately, strip centers can be a major real estate asset class owned by the same regional, national, and international actors, depending on the market, with costly rents, therefore mostly attracting chain businesses.  But thousands are still independently owned and capable of supporting independent business.

-- Ten Principles for Reinventing America's Suburban Strips, "The Future of the Strip," ULI

IN THE SUBURBS.  Because center city rents trend high, suburban strip centers can be a locus of innovation in the way that the center city no longer is.  You see this a lot in restaurant reviews, for example Tim Carman of the Washington Post and Karon Liu of the Toronto Star write a lot about great restaurants in suburban strip centers.

This strip center in Scarborough is working with the organization plazaPOPS to reallocate some parking spaces to pop up markets.

In Toronto there is also an initiative to work with Strip Centers to improve their place value ("Toronto-area strip malls are foodie havens. Here’s how this project is helping them become places for people, not just cars," Star).

Infographic: Independent Coffee Shops.  I suspect that the cities with a higher density of independently owned coffee shops have a greater amount of independently owned retail spaces still.  It hasn't all been rolled up by the big firms.

Infographic by OnDeck.

Sunset Strip, West Hollywood.  There is a superb article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood and how it has changed with the change of real estate ownership and upscaling of retail concepts so that it no longer has space for "hanging out" the way it did back in the 60s and 70s when it was known for eclectic and electric nightlife, including the club Whiskey A Go Go where The Doors band got its start.  ("Once LA's nightlife epicenter, the storied Sunset Strip has a murky future").  Also see "Then and now: See how much the Sunset Strip is changing," Curbed LA.

Ultimately, the Strip writ large has failed to produce more substantive scenes in recent decades because it’s no longer amenable to supporting a critical cornerstone of subcultures: the lost art of hanging out, where fun also comes with absorbing and exchanging ideas. The raucous venues of decades past lived alongside locales like Ben Frank’s, a now-defunct 24-hour coffee shop, where people could spend time together in a low-stakes environment. “Youth culture, even if it isn’t counterculture, needs people running into each other, physically, in space,” Rupert says. “And that’s not what the landscape of [the Sunset Strip] offers anymore. I can’t think of a single place you could just go and hang out without, like, an $80 bar tab.” 

Interestingly, the City of West Hollywood's Economic Development Strategy report acknowledges the "deficiencies" to small business and nightlife and affordability as the district is "upscaled" and calls for changes. 

Little Saigon in Annandale.  The Washington Post writes about a two mile strop in Falls Church being designated as "Little Saigon" in recognition of the Asian business enclave-cluster there ("East Coast’s largest Vietnamese cultural hub now sits on ‘Saigon Blvd.’" also "This ‘Little Saigon’ shaped their childhood. Now they fear for its future," 2023).

Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., contains the East Coast’s largest concentration of Vietnamese businesses. Local government officials are drafting a possible blueprint on how it might be enhanced. (Valerie Plesch for The Washington Post)

Interestingly, this cluster got its start in Clarendon in Arlington County, when post-war Vietnamese immigrants settled there, because it was cheaper.  This is an example of how later generations of immigrants migrate directly to the suburbs without an initial stop in the center city.

As Arlington implemented its "urban renewal" plan for the Wilson Boulevard corridor, the district moved west into Fairfax County and Falls Church.

There's been a couple year planning process on how to maintain the enclave without losing properties to large scale actors.  Like some of the other planning initiatives mentioned above, the University of Maryland planning school did a workshop and report on how to maintain the centrality of small businesses in this ecosystem ("New Tools for Keeping Immigrant-Owned Shops in Place," Maryland Today)  

Ironically, I remember them doing a similar report about Silver Spring in the early 2000s.  And more recently on the Purple Line corridor (Preventing Small Business Displacement in Six Neighborhoods Along Maryland’s Purple Line Light Rail Corridor, A Long Life for Long Branch: Tools to Preserve Independent Retailers).  It'd be interesting to compare.  (And frustrating, because probably, over 20+ years, the recommendations are pretty similar.)

-- Small Business Anti-Displacement Toolkit, 2024

Bars in Shinjuku’s Golden Gai.Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg

Tokyo.  Granted, my only knowledge of Tokyo comes from watching NHK.  But the metropolis, while it has plenty of tall modern buildings and big business districts, maintains a large stock of old and smaller buildings" located in what they call "shopping streets" as well as many districts across the city.  

Japan has both a strong retail chain system like 7-11 and independent businesses simultaneously ("Why 7-Eleven Is a National Treasure in Japan," New York Time).  In other words, Japan allows for a heterogeneous retail sector, partly because of how property ownership is organized, unlike the US where it is more homogeneous and oligopolistic and focused on large property owners.  (Plus, why are their chains like 7-11 better than ours?)

This allows for the creation and maintenance of all kinds of small businesses, although as the way work is organized affects the survival capability of some of these place ("Why Neighborhoods and Small Businesses Thrive in Tokyo," Bloomberg, "Last orders? Soaring costs and declining demand take toll on Japan’s legendary izakaya,").

Microspace and regulation in Tokyo.  The book Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City discusses ground up small business development in terms of microspaces and the regulatory regime which supports them, a regulatory framework that is much different from the US.  From the Bloomberg article:

There is an economic logic to these developments. If you’re developing something at large scale, you want to get a high return. So you’re looking usually at luxury condos, stacked over high-end retail and restaurants, maybe with some anchoring project like an art gallery, and also what’s called POPS, privately owned public space. 

 We’re not saying it’s all bad. There are reasons to have those kind of projects, but there are things that corporate urbanism can’t easily bring to your city like a sense of community, spontaneity, idiosyncrasy, surprise that really make our cities flourishing and exciting places to be.

... This is going to sound wild to anyone who lives in the US, but for any two-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor — even in the most residential zoned sections of the city. That means you have an incredible supply of potential microspaces. Any elderly homeowner could decide to rent out the bottom floor of their place to some young kid who wants to start a coffee shop, for example.

... Of course, regulation at all different levels figures into that. It’s this incredibly dry topic, but actually how you regulate small business and spaces changes everything about the emotional color palette that your city can paint with. In Tokyo, for example, small businesses get a lot of interesting tax incentives. Liquor licenses are extremely cheap and easy. A liquor license in an American city can sometimes run up to $500,000. You’re not going to have a little four-seat, mom-and-pop bar for the locals. So those regulatory and policy choices that we make fundamentally determine what our cities are going to feel like.

Fullerton, California.  Is one of many cities ("Fullerton’s ‘Walk on Wilshire’ to permanently close at end of month," Orange County Register), small and large--Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, etc.--that are ridding themselves of street closure initiatives focused at providing business opportunities for restaurants and commercial districts in the face of covid and restrictions on how many people could be in a business at any one time.

A deadlocked vote by the Fullerton City Council means the city’s popular downtown promenade, Walk on Wilshire, will close permanently at the end of the month. Wilshire Avenue will reopen to vehicular traffic.

The 200-foot street closure on Wilshire Avenue west of Harbor Boulevard began in 2020 to spur outdoor dining during the peak of the pandemic. The road was closed to vehicles to create outdoor dining spaces intended to help local restaurants at a time when California imposed indoor dining restrictions and people were looking for more social distancing options. Over five years, the City Council extended the temporary street closure multiple times while launching a pilot program to permit business owners to rent and build parklets on the street space. A majority of Fullerton residents seemed to support the street closure, according to a city survey. Large crowds of residents urged the City Council to continue the program in October and again in January.

Still, a majority of the several restaurants along that stretch of Wilshire Avenue declined to participate in the parklet program due to its associated costs. Restaurants needed to lease street space from the city to build a parklet. Jung and Valencia argued it would be too expensive for the city to continue the program permanently. A staff report said the city invested $90,000 in the temporary partial street closure and would need to spend up to another $250,000 for a permanent closure. Staff estimated the city would recoup $60,000 per year in annual lease revenue from participating businesses.

A view along the tree-lined Wilshire Avenue from the intersection of Harbor Boulevard in downtown Fullerton Fullerton on Thursday, January 28, 2021. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG).

I wrote a piece back then, "From more space to socially distance to a systematic program for pedestrian districts (Park City (Utah) Main Street Car Free on Sundays)," making the point that cities and commercial districts should have been focused already on making spaces attractive to potential customers--place making instead of place breaking.  But that it was good to take advantage of covid in terms of changing retail business practices.

Sadly, by going back to a focus on privileging the car, cities are diminishing one of their key potential competitive advantages--walkability.

-- "What is the competitive advantage for the post-covid city? Doubling down on place values" (2022)

-- "Pedestrianization of Newark Avenue in Jersey City"  (2022)