Loosen Up: How Mixed-Use Zoning Laws Make Communities Strong
(Source: Amy Gizienski, Flickr)
One of my favorite things about living in a neighborhood with a lot of young families is the way children make their presence known.
I love the sights and sounds of kids shrieking with joy as they take their first bike and scooter rides of the spring, running through sprinklers in the summer, or gleefully jumping in piles of leaves in the fall. I don’t even mind the sound of teens goofing around on the basketball court — while their blaring music and the endless reverberating thunks against the backboard can get old, it reminds me that they’re having fun and not getting into trouble.
One thing I especially love seeing is posters for kid businesses. Lemonade stands, snow shovelers, lawn mowers, dog walkers (and dog pooper scoopers), babysitters... Kids often have a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and most people enjoy supporting them.
While kids eventually grow out of the card-table-on-the-lawn stage of life, I think it’s a mistake to see this as a sign that entrepreneurial spirit fades with age. Modern zoning rules have put up huge barriers to starting or running a business from home, the place with the lowest barrier to entry and the lowest stakes — the natural jumping-off place to try out a new idea or venture.
Looking around any older neighborhood, you’ll find signs that it used to be normal to have businesses coexisting with residences.
The most obvious example is the “clearly used to be a corner store” house. Here’s one in my neighborhood. Years ago, it was Hart Meat & Grocery Store. Each time I pass by, I daydream a little about it being a small convenience store again, where I could walk for a bag of ice, a Saturday newspaper or a carton of milk. Or an ice cream shop where my kids could walk on their own to get a cone or sundae. Or a small cafe to meet a friend for coffee. The possibilities are endless. Except that it’s no longer zoned for commercial use, so to bring it back to that use, you’d need to apply for rezoning and likely several variances, which would be prohibitively expensive — with no guarantee of the application even being successful!
This house used to be a corner store, a sign of how neighborhoods were once a mix of residential and commercial buildings.
Other home-based businesses operated in ways that left no trace. A couple of years ago, some neighborhood friends outgrew their house and bought a bigger one, one street over. As I was describing the location of their new home to an acquaintance who’d lived here for decades, he mused, “Hmmm… I think that’s the house that used to do Christmas tree sales in their yard.” Say what, now? I looked through old classified ads in a newspaper archive database and discovered this was indeed something people did: set up a tree lot in December, on their own property, right in the middle of their neighborhood. And sure enough, our friends’ new home had been the location of a Christmas tree lot for several decades.
The days of mid-block tree lots and corner stores seem to be over. Over time, zoning has reshaped our neighborhoods and our buying patterns. And we’ve just gotten used to getting our Christmas trees and milk from bigger outfits. What have we lost, though? Maybe a lot.
As a kid, the first place I remember being allowed to go on my own was a small grocery store called Jennifer’s Grocery (though everyone called it Joe’s because Joe was the friendly man behind the counter). It was in a small strip mall with a handful of small units, smack in the middle of a residential area. We’d walk or ride our bikes over to get penny candy or a bag of chips. This strip mall had a few stalls of angle parking out front, but it blended pretty seamlessly into the neighborhood. It was built in the ‘50s, probably right at the tail end of an era where commercial buildings were still incorporated into new neighborhoods (you can see the auto-orientation creeping into its design). Although there’s no longer a grocery store there, the little mall remains and evolves with a variety of different small businesses.
Local businesses can bring neighborhoods together.
In this post from the Lethbridge Historical Society, folks wax nostalgic about the big role that Jennifer’s played in their childhoods. They remembered being sent to the store to pick up a missing supper ingredient, and they remembered the names of the folks who worked there and the other businesses that sat alongside it. “The hub of the neighborhood,” one person categorized it.
There’s just something so special about a place you can walk to — a place that adapts and endures, where you know and are known. It feels like it’s yours. In a piece about the community benefits of walkability, Sarah Kobos captures this sense of familiarity and engagement beautifully:
“As people start to recognize you, the smiles get bigger, and the hellos get friendlier. You start to feel that we’re all in this thing together. Every time it happens, it makes my day. Every time, I feel a part of something bigger and better than myself. Maybe that’s the definition of community.”
That commercial units have been zoned out of existence in older neighborhoods — and never allowed in the first place in newer ones — is a real loss for residents. Kids miss out on opportunities to build independence. People have no choice but to drive to get groceries or anything else they might need, even something as small as a carton of milk. And there are fewer opportunities to just bump into people you know. These seem like little things, but collectively, they make life harder, more expensive and more isolated.
And while people will often point to parking or noise as reasons we should keep commerce out, it’s usually the scale of the operation that is objectionable, not the use. Many of us would be happy to live beside a small coffee shop that folks could walk to; most of us wouldn't want to live next door to a Tim Hortons or Dunkin Donuts drive-through.
Despite the restrictive environment that entrepreneurs find themselves in these days, there are, all sorts of home businesses operating — though many of them are not technically permitted. And even when they are permitted, they’re certainly not encouraged. I tried to find home-based business rules for my city and had to dig through a 400-page zoning bylaw and then a bunch of application forms and web pages to try to make sense of what’s allowed here.
Imagine how many thriving home businesses there could be if we actually encouraged people to make a go of them, rather than creating as much red tape as possible. Chuck Marohn made a good point here:
“Would Bill Gates or Steve Jobs be able to start their multibillion-dollar businesses in their garage today? Not with the zoning restrictions found in most cities. If you can do the business inside the house or an outbuilding and nobody passing by can tell, then there is not a lot of justification for regulating it. We can let entrepreneurs get started by easing up on home occupations.”
I see the rich relationships and connections that grow out of supporting small local businesses in my neighborhood, whether they are artisans, teachers, yoga instructors or beyond. More opportunities for people to make a living, and for the rest of us to support them, can only be a good thing.
Dylan Reid had a great article on spotting (and reviving) the neighborhood corner commercial building. In it, he suggests that “one small nudge… could be to designate all of these former corner shops inside neighborhoods as automatically, as-of-right, eligible to be reconverted to commercial uses.” Even if these buildings didn’t return to being corner shops, this designation would allow other businesses to enter the community. “It’s a change that would be relatively subtle,” Reid explains, “since it would only affect a tiny fraction of the buildings in a neighborhood.”
That would be a great start! I think we can go even further. Ashley Salvador makes a compelling case for permitting accessory commercial units, saying, "Many of today’s urban dwellers want their leisure, consumption, health, and employment needs to be met within close proximity to their home in an affordable, accessible manner.” Accessory commercial units could make this possible.
If it were easier to run a business from home, would every kid with a snow-shoveling hustle or dog-walking gig grow up and keep running a business from home? Not necessarily. But one thing’s for certain: With our current zoning rules, there's a lot of them who’ll never get the chance.
Whether it’s restoring commercial uses within neighborhoods, allowing the construction of accessory commercial units, or easing red tape and restrictions on home-based businesses, there’s so much that cities can do to help entrepreneurs make our neighborhoods more vibrant, walkable and prosperous.
Emma Durand-Wood likes walkable cities, front porches, street trees, bumping into neighbors, riding her bike, downtowns, and any excuse to check out a new coffee shop, bakery, or shop. A Winnipegger by choice, she lives in Elmwood with her husband and three children. You can connect with her on Twitter @emmaewood.