"Urbanist Sprawl" Revisited

You can't build a city out of off-the-shelf suburban parts

There’s an idea related to urbanism that I think is a little bit under-discussed/underappreciated: the “scale” problem, or the relationship between urban form/land use on the one hand, and complementary “urban-scaled” accoutrements on the other.

This issue of scale is talked about a fair amount with regard to vehicles: garbage trucks or fire trucks sized for city streets, small cars and e-bikes that are good for city driving in particular.

It’s also discussed with regard to buildings themselves. Parking requirements and double-stairwell requirements have had the effect of making the typical residential multifamily building larger, which a lot of people dislike aesthetically and which can deaden the feeling of street life. The “single-stair” reform is about making it easier to build moderately-sized multifamily buildings (because two stairwells make smaller buildings uneconomical).

Removing parking requirements is about more than that, but it can also help have the same effect—the kind of builders who might build one small multifamily building probably can’t afford the real estate to meet a suburban-style minimum parking-space requirement, while big developers can afford to build a parking garage.

Where I think “scale” is underappreciated is with regard to business enterprises. I’ve written about this a fair amount; I think it’s really key to good urbanism, and I want to write about it again because I recently talked to a couple of folks who know much more than I do about this question, and that conversation backed up my general impressions about the issue.

I was chatting, at a multi-organization urbanist happy hour in D.C., with a couple of guys from Torti Gallas, the company behind Rockville, Maryland’s King Farm and a number of other tasteful, well-designed, New Urbanism-inspired projects, most of them relatively dense and mixed-use.

The whole architecture/development/financing side of buildings/cities is very much not my area of expertise, but we were talking a little bit about the interplay of finance and retail and development. In simplified form, banks have certain ideas about what projects are viable and what they want to lend for and how much; they like to see comps for other similar projects. This is one reason why so much new development all looks and feels rather similar: the design and planning aspect is influenced by what can be easily financed, which is reliant on the project looking like other projects, which creates a self-reinforcing cycle of sameness.

I have gathered, from writing on this issue before, that one reason why you find somewhat quirky, non-standard arrangements in business and the way buildings are used in immigrant neighborhoods, is that immigrant entrepreneurs are often not using typical financing. They’re using cash or alternative financing paths (like small banks or financing arrangements within their community) that do not put up the same roadblocks. Lenders within those communities do have comps, because they’re familiar with this whole “alternative”—i.e., outmoded but once very normal in America—mode of business.

Another issue is what prestige retailers want. Developers and architects need to design spaces for flagship tenants, because having high-end/mainstream/corporate tenants is part of the value and business proposition of the project, which in turn is part of the financing. This means designing/building spaces to specs that are desirable for chain retailers. One of the guys I was talking to said that even if there are no parking requirements in the zoning code, they would typically need to include a fair amount of parking, because the sort of commercial tenants the project needs want ample parking. They might even want more than they need, because they don’t have “comps” for urban stores, to a large extent, and err on the side of more rather than less parking.

The gist of the conversation is that no single actor in this world can just go ahead and “do urbanism,” because there are so many overlapping and interrelated concerns. And I also gather than because everything is big/corporate/financed, it’s very expensive for things to fail. It’s tough to iterate or try things out at this scale, and nobody wants to be the first one to expose themselves to that risk.

This gives me some background for why we have this “scale problem.” For example, I often use this little story when I’m talking about scale, about three supermarkets along a commercial strip out in Gainesville, Virginia (Prince William County, D.C. exurbs):

Madison Crescent broke ground in 2005 or 2006. The strip plaza and supermarket were finished first in 2008, and the housing was slowly built out. The final homes were built only by 2017 or 2018. The supermarket closed in 2020.

The final supermarket, a massive Wegmans, is located right in between these two developments. It opened in late 2008.

Wegmans is the nicest and largest of the three. The Shoppers only lasted two years, and the Harris Teeter failed only two years after the adjacent housing was built out. The three supermarkets coexisted for a very short time. And now anybody who lives in Somerset Pointe or Madison Crescent needs to hop in the car to buy any sort of groceries.

Madison Crescent was a mixed-use, New Urbanist-ish development featuring a supermarket. But because American mainstream grocery chains don’t really have small, urban-format stores that could work to serve a small trade area in this generally low-density exurban area, the only easy option for a supermarket to anchor that community was a typical suburban big-box store. That store could, apparently, not compete. Its actual business model had little to do with the role it was supposed to play in anchoring a little pocket of high density in a semi-rural area. You can’t assemble an urban environment out of off-the-shelf suburban parts.

Why don’t smaller grocery stores designed to fit into smaller storefronts, in towns or cities or to anchor specific developments, really exist? They used to; a typical mainstream supermarket in the 1950s or 1960s was about 10,000-15,000 square feet. Obviously a store that size would have fewer items, but they still had all the departments, real butchers and bakeries, etc.

The whole discussion of financing may shed some light on this. It has been decades since mainstream grocery chains have operated stores like that, and, in a world where most people can hop in a car to drive five minutes to the bigger grocery store with the bigger parking lot, maybe it just doesn’t pencil out.

And the people designing and building these mixed-use developments can’t just wave a wand and put the “right” kinds of businesses in. Those businesses have to be enticed to site there, and more than that, they have to exist. The kind of grocery store (or discount department store) that would work in these spaces is just not a common thing.

It is much more common among immigrant communities. There are so many sub-10,000-square-foot ethnic grocery stores with actual meat counters, frozen and refrigerator sections, produce, and packaged goods. They’re cheap, too! There’s also a whole logistics question here: mainstream supermarkets are designed for huge truckloads. Most of these small ethnic stores don’t have truck bays for tractor trailers. They use distributors that sell to smaller companies. Etc. etc. These are not insurmountable, and I certainly don’t know everything about it. But there’s a lot of inertia here, a lot of doing things because that’s how we do it.

I keep thinking that this is one of the nuts to crack if we’re going to “do urbanism” well in America. Getting land use and transportation right is important, but it’s not the whole ballgame.

I’m especially interested in anyone who has specific insight into the inner workings/decision-making of the business side of these questions. Leave a comment!

---

Related Reading:

The Neighborhood Supermarket Never Disappeared

A New One Bites The Dust

Not Quite On Target

---