Posted by theanonymousone 4 days ago
More than half of the shops are retail chains with stupidly bright colors that clash with the local architecture. The other half is cheap-looking stores and bad restaurants.
To illustrate my point, I picked a random town center on google maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5494903,0.0881482,5a,55.8y,2...
This has a costa coffee, a subway, a ladbroke, a betfred, a bright vape shop, a haart real estate agency, a bunch of hair salons, etc.
To be fair, this town has also a number of local shops that look decent. But overall the aesthetics of it is highly depressing to me.
Look at the triovet clinic, this is a local place that wants to look like a national chain.
The biggest cost is labor, but labor money isn't something you need up front, since presumably at that point you have money coming in.
I realize everyone who's watched Breaking Bad thinks it's all about money laundering, but that's not as easy to do anymore, at least where I live, and the nail salons are proliferating.
Glasgow at one point had eight American Candy Stores that were always empty but been operational for years. Not even good American Candy.
When a lake spontaneously disappears you can see all the trash on the bottom because it's no longer obscured by the water.
When economic prosperity disappears you're left with baseline services that involve people and the government, because all the other activity that was obscuring it is gone.
I mean, Ghirardelli chocolate is nice, and I am fond of Junior Mints & Bit-O-Honey..but you can miss me with most Hershey and/or Mars products.
Only yesterday, I drove into London and walked nearly 20k steps to visit the various locations on my itinerary. Not every inch of a space need be a road, but banning cars and insisting everyone walk or use public transport also isn’t the answer. We need roads adjacent to large, pedestrianised areas.
The specific problem with the UK is how London-centric and unreliable our transport infrastructure has become. Not to mention driving can be incredibly fun! Much more so than cycling when it’s pouring with rain, you’re going to a fancy event, or have a large amount to move.
Rents are high, parking difficult, the products undifferentiated (carbon copy list of the same 15-20 chain franchises), not unique. After all of that, I'll assume prices are no better and may be worse than online retail.
I'm not sure what the answer is, as retail is not my area of expertise. However I think that if there is a solution it will have something to do with people, community, and offering a specifically local experience. Not one which is purely a chore, and I think it will involve much more than just "convenience".
In general, it seems as if Oxford City Center is just too big: it can't sustain all of it, and people gravitate towards the nicer part, which is the Westgate.
Parking is a massive blight on our cities (and suburbs and rural areas)
it never ceases to baffle me to see the progressive cosmopolitan types being utterly detached from the reality they live in.
The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.
The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.
We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.
Yet this is no utopia, despite being designed for people (...and horses!).
It takes 20 mins to get to the tube station or the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a tube station and doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 or even 10 minutes walking unless you build some sort of ultra high-density high-rise city of the future where 10s of thousands of people live in a single 250-storey building (and then you end up "commuting" inside that buildings elevator system...).
Back in real life what you do have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end (assuming there is a single bus route that goes roughly where you need and you don't have to get off and wait again to change to another route to get to your final destination...). Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.
Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend multiple extra hours a day just for getting around on foot and bus to buy food for the next few days (and you can only do a few days at a time as your are physically limited by what you can carry) or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.
The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" of the different lines becomes considerable.
One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs within that much time via walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My neighborhood - about ten years older than yours - comes close to the ideal, and while it has its share of apartment buildings, none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.
We don't have a metro station, but we do have an express bus line which will get you to a metro station in fifteen minutes, and that bus comes every five minutes. Not so bad.
No, there's not a shop on every corner - but there are two grocery stores within five minutes' walk, and two more within ten. No need to carry groceries on the bus at all.
The main issue is around equity.
15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi ... your typical HN reader perhaps). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, security guards, farmers, construction workers etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).
Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)
If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided. Oh and ding ding ding yes these types people who have mobility issues also tend to be the poorer and lower-income people in society too.
Starting to notice a pattern here yet?
Basically the "15 Minute City" utopia is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.
It seems like the solution would be making nice cities less rare, and thus less of a hot commodity, rather than preventing them. After all, nearly anything that would make an area nicer to live in, would also make it more desirable, and therefore less affordable. I can't believe letting inner cities be hideous slums is the best thing for society overall (historically, indeed quite common).
And anyway you can't have the entire place be 15 minutes because some people have jobs etc that are just incompatible with that, and they tend to be lower income people.
It's essentially "economic cleansing" so only the nice charming rich people with interesting jobs doing something awfully smart in tech can live in the lovely areas with the nice cafes and that lovely little grocery store that does that tapenade to die for. Meanwhile the lower income folks live further out in lower density cheaper areas that need cars and have the run down high streets with the vape shops, the betting shops, the drug addicts living in derelict doorways etc.
Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.
A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.
I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.
It doesn't seem that hard to replicate. I am pretty sure the main issue in some places are some sort of zoning laws that prevent commercial areas to be rented in otherwise residencial neighborhoods.
Or just accept the world has moved on.
There's also the fact that property developers, commercial landlords, and institutional lenders frequently favor corporate tenants over independent operators. Rising property values and high commercial rents also price out local, independent owners.
However, there have been some exceptions under the New Urbanism banner where you see localized revivals. Some cities (like Jersey City) cap chain occupancy of retail space to 30%. Portland and Austin use zoning rules to make commercial real estate unattractive to chains. Commercial community land trusts can also be used to freeze rent and make space more affordable for local businesses. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all approach.
They also need some sort of tax forgiveness if they are to be at all competitive with the major online retailers who pay very little effective tax - which isn't really on them but on national governments to level the playing field.
What shops would you suggest could be added? Most people are buying larger items and clothes online or in chain retail park stores.
My small town has multiples of all of these but also many nice cafes/bars/restaurants and a butchers, bakers, a small market and fruit and veg, a couple of diy/hobby shops as well as 3 supermarkets, a library etc. There are even a couple of clothes stores and some pound shop type places.
I can't really see much of a change coming here or how it could be much better. Our 2 nearest city centres have a bit more variety but of course are mainly chain stores. People go out for an experience rather than shopping and this had already started well before covid hit.
EDIT: Interesting they chose Rotherham as an example, of course if they'd chosen Harrogate, Oxford, Durham, Bath etc the story would have been quite a bit different...
Also, right behind where that header photo was taken, is a GOOD example of attempts to regenerate the high street.
But the causes are much longer reaching than anything this points to – it's been in decline in Rotherham since probably the 1970s.
The broad strokes are true in general, though.
- asset prices don’t support ROI on low volume / low margin shops - I’m not saying ok, but when you say would I buy this shop and rent it to myself - too often the answer is no
- virtuous cycles / density - and at much easier to open a business next to another successful/ complimentary business - i want the butcher, coffee shop, dry cleaner, wine shop, gourmet shop, pub, bakery etc all right near each other I don’t want to make a special trip for each.
- these shops need to be open past 5/6pm!