Just move to europe you can. Where i live theres a pizza place under and the guy running it is literally one of my neighbours(apartments) and literally the next house on the street is on top of a bakery/cafe, all owned by a family.
In my last year at uni some of my mates lived over a curry house. It was brilliant as when I went round we’d inevitably put some videos on and order food from downstairs.
You can only live above a curry restaurant for one, maybe two months before becoming medically obese.
Soviet era commie blocks with stores and doctor's offices in first floor go brrr
There are lots of places with apartments on the 2nd floor and businesses on the 1st floor?
Yeah I don’t know what this post is really talking about. Unless it’s not in the US or something? I used to live above a restaurant in my early 20s. There were like 4 or 5 apartments above it
Obviously different cities and states have different laws and such, but generally speaking, it’s pretty common for people to live above businesses/in commercially zoned buildings. In fact in my experience commercially owned buildings have the most flexible usage whereas residential zoning has a lot more restrictions/auditing traps If you try to operate a business out of them
I had a friend who rented a storefront. For 5 years, the "store" had a ladder, a bucket of paint, and a picture of the Pope. He lived in the back in a gigantic barely-converted "studio" space.
Interesting guy. I think he's clean now.
Even outside of the US, it's been pretty common in my experience. Especially in cities that are a lot older where there isn't a lot of space for new builds and they generally went up instead of out.
I would say the US is the one with the most restrictive residential zoning.
I think OP is talking about a single building with single-family occupancy and commercial storefront. At least in the US, a lot of single-family residential zones exclude commercial use.
One of the things I absolutely loved in China was the almost systematic X over 1 buildings everywhere. It created so much life in the residential areas! A lot of residential areas would have some sort of pedestrian central hub, and then on the outer layer, business at ground level with convenience shops, fruit shop, noddle shop, etc. Coming back to France and its stupid zoning system is just so painful. Seeing all those lifeless suburbs, those lifeless housing estates, and everything concentrated in some shitty commercial areas separate from it all. Ugh.
Huh, what city in France are you talking about? Every city I've ever visited had mixed zoning with shops and restaurants in the ground floor and flats above. Of cause there are also blocks of houses without shops, but that's mainly because you need more space to house a certain amount of people than for them to shop.
I there are also suburbs where every house has like a 1000m² of garden around it, and of course these houses don't have a shop in their basement. But that's because people choose to live like that and not because it's the only option.
Yeah, it's a scale thing. In Lyon centre-ville, you'll see X over 1 along big avenues and boulevards. But I lived in the suburbs where it was tower after tower after tower, with all the shops only in the historic town center, which were just villages that had 100% residential areas tacked onto them. Sometimes you will have like a park or a commercial hub in bigger suburbs, but it's all segregated. Very different from what I experienced in China.
That's how portland Oregon feels. They have houses and such all throughout many areas with shops. I'm sure it could get annoying for home owners to have cars parked outside their houses all the time, but not needing a car to go into town is probably a great trade off.
The thing with that system is that all the people living in those areas don't need to go anywhere to get their daily needs, they can just walk down and around the block. Food, deliveries, house services and utilities, it was all there. And these are small shops so people from outside wouldn't really bother to come since they'd have their own where they live.
And whatever isn't there locally, you can just get delivered from across town by the army of electric scooters. And of course the public transit system is crazy good so I can just grab a cab, take a bus or the metro. I never missed my car, is what I'm saying.
But of course that's a giant city thing. The smaller the city, the less and less this is possible and the more people will use their car. I'm back in France now in a tiny town in the countryside (60k ppl) , and I couldn't function without a car.
Zoning sounds terrible until your next door neighbor starts running an auto repair shop out of his garage.
"Mixed use" is also a thing. I know of plenty of examples here in the US, I have lived in one of them. New construction consisting of living space above retail is actually kinda trendy right now.
Also if you live above a greasy diner expect cockroaches
On the flip side, you're stuck in a peaceful quiet suburb that's a mile or more from any business.
Yes. Exactly.
sincerely,
the car manufacturers of America
Zoning is a good tool used poorly. Restaurants and grocery stores being subject to zoning creates issues. My personal belief is neither should be subject to zoning (but still have the parking lots be.) Auto shops, manufacturing, and mining operation type things are examples of where zoning is good.
Zoning sounds great until you want to start a small business on your property, and you have to spend years convincing several councils and review boards that a photography business is not going to destroy the neighborhood character... and then you need to pay for a traffic study to prove it won't negatively impact parking or meaningfully increase car travel on the street. And if it manages to get approved, then some retired busybody with no life will complain at every town council meeting that it's attracting a bad crowd, and there's too many people around now.
There is definitely a place for reasonable limits, but almost nowhere in the United States has that. People need to accept that neighborhoods change, and expecting them to be frozen in time is literally insane and fiscally irresponsible.
Why is a next-door auto repair neighbour bad? Do you not have laws on noise?
If you live above a proper restaurant expect no roaches ever, because they can't afford for literally a single roach to be seen in their restaurant by their customers.
I mean that person was wrong, there are absolutely places where mixed use setups like that are a thing. It's rarer but it exists. Zoning laws suck and aren't a good reason, but it's also not a good reason because there are places that don't have this issue. Also if it was like that when it was built and has been used like that since forever they allow it by grandfathering it in, not a forever solution but it does happen.
IIRC one of the few good things about Texas is that there aren't zoning laws.
I want every big box store and strip mall in America to be obligated to build enough housing on top and above as it would take to staff the store and their families at a minimum.
Im not living on site and working at the company store...
The number of managers that would come upstairs to knock on your door to get you to cover a shift; it angers me just imagining it.
Oh no doubt. The actual staff wouldn't have to live there. They'd just have to have that much housing built up over the stores.
But also thinking strip malls that are often filled with small stores already owned and operated by a family. They'd only need one or two units overhead, thus being close to as described in the original post.
Also gives a solid advantage to the small mom and pop over the soulless profit machine, I like this idea :)
It would be harassment and it should be made very clear that if your manager keeps showing up at your door after being told he's unwelcome and not to come back, you get to give them the old American ta-ta.
Imagine an America where managerial types are regularly legally filtered out from society by the combination of castle doctrine and their incessant need to bother staff.
Bar I frequented in my 20s had apartments above it. Thought it would be so cool to live there
I helped move some coworkers into an apartment directly over a bar in a decent sized bar district.
It was a cool pad, ancient, crazy 1800's storage warehouse vibe, a dozen great food options and breakfast places.
WOMP WOMP WOMP WOMP till 2am most nights. A vagrant that liked to crash on their doorstep and peed on the door most days. If they want out between X and Y hour, they'd have to shoo him off the little porch to get in.
Yup. You can do any store that closes at a reasonable hour, not a bar or club.
My last place was directly over a karaoke bar. It was weird how the sound of drunk off key singing became a comforting sleep sound. I missed it when they shut down.
Zoning is one of the biggest issues facing major urban areas. Cutting down on it will be integral to facing the cost of living crisis.
There's a little town near me where they allow that zoning. My favorite restaurant has an apartment above it and it is my goal in life to live there and eat there every day, maybe every meal.
ITT: people who think mixed-use housing is way more common than it actually is.
Ngl I live in Chicago so to me it seems like the norm rather than the outliar
It's not, even in Chicago.
41.1% of land area is single-family only. Mixed-use, non-single-family + planned development is 33.8% of land area. The majority of residential land area in Chicago is zoned single-family only.
41.1% of land. Not the places where people actually live. Take Marina City (AKA the corncobs); there's a restaurant on the ground floor of one, and I think House of Blues Chicago in the other, and then, I dunno, a few hundred condos above them? Go into Wicker Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, and on, and on, and almsot every single retail establishment has at least 2-3 stories of apartments and condos above it.
Is this actually illegal in the US? If so, where is it legal? There's British comedy series called Black Books where the protagonist ran a bookstore on the first floor and lived on the second floor. My wife and I have always thought about opening a coffeeshop/bookstore hybrid and live right above it, partially inspired by this.
It's totally a thing in the downtown of some older cities, and occasionally in some apartment complexes that have popped up recently, but I'd say that throughout the majority of the country, residential and commercial zones get drawn without overlap.
Is this actually illegal in the US? If so, where is it legal?
It varies by city, but typically the vast majority of land used for housing (upwards of 90% in some of the worst cases) is zoned for single-family detached houses only.
Small live-work places like this, with a single business on the ground floor and a single dwelling unit above, are likely typically in the single-digit percentages, in terms of land area zoned for that use.
(Even the vast majority of non-single-family detached housing wouldn't usually allow stuff like this, but would be medium to high-density apartment/condo buildings instead. The phenomenon of having a gap in housing density is so prevalent it even has a name: "missing middle".)
A lot of the new buildings in my city have stores and restaurants on the griund floor with apartments above. Also there are older places with apartments above a business in my city. It seems like its just post WW2 construction wanted to get away from it. We seem to be moving back towards that.
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