Restaurants and Urbanism

Thoughts on "urban" energy without the form

I’m bouncing off a piece by Joel Kotkin here today, which—I was, and you might be, surprised—I substantially agree with. What I find interesting is Kotkin’s framing, which I somewhat disagree with, and want to think about.

It’s an article about restaurants, particularly small, independent, immigrant-owned restaurants, in California, and how state regulation makes their businesses harder. He also throws in some land-use stuff.

For example, he writes:

Many urban planners and new urbanists dislike mini-malls [small strip plazas], but to a new generation of food entrepreneurs, the malls’ easy parking and generally lower costs make them what Houston architect Tim Cisneros calls “the immigrant’s friend.” As ethnic minorities have moved to the urban periphery, places once known primarily for their hamburger stands and chain stores have instead become homes for ethnic food. The city with the most authentic Mexican restaurants per capita, for example, is Humble, Texas, a diverse outer suburb of almost 17,000, north of sprawling Houston.

And he includes, but doesn’t unpack, an interesting quote in this paragraph:

“This is not suburbanization but localization,” argues Shaheen Sadeghi, the visionary developer of the Packing District and numerous “anti-mall” complexes—essentially open-air shopping areas with local businesses—throughout Southern California. “Suburbia is no longer bland,” he notes. “Orange County is local like New York and L.A. are local.” Doing business locally, appealing to a diverse, dispersed customer base with social media and word of mouth, and utilizing app-based delivery, Sadeghi says, have allowed small culinary startups to compete with larger chains.

He mostly writes this with the implication or suggestion that if planners had their way, none of this messy, somewhat car-oriented small-business-incubating space would exist. He also notes, without disapproval, the importance of the car in California’s historic restaurant scene. In other words, the interests of urbanists and city boosters on the one hand, and entrepreneurial immigrants on the other, are opposed.

This is not, in my experience, the case. I get the sense that Kotkin would be surprised by how much mainstream urbanism is essentially deregulatory in nature. Much of the stuff he doesn’t like about land use is really about making more room for people to do things. He writes stuff like this—I Googled “Joel Kotkin war on suburbs” and these, for example, were the first three results:

Yes, there is a strain of often elitist anti-suburban thinking. But that is becoming kind of old-fashioned. Increasingly urbanists recognize that the suburbs are becoming something more than they were built to be—more complex, more diverse, more energetic. In some ways, more urban.

I’ll give you an example (aside from my own work, such as this long piece on exactly this subject). A former researcher with the Congress for the New Urbanism said to me once that she had misgivings about disdain for suburbia and enthusiasm for wholesale redevelopment. It sounded, she said, a little like urban renewal. And the crime of urban renewal should have taught us to have more humility when it comes to engineering the built environment.

She also introduced me to Dan Reed, a Black urbanist writer and planner who I’ve cited here (here, for example), and who I also know personally. Most of what he writes is about, or takes place in, these liminal suburbs, which are neither 1950s time capsules nor true cities. Whatever it is they are or are becoming, though, is valuable and interesting. The sense I get from Reed’s work, which, I can tell you, is read among urbanist/land use/planning folks throughout the D.C. region—something I’ve also been thinking about a lot lately—is that “urbanism” is a spirit, an approach, and that the physical form of the big city does not need to be its vessel.

All of this is to say that Kotkin sort of pits immigrant entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color against urbanism, when rather, these old and imperfect landscapes in which those business owners find success are becoming urban in this deeper sense.

This is what I mean by framing; Kotkin is working around a wedge that increasingly does not exist.

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Where Kotkin may be right is his discussion of business regulation. He talks about restaurant-workers unions and wage rules which may be onerous to small restaurant owners:

Even as they plan and dream, Golden State restaurateurs are threatened by ever-increasing regulation. Rather than encourage the rise of new food establishments, the progressive Left, particularly its unions, has sought to demonize the restaurant industry: University of California labor activists call for “Ending Jim Crow in America’s Restaurants,” referring to the preponderance of minorities, particularly Latino and Asian immigrants, at the low end of the restaurant workforce—dishwashers and cleaners. Cowed by labor, the California legislature recently passed, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed, AB 257, a measure that essentially forces franchise owners to submit to a state board for wage rates and labor rules, granting control of their businesses to a union-dominated body.

Giant firms and owners of hundreds of restaurants will doubtless have an easier time finding ways to pay up. But the legislation also applies to those who franchise from a company with more than 30 stores nationally.

Now, none of the small restaurants he profiles in the piece are franchises at all, let alone franchises with more than 30 members. I suppose the argument is that laws like this can prevent future franchises from ever growing. Part of the underlying question is when the transition from small business that needs flexibility and a light regulatory touch to big business that needs some regulatory constraints occurs. (It’s similar in a way to the question that roils the craft beer scene. Who’s gotten too big to be craft? Is craft a recipe, a spirit, a case number?)

The business/regulatory constraint that Kotkin does not mention, at least not here, is zoning. The real point of the California mini-mall is not that it’s a car-oriented low-rise strip plaza but that it’s cheap commercial space. And one of the things that determines that is zoning.

There’s a larger point I’ll note here: many people conflate suburbia’s characteristics with its form: suburban housing is often cheaper than trendy urban housing, therefore affordability is a characteristic of the suburbs. As though there were something intuitive or even inherent in detached houses on large lots costing less than urban apartments. But suburban housing is cheaper because it is invisibly subsidized, and because it is frequently easier to build on greenfields than in places that are already developed. It’s almost like if someone at IBM had looked at the first prototype Personal Computer and said, “This is too expensive, we’d better not mass produce it!”

But anyway, cheap commercial space. Land values, of course, determine this. But so does zoning. Many of those mini-mall lots might be worth more as housing, if they were zoned residential (in Los Angeles, at least). Likewise, in other places, there might not be enough space zoned commercial.

I wrote recently about Culpeper, Virginia. It’s a beautiful, well-preserved historic town about an hour south of Fairfax. It has lots of small businesses downtown. But take a look at this unfortunate story:

Garam Masala owner and cook Avinash Chand thrived as a chef in the D.C. area prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. With funds becoming sparse, a family friend suggested moving to her property on Browntown Road in Culpeper to “refresh” his mind and perhaps start his own business.

Although Chand wasn’t sure how community members would take the offered cuisine, he and co-owner Mine Dai, also known as Mindy, took a chance and put everything into the food trailer.

Even with plans of opening the trailer rolling, goals for the property remained much larger. Sitting on 26 acres, the pair intended to jumpstart a farm-to-table operation with a greenhouse and animals like chickens and rabbits.

Their aim was to help the community via fresh food at a reasonable price via permaculture, which is land management design that observes natural ecosystems.

When they opened in August 2022, they were welcomed with open arms. They had return customers and formed relationships with patrons. However, months later in January, they received a letter from Culpeper County Zoning that they were in violation of the county’s code by operating a food business on a property zoned RA - Rural Agriculture.

Despite going back and forth with verbiage, Chand could not afford to pursue the challenge due to lack of funds. Instead, community members approached him with solutions to move to their property and continue operating.

The trailer-based restaurant was able to find a space behind the town’s fancy cheese shop, in a parking lot. But what a shame. Here’s a town with an almost perfect physical urban form, but a county that lacks the spirit. Here, and here, on the other hand, are typically suburban places which understand the urban spirit.

So when I see an energetic, fine-grained, diverse commercial scene taking form in suburban landscapes that are now many decades old, what I see is the arrival, decades late, of an urban spirit, and a restoration of sorts in places that have been shackled by limited imagination and rigid regulation.

This is especially true for older suburbs, which still had a little bit of classically urban DNA in their design. I’ll leave you with a bit from my Vox story last year, on this suburban evolution. I’m writing about Rockville, which I mention frequently:

Rockville, Maryland, a suburban community about half an hour from DC by car, didn’t always look like standard suburban sprawl. In the early 20th century, it had trolley service into the urban core. The trolleys completed “24 trips a day between 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m.,” not unlike the region’s subway service today. The trolleys were scrapped in 1935, and it was not until 1984 that the Metro system was extended out to Rockville.

Looking back, scrapping the trolleys wasn’t Rockville’s only mistake. In 1962, the town embraced urban renewal and leveled nearly all of its original downtown, wiping not only the buildings but even the street grid off the map. In its place, they built a mall and office complex. That period, from 1935 to 1984, and especially from 1962 to 1984 — no rail, no downtown — typifies what we often mean by “suburban.”

Today, Rockville is very different, and in some ways it resembles its original state more than its “suburban interlude.” Rockville is widely considered to be the region’s main Chinatown, with a population that is about 20 percent Asian American, and an array of restaurants, Chinese newspapers, and other businesses that serve a predominantly Chinese customer base. In the 2000s, the mall that stood atop the old “downtown” was demolished, and a “town center” with gridded streets was built in its place. For curmudgeons or NIMBYs who think these trends are altering Rockville’s character, they just need to look further back for their baseline. The changes in Rockville aren’t turning it into something it isn’t; they’re turning it into something it used to be, and continuing a process artificially arrested by the suburban era.

Joel Kotkin is seeing the same thing. But I’m not sure he knows what he’s looking at.

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Related Reading:

Main Street Manufacturing

What a Strip Mall Can Be

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

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