Tiny Storefronts
A new (for me) way of looking at food trucks
I have a piece at Resident Urbanist (the new urbanist publication where I’m on the editorial board—go check it out!) on the need to bring back tiny businesses to our cities and introduce them in our suburbs.
I’ve done a lot of writing about small-scale enterprise here, but what sparked this new piece was a specific insight I saw on social media: the idea that food trucks are the way the need for tiny retail space expresses itself when we don’t build tiny retail space. In other words, this whole food truck trend/culture thing is a sort of accident arising out of a zoning/financing/regulatory problem with commercial construction.
Now that’s not entirely true—mobile vending is a very old commercial activity in cities, and it certainly existed long before urban renewal and Euclidean zoning. But it sure does seem like there would be fewer food trucks in cities today if there were more 200, 500, 800 square foot spaces where you could run a tiny business specializing in a few items.
You can flip the analogy and say that a “food hall” is a bunch of fixed, immobile food trucks inside a building. A typical food truck is somewhere between 100 and 200 square feet—smaller than most small storefronts but close to a market stall.
I don’t favor any particular small commercial form. All of the above, and more. I give a few examples of small-scale commerce that should much, much easier for the average person to engage in, but this is the one (other than Eden Center) that I think about the most:
My wife and I visited Croatia in 2022, and one of our meals was in a private house, where an elderly woman who lived alone hosted two or four diners a couple of nights a week, serving a completely homemade fixed menu. No dealing with wholesale suppliers or any of the other work of running or managing a restaurant. She simply loved cooking and got to share it for money. She had basically monetized a dinner party.
That kind of thing is out of reach for the average American, unless they’re willing to break the law or go through permitting, licensing, and paperwork that is more or less designed to regulate such enterprises out of existence. And that’s in localities where it isn’t completely banned. I wonder how many amorphous problems and discontents come down to the difficulty of doing anything in America—not only in suburbia, but even in cities. Cities, too, are governed by zoning and regulatory codes that force the scale of business up. Good urbanism, whether in legacy cities or in suburbs, should lower barriers to entry: barriers to getting around, to running errands, to meeting people, to accessing opportunity, and to engaging in commerce and entrepreneurship.
Sometimes I write a line that I know I’ll end up quoting in the future. “Good urbanism, whether in legacy cities or in suburbs, should lower barriers to entry: barriers to getting around, to running errands, to meeting people, to accessing opportunity, and to engaging in commerce and entrepreneurship” is one of them.
But I want to think a little more about how fixed realities express themselves in different forms. The reality is human settlements need tiny commercial spaces. This can express itself as tiny storefronts, pop-up markets, or food trucks. It can also express itself as technically prohibited home-based businesses and informal, unlicensed food stands. Trying to stamp out a reality only forces it to manifest in less beneficial ways.
I think understanding this is really important. It’s similar to the insight that while addiction and mental illness often lead to homelessness, that outcome is a result of housing policy which has sawed away the bottom rung of last-resort housing, where people in trouble would once have landed. The thing we observe is real—people living on the street have a high rate of addiction and mental illness, and they are related—but it is also artificial, in the sense that this relation is determined more by the housing landscape than the personal problems themselves.
This is similar in turn to the widely held feeling that “city” means “dirty, loud, run-down, dangerous place.” But we allowed our cities to become run down, to the point where people think cities are run down. Too many people now perceive the consequences of urban neglect and mismanagement as inherent in the thing itself. It’s like growing up in a home where the bread is always stale or moldy, and thinking fresh bread doesn’t exist.
But that idea of realities taking different forms: that’s what I remind myself when I see informal commerce in the suburbs, which just kind of looks and feels odd because suburbia isn’t designed for that. Now I know to respond this way:
Most of this is not totally allowed, and it is often done by working-class immigrants, in older and sometimes run-down suburbs, which reinforces the perception that only desperate people do business like this. But what we’re really seeing is completely normal human activity rendered questionable by a poor built environment and regulatory regime.
The answer is not to marginalize or punish the people who do what humans have always done, but to put small-scale commerce back in reach for all Americans.
So when we see a crumbled parking lot with a few (possibly unpermitted) food trucks doing their thing, next to an aging strip plaza, we can see disorder and deterioration. Or we can see a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood taking shape, veiled under a different form.
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Yeah, everything is lawyered out the wazoo. Pretty annoying. This country needs to wing it a little bit more.