Which comes first: Small scale retail or walkability?

My kingdom for a neighborhood where I can quickly grab a loaf of bread.

Today was an awesome lazy Saturday in my neighborhood. In the morning my son had a basketball game at this sparkling new gym nearby.

This rec league we play in is very cute, very social, everything youth sports can and should be — but are less and less. (This is something I’ll write about another time and I’m writing about in the book I’m working on.)

Anyway, so many of our parent friends were at the same gym rooting on their own kids. We decided to stay late and cheer for a neighbor kid who played next.

Here is the beauty of living in a walkable neighborhood with kids: The whole day could unfold in kind of a fun, unplanned way.

My husband decided to take the van and drive home. My daughter and I agreed to walk because we wanted to stay a little longer. My son was still shooting hoops with a friend, so I said either get a ride home or walk. Home is less than a mile away.

I said to my daughter, “let’s go to the donut shop on the way home.” But we hadn’t gotten one block before I noticed we were going right past a new book shop. We stopped in and browsed. And my daughter picked out a couple books. Then, we continued on our way to the donut shop.

As we were sitting there eating, I was kind of in disbelief of my good fortune. (That happens to me a lot lately.) One reason is, this corridor we were walking on has just recently really come alive with small scale retail. The book shop — people are thrilled about it. The donut shop is just a couple years old.

Right next to the donut shop was this amazing local vintage clothing store. And so I said to my daughter, let’s stop by just for a few minutes. Again, this is a relatively new addition to the street. It’s got to be one the of the coolest vintage clothing stores in the country. It’s great for kids. There is an actual plastic tube slide where you can slide from one floor to another.

After that, we turned around and headed home. And my daughter and I had a chance to chat. It was such a fun outing, we both agreed. A mini adventure.

Later on my husband and I were just laying around screening. And I said: you know what? “Let’s walk down to the lake.” We live just under a mile from Lake Erie and this really expansive public park. There’s a loop we can do, for exercise, for a serious walk, that is about 2.5 miles. So we did that.

On the way home we were going past the Dollar Store and I stopped in to buy some Diet Coke (because I’m an addict). And then we passed a corner store, and I stopped to buy some onions (it’s a minor emergency for me when we run out of those). Practical trips, undertaken spontaneously.

It got me thinking, how great that is. Being able to accomplish a few tasks on foot is the ultimate life hack imo. It’s healthier and more fun, imo. There’s social rewards as well, I believe. Close to home, you run into people that you might know.

I feel like if there’s one thing people in my field (transportation planning) could accomplish that would really improve life for average people, it would be creating more opportunities for average folks to make a useful trip on foot every once in a while. Too few people have that opportunity right now. Even if they live near retail, it’s often designed to be as hostile as possible to pedestrians. For example, a Target store might abut a residential neighborhood, but have a fence that prevents anyone from accessing it from the neighborhood side.

My first book was about pedestrians and how they get killed in huge numbers in the U.S. and how there’s sort of an institutional indifference. I didn’t go ahead with it, but if I were to add one more chapter to that book it would have been about retail.

The big box retail model that dominates, has dominated for decades in the U.S., objectively sucks for pedestrians. In fact, I cited a study that shows, for every Walmart, for example, added in a community, they can expect to have 1.8 more pedestrian crashes every four years.

That is sort of the nature of these places. They require huge parking lots. Huge access roads, with lots of turn lanes, which taxpayers typically pick up the tab for. They also produce a kind of sameness to town after town. A corporate hegemony. I follow an urbanist account that calls the kind of big box retail you see in suburb after suburb as “corporate slop.”

The kinds of stores and restaurants you can walk to, imo, they tend to be a little more interesting. You might come across something that surprises you. There are more personal touches. Local businesses play an enormous role, imo, in local culture, which is something more and more I really treasure.

One of the reasons I was so stoked about how my day unfolded is because some or all of this is new. I’ve lived in my neighborhood in Cleveland for 15 years. And for a long time I didn’t have a car. But one thing that was a bummer about it was that there just wasn’t much retail at all. That has gradually started to change, and I am pretty stoked about it. The fact that that is happening while in-person retail is shrinking nationally (as the even more anti social model for internet shopping takes over), is even more exciting.

Now, I was in Chicago last weekend, and they have REAL retail. Corporate retail in the city. Just blocks and blocks of restaurants and stores. I wrote about passing a Hermes on the Miracle Mile. I honestly wouldn’t mind having some more corporate retail in Cleveland. (My dream is to have a Sephora.) We are still a retail desert with respect to a lot of corporate chains.

I think without the kind of mass transit Chicago and Toronto and New York have, it’s difficult to make it work, though. You need a lot of foot traffic to have storefront retail, designed at walking scale. And without a subway, a good amount of high density housing, it’s hard to get a good concentration of foot traffic on sidewalks.

Maybe we wouldn’t have any at all in Cleveland except we have this legacy of the old streetcar system. And the storefronts that abutted our streetcar corridors are lined with this kind of old-school retail. It’s just that it’s not often occupied, at least in a well used way. There are a few rare exceptions though in Ohio.

Lakewood, Ohio, a nearby suburb, has seen one of its old streetcar corridors really come alive with local businesses. And I think that’s in part due to the fact that they have a ton of these legacy spaces, and they’re able to offer very affordable rent. It’s sort of a beautiful thing. I think it helps stimulate entrepreneurship as well.

But like I said, it’s pretty rare. And that’s, of course, due to changes in how we travel. Households with 2 SUVs and a quarter-acre lot, their retail options are more or less baked in. Most likely they’re going to shop by driving 15 miles into the hinterlands to Costco.

Meanwhile, I’m just wishing there were more places I could dash in and get a loaf of bread. There are a few places like that now, between my house and my office (a distance of a couple miles) and I couldn’t be happier about it.

One point I wanted to make with this post and my long, annoying windup, was that there are a number of trips I made today that I wouldn’t have if I wouldn’t have happened to be walking past:

• The donut shop

• The book store

• The vintage clothing store

• The Dollar Store

• The corner store

I’m an impulsive person, not a big planner. And the level of preparation and planning it requires to get everything you need for the week in one big grocery trip — ugh. It’s difficult for me. And I also think it turns something that could be very fun — shopping for food! - into this big, boring chore.

Anyway, for people who love that, I know there are a million Costco lovers out there, to each his own. I mean that. But this other model that is a little more compact can be pretty great when it works. We have so few places where we’ve managed to put all the pieces together. But what a beautiful thing when it all comes together.