Soviet era commie blocks with stores and doctor's offices in first floor go brrr
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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.
60k "tiny"?
Haha you're right, sorry!
In France it's a préfecture, and the biggest town in the department. But it's still a small town, really, with mostly old people (avg age is 46) while the young flee to bigger cities.
In Ireland I was living in a town the same size (60k) and it was the most important town in the county, and felt a lot more "important" with a lot more business, more youth, more work... Basically if you needed more, you went to Dublin or Belfast. Or abroad, like many of my mates did.
But yeah, 60k is nothing when you live in a megapolis like Wuhan.
It's all so relative, it's a bit crazy.
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.
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.
I've always wanted to live above a restaurant that had a dumbbell waiter into my apartment and I could just order anything on the menu brought up that way
Imagine the look on their faces if you'd ever decide to order a pizza and it gets delivered at the restaurant.
Oh, I want that too!
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.
There are those five-over-one constructions, which sort of fits, but they're cheap as hell. The construction isn't going to last.
Yeah, but I'm still glad to see those over the sprawling parking lot retail district approach we've been using everywhere for decades in the US. Maybe we'll do a better job on the revision when the ones you described start to fail lol, one can dream!
I think inspectors in NJ already started cracking down on those constructions after a nasty fire. Those things are all stick construction for speed and cheapness. Minimum concrete.
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.
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.
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 :)
Yeah it's coming back with 4 over 1s and 5 over 1s, assuming we do go into world war 3.
There's also a variant where They take a plot of land, like 500-1500 acres. Put up Luxury condos, a gaggle of townhomes and a decent number of large single family homes then shove in a stripmall, gas station and grocery store in with it. The residents can walk to the grocery and a couple of food places, maybe a gym, shipping store, electronics repair store.
Unless it's a four-over-one with a stupid name and a hideous facade, and then it has to be someone else's store, and it still costs too goddamn much.
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