Bar I frequented in my 20s had apartments above it. Thought it would be so cool to live there
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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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.
If you map it by population, I would expect there to be a difference.
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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.
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The old downtown area of the small town I had lived in most of my life had those kinds of buildings where there was retailers/restaurants/a bank below apartments. Shit, even the city hall building had apartments above it. One of my friends in high school lived in one of those above city hall.
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
I haven't read it yet, but arbitrary lines is a very cool book about the subject, and the exact opposite of what you are saying. The author defends that zoning is the wrong way of going about things and proposes other ways of controlling this issue.
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.
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
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Ok, now it's driving me nuts figuring this out. I live in Oklahoma and yeah, minus some small exceptions, our commercial and res are strictly zoned, and maybe this applies to other places where the strip mall and Plaza are king, and there's more room in general? Our 'town squares' are nothing but beauracratic stuff, bars, and historical buildings.
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.
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".)
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.
I live in a town in the west that is a population of about 13,000 but is well within the Seattle metropolitan area.
All of the new build in the city is apartment buildings with commerce on the street level. Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city but downtown is all mixed use for new builds.
Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city
Which means it's going to be decades before enough redevelopment happens before mixed-use can be considered "common" compared to that sprawl.
It's not "common" per se, but if you wanted to live above the store you owned, as the poster was talking about, it would be easy to do so in the United States today.
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