The Standardization of Downtown
Around the corner from my home I was waiting in a house I have listed for sale. The prospective owner hadn't shown so I was inching my head out the front door looking at a stray cat that had been waiting at a stoop where it usually found food. I had recently bought some low-cost food for just this occasion, so I called my friend and asked if he would bring some around the corner for the hungry cat.
Fifty years ago cats didn't live indoors (that started when someone decided to market cat litter). Almost as many years ago a cat, or dog for that matter, would receive scraps at the most, but more ordinarily he'd have to wait for a mouse to come along.
Today the cat food, the cat litter, and everything about the process has been commercialized, standardized.
A few decades (as many as five) back and this home where I stood would have been within walking distance of any number of local corner stores. In the 1950s, supermarkets came into fashion, as did the further standardization of food products.
The home I was standing in, built somewhere soon after the turn of the 20th century, would take a while longer to be standardized. Homes probably began to lose some of their individuality in the 1920s, but by the 1960s a standardized home was the norm.
Today our homes, and our cities, are being standardized like never before. While there may be a return to the cities and a rebirth of downtowns, it's not the case that what we once knew as downtown is returning.
The downtown resurgence has been credited to smaller household units looking for more maintenance-free housing and for a desire to lessen commute times. I also suspect a large part of the downtown revival, as it could be called, is due to a desire to further standardize housing. Real estate is given value, to a far greater degree than cat food or other consumer goods by subjective elements.
In real estate, subjective values mean a high risk. Standardization can lessen that risk.
What do I mean? When you walk into a grocery store you can go to the detergent aisle and choose All, Cheer or Tide. Each has a relatively consistent value. Real estate works like that to some degree, but the precise value is harder to uncover and subject to emotions as well as a myriad of external market forces.
With a mobile population, and one made up of smaller households, having a home with a market value that's more easily determined is attractive and important. This desire for standardization is perhaps most easily applied to the condominium.
Condos can be customized to taste without significantly altering the standardized value. Downtowns in the U.S. are filling with condos for a variety of reasons, and the ability to know the value of what you are buying, the ability to have that product customized, and the ability to live in a maintenance-free environment are among them.
Downtown retail, often lacking when residents first return downtown, is also being standardized.
These condo inhabitants who are breathing life into downtown may currently find some specialty stores are restaurants that suburban homeowners may be without. Yet much of the downtown condo boom is combined with a downtown retail boom. Many big box retailers including Home Depot, Target, K-Mart, and even Wal-Mart have designs that will fit into urbanized areas. As I have mentioned in previous columns, chains like Ikea and Target are even getting into the home business.
Today we may be seeing a downtown revival, but more often than not these downtowns will be in the image of a condensed suburb rather than a funky neighborhood.
On a recent trip to Chicago, at the Roosevelt transit stop, just outside the city, I found myself surrounded with new condo buildings and conversions, surrounded by chain stores offering most anything the occupants could need. Target, Walgreen's, and Starbucks were visible.
A recent visit to San Francisco found a similar situation. New Whole Foods and Trader Joe's locations stood alongside an increasing number of local and national chain outlets, including Target and others.
In Atlanta I observed a new urban development centered by an Ikea store
Is this good for cities?
The newfound interest by major chains in urban areas would seem to be good. It would most certainly mean customers are returning from the suburbs. I would much rather live in an area where I can walk or use public transportation to get to Target than to live somewhere that puts all retail out of reach to those without a car.
The question now is first, how far will our downtown's go in transforming from office to residential and retail. The more the pendulum swings to the residential side, the more retail we'll see. Additional housing development will bring additional chain interest.
It also depends on how downtowns are developed. Since the 1960s, city governments have sought to assemble large tracts of individual parcels in preparation for development. In the worst case these blocks were razed to make way for new, often suburban-style, developments. In other situations, the buildings were converted into spaces for retail stores.
In either case, this usually led to an exclusive chain-store environment, and one that could fail if the stores were ones that could also be found in a suburban mall.
The difference we're seeing today is a return of middle-income residents to the center city. This means the stores won't be as dependent on suburban shoppers to come into the downtown to buy.
Many new downtown residents have moved there to some degree because they are looking not only for the convenience, but also the interest and diversity, of city life. Even though they have purchased perhaps the most standardized types of housing, they may yearn for more than the Starbucks and Target.
Make no mistake, Target and Starbucks?along with Walgreen's, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and Home Depot--are coming to a downtown near you. The question is, will they be placed in a development that by its nature limits stores to chains, or will they be built one at a time, allowing for a more organic mix of chains and local stores?
A good urban environment conjures up images of New York's green grocers, Little Italy, and stores that provide local flavor. That's not what condo inhabitants moving in from the suburbs are finding, however. Chain stores have been able to capture this local flavor, many of them starting as regional urban stores and expanding.
While redeveloping downtowns today, it is important to include chain stores. Yet it's also critical to make sure these chain stores do not exclude local stores, just as it's important the new condo developments don't completely replace other forms of housing and other uses. It's a good sign that big box stores are finding ways to build more urban-friendly designs. It's also important our cities encourage and facilitate city-friendly designs that leave room for the flavor that's part of the drawing card bringing Americans back to the city.
Eric Miller is editor of The New Colonist.
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