Sleeping Babies in the Town’s Living Room

By Norm Van Eeden Petersman

Q: Is this housing or office or retail? A: It shouldn’t matter as long as it’s allowed to be what it needs to be at any given point in time.

A colleague once asked Jeff Siegler if people should be allowed to live on the first floor of a downtown building. His answer was unequivocal: “No, people shouldn’t live on the first floor downtown.”

In his view, the ground floor is the “face of the city.” As a gathering place and marketplace, the ground floor functions as the living room of community life. Fill it with couches, cardboard boxes, or “Shhh, baby sleeping” signs, and you kill the very energy that makes downtowns special.

Siegler has written and spoken extensively about these issues on LinkedIn, where I follow his work, and within the communities where he does the difficult work of trying to spark real change. His perspective is not theoretical. These are hard-won lessons learned through years of seeing what does and does not work when communities try to bring their downtowns back to life. We would be foolish to dismiss his warnings.

At the same time, Strong Towns thinking leads me to resist a “never” posture. Zoning codes, while originally intended to mitigate nuisances, too often end up freezing neighborhoods in place. They regulate uses so tightly that buildings can no longer serve as flexible shells that adapt to what people actually need in a given moment.

Alli Quinlan-Thurmond makes the point well: cities can and should regulate nuisances, but they should not attempt to regulate away the very life of a place by prescribing the exact way a building must be used.

A vibrant place is not achieved by decree. It emerges over time through trial, error, and evolution.

In the case of new or re-emerging main streets within a traditional development pattern, the sequence of viable projects frequently starts with exclusively residential projects, then mainly residential projects, and finally the mixed uses that are sought after.

The deeper issue is that we too often treat places as static, fixed forever in whatever condition they are in, rather than as dynamic ecosystems.

Housing on the first floor of a street may not be the ideal long-term outcome, but it can serve as a critical “for-awhile” stage. It is a transitional use that sustains life and maintains momentum until the market supports retail or other community-serving activity.

Consider Port Arthur, Texas. The city has a map and plan for the revitalization of its downtown, complete with the standards we have come to expect from the suburban development pattern: clearly segregated uses, neatly drawn zones, and “best-laid” ideas for how things should unfold. But economic stagnation has meant those plans have gone nowhere. Downtown remains empty. The comfort of having a plan is an illusion when it does not result in activity. And while Port Arthur is not likely to see people living on the ground floors of its main streets, the more pressing reality is that it is not seeing much of anything at all.

When I visited in 2023, Motiva, the area’s largest employer, was negotiating with the city to move some of its offices downtown. The move could have brought hundreds of workers to the core each day, sparked new energy, and created momentum for others to follow. But the negotiations got bogged down in zoning requirements, parking minimums, and density caps. When I asked a city staff member why they were clinging to rules that so obviously held the project back, their response was remarkable. I am paraphrasing, but they said: “Because otherwise there won’t be enough parking seventy years from now when everything gets built.”

Seventy years from now. In a downtown where almost nothing stands today.

A regulation meant to prepare for an imagined future prevented Port Arthur from seizing a real opportunity in the present.

Daniel Herriges wrote, “The planner’s job needs to have more in common with conservation biology than with the tinkering of an engineer.”

A conservation biologist walking past a degraded slough sees not just a mess, but thousands of possible futures depending on how its inputs are managed. That perspective should be applied to our cities. The role of local government is not to dictate the one future they hope for, but to allow the conditions that make multiple futures possible.

So, should people ever live on the first floor downtown? Siegler is right to warn us about what we stand to lose if those spaces turn exclusively and enduringly private. But there is more to the story.

Next week, I’ll share how this question is playing out in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Norman, Oklahoma. I’ll also explore what Port Arthur can teach us about two deeper principles that every city must grapple with.

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Previously Published on strongtowns.org with Creative Commons License

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