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.
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.
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.
It would not be “easy!” You would be severely limited in your choice of location due to lack of availability compared to other housing types, and what places you do manage to find would have an inflated cost per square foot compared to other housing types because they’re bid up by demand outstripping supply.
Maybe there are certain cities where it’s common enough to be “easy” in that particular city, but you can definitely not extrapolate that to claim that it’s easy on average in the US as a whole.
The US is a huge and diverse country, and you cannot make ANY generalizations that will apply to everything. You are right that “easy” isn’t the right word, but there are places where it is possible.
I guess my original point was that there are communities that are starting to prioritize mixed use buildings and it IS at least possible now. I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
Or the '50s, '60s, or '70s. Maybe not even the '40s.
And that’s the problem: because it was illegal to build for like half a century, there’s a huge pent-up demand unmet by supply, and that’s what makes it very often inaccessible as per the meme.
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”.)
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.
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.
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.
It would not be “easy!” You would be severely limited in your choice of location due to lack of availability compared to other housing types, and what places you do manage to find would have an inflated cost per square foot compared to other housing types because they’re bid up by demand outstripping supply.
Maybe there are certain cities where it’s common enough to be “easy” in that particular city, but you can definitely not extrapolate that to claim that it’s easy on average in the US as a whole.
The US is a huge and diverse country, and you cannot make ANY generalizations that will apply to everything. You are right that “easy” isn’t the right word, but there are places where it is possible.
I guess my original point was that there are communities that are starting to prioritize mixed use buildings and it IS at least possible now. I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
Or the '50s, '60s, or '70s. Maybe not even the '40s.
And that’s the problem: because it was illegal to build for like half a century, there’s a huge pent-up demand unmet by supply, and that’s what makes it very often inaccessible as per the meme.
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”.)