Neighbourhood Retail

Welcome back to Middle Ground; today’s issue will discuss how allowing Neighbourhood Retail can help revitalize the city of Toronto.

What is Neighbourhood Retail?

Neighbourhood Retail refers to businesses such as cafes, shops, stores and offices which are located on residential streets. In Europe, these types of shops have been commonplace for centuries, with many towns built around the idea that someone would own a commercial business on their ground floor and live above that business on the top floor.

In North America, the most common example of Neighbourhood Retail is corner stores, which would often be allowed at the corner of two residential streets where there was otherwise no other commercial activity. The reasoning for allowing these stores was to increase access to basic necessities without requiring residents to leave their neighbourhoods. 

Why don’t we have more Neighbourhood Retail?

When designing cities in North America, planners split the cities into commercial, office and residential spaces. Looking as far back as the City of Toronto’s 1963 “Plan for Downtown Toronto,” we can see that the entire downtown core was designed to have separate purposes for each neighbourhood - for example, offices on Bay Street and shopping on Young Street. 

The primary argument against Neighbourhood Retail is that having businesses in residential areas attracts more people, making neighbourhoods busier, louder and less safe. 

What are we missing?

The problems with banning Neighbourhood Retail are evident when looking at the City of Toronto:

1. Reliance on Vehicles - When you don’t have a local cafe, doctor's office, shop, or restaurant, you must rely on delivery or driving to the nearest commercial street. This makes the city much more difficult to live in without a car, contributing to the congestion and reliance on cars that we see in Toronto today. 

2. Affordability - A lack of neighbourhood retail means that there are fewer shops, with existing stores all concentrated on commercial streets. This makes it easier for large restaurant chains, fast food establishments, big box stores and other corporations to create oligopolies and eliminate local businesses. If more people were able to open shops in their homes (without needing to pay the high cost of commercial streets to rent a store), then they could more competitively open doctor’s offices, law firms, accounting firms, cobblers, specialty grocery stores, restaurants, cafes, workshops, art studios, mechanic shops, etc. 

3. Community - Today, when we need our groceries, we drive to big box stores like Costco, Walmart, No-Frills, and Sobeys to buy everything we need for the week. If there were more neighbourhood stores, we would instead have the option of visiting local bakers, butchers, produce markets, etc., buying from our neighbours and building relationships with them. Likewise, throughout Europe, there are neighbourhood cafes and pubs at neighbourhood corners. Both of these create gathering spaces for the houses on the neighbouring streets and help neighbours meet each other in a casual setting.

If you learned anything from this newsletter, forward it to one person who would benefit from these insights.

Liam Gill