No Restaurant for You

Even if people don’t agree with my specific policy prescriptions, I hope that one lesson people will take from my land use and planning blogging is simply that everyone ought to pay more attention to the regulatory framework prevailing in their area. People often express likes and dislikes for certain cities and neighborhoods as if they just happened to arrive by magic. In fact, the character of neighborhoods is powerfully shaped by regulation. For example, I spent the bulk of my DC years living in a neighborhood where almost all the commerce was subject to what’s called the ARTS overlay zone which contains, among other things, an odd anti-restaurant provision:

Yesterday, I mentioned the ARTS overlay’s restriction on restaurants. Only 25% of the street frontage, measured in linear feet, can be restaurants. The district (which includes commercial districts of U Street, 14th, P, and 7th near Florida) is already about 24% restaurants.

Whether you like this rule or not, it’s exerting a considerable influence on the neighborhood since we’re butting up against the limits. For one thing, it’s impeding the opening of new restaurants. For another thing, it’s probably doing something at the margin the encourage non-restaurant businesses to open. And it’s encouraging vacant retail spaces to stay vacant for longer. And it means that portions of this neighborhood that currently have few restaurants will stay that way even if demand for restaurants is high, since there are already so many restaurants in the restaurant-heavy portion of the ARTS overlay around the intersection of 14th and U. Last, it’s a huge boon to incumbent restaurant owners. A desperately mediocre, not-especially-cheap place like the Sala Thai on 13th and U can stay in business in virtue of the fact that, due to its mediocrity, you always walk in and get a table there and they don’t need to worry about too many newcomers opening up and competing with them.

As with almost all efforts to micromanage development in this way, I’m extremely dubious of the merits of this sort of thing. I think that if you let as many restaurants as want to open just go open, that might actually increase the volume of non-restaurant businesses simply because there would be fewer vacants and more street traffic. But if that’s wrong, if lifting the restaurant cap just led to more and more restaurants and no non-restaurant retail, I’d think we should take that as a signal that the neighborhood doesn’t include an adequate number of retail possibilities and that more areas within the jurisdiction should be opened to retail activities. In general, a smart city or neighborhood will welcome as much economic activity as possible. You might want to eschew unsafe or heavily polluting industries, but we’re talking about restaurants here. Allowing plentiful restaurants to open will give people more dining options and, ultimately, better dining options. Stifling competition through these kind of restrictions, by contrast, does a lot to help whoever happens to own a restaurant (and, more important, permission to run one) and little to boost retail diversity.

But even if you disagree with me about the merits here, I’d like everyone to appreciate the point that the vast majority of people living in the neighborhood have no idea that this rule exists or what its implications are. And you in your neighorhood probably have no idea what zoning rules are in place in your local commercial district. But you should find out — people should take ownership of their communities and of the policies that shape them.