It’s a familiar pattern in Boston: A neighborhood becomes gentrified (i.e., safe and attractive), raising hopes that stores selling things like books and household necessities will move in. But instead the main street is dominated by (mostly upscale) bars and restaurants. It happened in the South End, and it seems to be only optimistic outcome in my neighborhood of downtown Malden. (Photo of the South End’s DeLux restaurant — which is hardly the most deluxe eatery in the neighborhood — by ckirkman.)

Washington, DC, is experiencing a similar phenomenon, and one response has been to put limits on the number of restaurants and bars that can open in a neighborhood. On Greater Greater Washington, David Alpert explains the rationale:

Restaurants, especially those allowed to serve alcohol, can afford higher rents than neighborhood-serving businesses, like grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies and dry cleaners. As bars and restaurants become successful, an area draws more foot traffic, attracting more of those businesses. Landlords can charge higher rent, which pushes out the local businesses. This is basically an economic game theory problem: the most natural equilibrium states are a mostly-vacant corridor on the one hand, and nothing but bars on the other.

Matthew Yglesias counters that restrictions (presumably, Boston’s limit on liquor licenses is an example) only make the problem worse:

The high levels of regulation prevailing throughout the city means that if you make a single three-block stretch of some street somewhere friendly to new bars and restaurants then you really will get a ton of new bars and restaurants crowding everything out. But it’s a fairly large city. If there were less regulation across the board then the new bars and restaurants would be spread throughout the city and no particular neighborhood would see a drastic increase.

Whether Alpert or Yglesias is correct, it does seem desirable to prevent restaurants from completely taking over a neighborhood. (When I lived in the South End, I was frustrated by the paucity of local retail places, as well as the fact that I could rarely get into local restaurants on weekends — because the neighborhood’s reputation for dining attracted people from all over the Boston area.) But I’m not so optimistic that storefronts will then become stores. 

It’s clear that booksellers are never coming back, and there isn’t any successor to Woolworth’s (which, in the pre-Wal-Mart days, had a general store in just about every thriving commercial district). Non-chain hardware and drugstores tend to be significantly more expensive than their highway-based competitors, such as Home Depot, so they have a precarious existence even in the most stable urban neighborhoods.

Before taking a side on the best way to limit restaurants, I’d like a better sense of what we hope will take their place, knowing that we can’t go back to pre-Internet retail behavior and may be seeing a long-term reduction in consumer spending of all kinds. Tailors and second-hand stores? Make-your-own-pottery establishments?