The "housing theory" of corner bars

Programming note: I’m on the road for the rest of the week, so no Weekender this Sunday. Today is the latest installment of The Fingers Interview. Normal publishing schedule resumes next week!—Dave.

Perhaps you have heard of the “housing crisis.” Briefly: America needs more housing in places Americans want/need to live. There aren’t enough! It’s a crisis. I’m sure you understand.

Of course, Fingers is not a houseletter, or even a homeletter. It is a boozeletter. But today, taking inspiration from “the housing theory of everything,” I’ve got a wide-ranging interview with Ned Resnikoff, urban policy consultant and writer of the newsletter PUBLIC COMMENT, about a subject squarely within this publication’s editorial wheelhouse. Namely, the cultural and civic importance of bars, and how to preserve and promote their vitality while making our communities safer and more closely knit. Y’know: The Good Shit™️.

This conversation came about after I saw a post from Resnikoff on Bluesky (above) proposing a relationship between a mundane municipal rule and American drinking culture’s most notorious social cost. Naturally, I asked him to expand on that. “American mid-sized and larger cities used to be a lot more walkable than they are today, and you really did have a much broader sort of ecosystem of neighborhood bars, corner grocery stores, and so on,” he said in a recent phone interview. But outside of a handful of US cities, that’s no longer really the case. That’s a self-inflicted problem, argued Resnikoff, a former policy director of the housing advocacy group California YIMBY. “We’ve created a planning system where in general, we're putting the alcohol where the only way to access it is by going there, having a few and then driving back.”

I don’t need to explain why that’s a problem. Instead, I had Resnikoff explain how antiquated US housing policies often hold back urban and suburban communities alike, and why that has a lot more to do with neighborhood bars (his is Prizefighter, in Emeryville, California) than you might think.

Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

Dave Infante, Fingers: Thanks for your time, Ned. By way of kicking things off, can you unpack your post the other day about bars and parking minimums, for readers that are definitely familiar with the former but may not be familiar with the latter?

Ned Resnikoff, urban policy consultant and writer: Sure. I primarily work on housing policy. Just to be clear on what a what a “parking minimum” is, I'm talking about legal requirements that a developer build a certain amount of parking. In the context of housing, it can be something like, ‘There needs to be one off-street parking spot or more for every for every apartment or unit of housing in the development.’ Many cities also have similar parking requirements for bars and restaurants. There, it’s usually more tied to square footage. In the housing context, requiring the construction of off-street parking limits the amount of space on the lot you can actually dedicate to housing, so you get less housing out of it, or it can be really expensive to build a garage. In general, our cities are way too car-dependent. Especially if we're going to decarbonize our economy, we need to be moving away from that.

I have a particular obsession with commercial parking requirements when it comes to bars and restaurants. If you are requiring parking for establishments that serve alcohol, then you're essentially requiring the owner or developer of the bar or restaurant to potentially subsidize drunk-driving. Given that we've got a real pedestrian and bicyclist safety crisis in our cities, the fact that we would be saying that as the the owner of a bar or restaurant it is your responsibility under local law to make it as easy as possible to get to and from your bar by driving to it just seems absolutely nuts to me. That's not to say that it should be illegal or a bar or restaurant to have to have parking. I think that should be up to the determination of the owner, and how much parking they actually need. It's not something that the city should be requiring of them.

The framing of a subsidy for drunk driving is provocative. It’s great. Can you say more about it? How are the individual bar owners or the city zoning commission that requires parking minimums “subsidizing” drunk driving?

It might be useful to take a step back from the individual bar or restaurant with a parking lot, and instead think about how cities in general are planned. Parking mandates are part of a larger system of planning and zoning that also very frequently involves separation of uses. So you are putting bars and restaurants in general, outside residential areas, and especially far outside “single family residential” areas. Already, you’re making it so that if people want to go to those establishments, they're probably not walking. Then there's the question of how much road space is allocated to private cars versus other means of transportation. That's another nudge towards driving in a car. Then the parking is another part of that. If you look at the Parking Reform Network’s website, you can see how much of different urban downtowns are dedicated to parking. In some cities, it’s 20%, 30%, 40% of the central downtown area. It’s just tarmac.

And of course, you agree that’s the highest and best use for that land. Right, Ned?!

Right, right. [laughs] So you’re creating a lot of desert, essentially, where there aren’t other establishments and there’s not a great way to get around between establishments. This is just kind of nudging people further in the direction of driving. If you're concentrating all of the places that serve alcohol in areas that are separated from residential use, and you're making it so that any way of getting to those places other than driving your own car is prohibitively inconvenient, then people are going to drive to and from the bar. I'm sure most people who do that, most of the time, are going to drink responsibly or have a designated driver. But way too frequently, that’s not the case. We’ve created a planning system where in general, we're putting the alcohol where the only way to access it is by going there, having a few and then driving back.

You hear a lot of people express preference to have restaurants and bars within their neighborhoods that they can walk to. But when the chips are down, they may not actually support a restaurant or bar on their specific block. I’m getting at the concept of NIMBYism here, which you’ve obviously spent an enormous amount of time working on. Can you talk about the schism that happens there between expressed and revealed preference for an amenity like a neighborhood bar?

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