The Corner Store is Back

Corner Stores Mount a Comeback in Residential Neighborhoods - Bloomberg

From Seattle to Baltimore, rebuilding this lost retail network has become a goal of many zoning reformers. It’s a core tenet of the buzzy “15-minute city” concept, which aims to give residents access to all their needs within a brief walk. And it fits into a post-Covid retail trend toward smaller-footprint brick-and-mortar stores.

But undoing decades of planning orthodoxy that strictly separates businesses from residences stands to be a slow and incremental process, and it comes with its own concerns about gentrification and conflicts with homeowners, as well as challenges tied to making neighborhood stores succeed in an age of Amazon and Walmart.

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This is more than just the corner store. This is about your local pharmacy. It’s about your local grocery store. It’s about your local restaurant. As people start losing a real contact with the people who work and own these establishments they lose contact with community.

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