Legalize Cafes Everywhere!

Disclaimer: This article and every article on my Substack do not represent the opinions of my employer, or any affiliated organizations and public bodies I volunteer with or serve on. These posts are my private opinions representing only myself.

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I’ve been studying commercial real estate. That includes spending a lot of time walking around the cities of the Bay Area, looking at ground-floor retail, and trying to get a sense of commercial markets. Many communities are frustrated by the lack of essential commercial uses like hardware stores and groceries in vacant commercial spaces.

There is a consistent theme I keep seeing in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley when commercial space do eventually fill up: cafes and food. I was even seeing cafes and food & beverage spots replace non-food retail in the suburban strip malls of the South Bay.

Coffee shops have always been popular in Berkeley, but they’ve been especially popular lately. Whenever I see a commercial vacancy in my neighborhood, there’s a 50% chance of it becoming a cafe or 50% any other commercial use.

Cafes are the simplest uses for commercial buildings. They don’t require much beyond a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bar for the baristas, and some amount of seating space. Some coffee shops are so simple that in the suburbs they’re run out of drive-through booths.

Urban commercial landlords prefer to lease to cafes because they’re profitable, require minimal construction that the landlord would be liable for, and get started much more quickly than other commercial use.

Cafes fall under most municipal zoning ordinances as “Food and Beverage for immediate consumption” and are typically restricted to the commercial buildings of limited commercial areas. With high demand for cafes, even greater now because of the rise of work-from-home, this could be crowding out non-food and beverage retail from commercial buildings in a limited number of commercial zones. Commercial zoning usually consists of less than 10% of land-use in most U.S. cities. Unusually large amounts of commercial retail floor space are now occupied by cafes and food & beverage spots.

Why not let people operate cafes out of their homes or allow new cafes in residential areas? Cafes and coffee shops are something most people wouldn’t actually mind in their backyards, especially if they’re working from home.

Commercial uses like hardware stores, trinket shops, horticultural shops, pet stores etc. need to be in limited commercial zones due to activity that is more likely to be considered a nuisance. Or that those types of businesses do not have a walkable business patronage and require real estate for parking and larger floor plans.

Why mandate that cafes (and other low-intensity food and beverage businesses) lease valuable and large commercial space that could go to non-food retail, when cafes themselves don’t need to depend on a customer base driving in or have on-site uses that are a nuisance to residential neighborhoods?

If cafes were allowed in people’s neighborhoods, then people would have cafes within walking range to patronize instead of getting in their car and driving to a commercial building farther away. In addition to work-from-home benefits, this would allow for new community gathering spaces directly within neighborhoods that many cafes functionally act as now.

Cafes in residential areas would also lower barriers to operating a small business by allowing people to operate cafes inside their homes without the need to post high profitability margins to pay for high rent commercial leases.

This argument could be made for the legalization of most food and beverage for immediate consumption businesses, but cafes would be a small enough starter for Americans unaccustomed to this convenience.

Americans love traveling to Paris, Milan, Tokyo and the like, and are amazed at how close cafes, lunch spots and bakeries are to residences and lodging — even in their nation’s suburbs and rural areas.

There’s little reason we should ban that here.