Last month, I dashed off this tweet, inspired by an online presentation by Ilana Preuss, about her recent book making the case for small-scale manufacturing in downtowns and on main streets.

Addison Del Mastro @ad_mastro

One thing about zoning things like coffee roasteries and microbreweries as light industrial is that they're basically rendered inaccessible without a car, despite being really great crowd-gathering/foot-traffic-inducing businesses

September 29th 2021

54 Retweets665 Likes

More than 600 likes later, I realized that this is one of those things that’s both a bit of policy wonkery and an aspect of policy that affects people every day. That’s the thing about land-use policy in general; it feels really distant and arcane, but it’s the DNA of the places we inhabit every day. Maybe talk of coffee and beer just makes ears perk up! This is a good example of how something like zoning can be made relatable to folks who don’t really know or care about it, per se.

I actually had no idea, before becoming interested in these issues, that operations like microbreweries and coffee roasteries were often zoned as light industrial. But they are, which is part of why these consumer-facing businesses are often located in industrial/office-type areas outside of downtown, often accessible only by car and by following a number of winding roads into the office parks. (In some cases, cheaper rent than downtown is also probably at play.)

First of all, it’s obviously not a great idea to more or less force people to drive to a place where they’ll be drinking. Second, these kinds of businesses draw a lot of people, and are great ways to enliven main streets. Third, I get the sense that zoning hasn’t caught up to reality here. Budweiser or Maxwell House are obviously full-scale industrial enterprises. But lots of small microbreweries and roasters aren’t doing anything more “industrial” than a restaurant is. Their fire or disaster risk isn’t any greater, nor is the noise or the delivery traffic they generate. Lots of microbreweries have all their equipment in a single room in the back. These are street- and people-scaled, consumer-facing enterprises, and I’d say they belong where the people are.

That’s the point Preuss makes, even more broadly. Here’s some of what I took away from her presentation. One argument beyond the policy aspect is that a small network of mutually reliant businesses makes places stronger and more resilient. If you’re familiar with Strong Towns, you’ll recognize this argument. “Business owners with social connections to other business owners are twice as likely to survive,” says Preuss. This is the real point that’s being made when people criticize big-box stores or chains for “taking dollars out of a community,” or some such. It’s about creating a local network of businesses and customers who work together.

Here’s a microbrewery in Cambridge, Maryland, a post-industrial small city working to revitalize its downtown. RAR Brewing is one of the few downtown businesses that attracts customers and beckons them to stay. That’s a positive signal for potential business owners elsewhere in the area. It’s positive-sum.

Preuss points to a typical example: a coffee shop with a roasting operation in the back, which in turn supplies coffee to lots of other local cafes or restaurants. It gives those other businesses a local selling point, and it makes the roaster/coffee shop more stable because it generates multiple sources of income based in one property.

“Anyone who replicates and packages what they make is part of small-scale manufacturing,” Preuss explains. This is more craftsmanship than factory production, at the scale she is talking about. There used to be a candle-making studio attached to a wine shop not from my home, and also a pottery studio with an ice cream parlor at the back. In some localities, that wouldn’t be allowed. 3D printing studios aren’t exactly clanking assembly lines. And so on.

A final particularly notable point is that there’s a shortage of affordable, small space for entrepreneurs to try out a small-scale manufacturing business, in an area where they can attract and advertise to lots of foot traffic. Permitting and regulation is also thick and often unpredictable. It’s a lot harder to dip your toes into this kind of small business than it should be.

At a broader level, I like to make this point to those who find such businesses a little too fancy/high-end/“boutiquey,” and wonder if downtowns really need them at all.

I can see why some folks might form that impression of enterprises like farm-to-table restaurants, fancy coffee roasters, makerspaces, etc. But here’s the thing: whatever outward form they might take, they’re in essence a recapitulation of what tight-knit, local economies used to look like.

Before the days of national distribution, out here in my corner of America, the outlying, rail-connected town of Herndon, Virginia supplied milk and butter to Washington, D.C. Today, more self-consciously, we would call that “farm to table.” In a much richer country, it takes on a trendier form. But it’s fundamentally a return to an old way, after what will perhaps one day be seen as a strange interlude.

If you’re a conservative, this stuff can all sound a little like it points to busybody central planning, but it’s really profoundly pro-market and entrepreneurial. It’s quite normal to have small-scale “industrial” operations mixed in with other bits and pieces of urban life. What’s strange is that we ever thought otherwise.

Related Reading:

California Zoning

More on “Commercial Density”

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