Upzoned
Washington DC is charging restaurants thousands of dollars to keep their streateries — outdoor dining areas built during Covid-19. Are these fees fair compensation for public space, or will they kill the local businesses they were meant to save?
Guest host Norm Van Eeden Petersman dives into this question with Carlee Alm-LaBar, a former city official who helped bring streateries to her own city.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
All right, folks, welcome to Upzoned. This is Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm excited to take this opportunity as part of our Upzoned podcast where we talk about an article that's current or fresh in the news, and we talk about it from a Strong Towns perspective. With me today is our chief of staff at Strong Towns, Carlee Alm-LaBar. Carlee, welcome.
Thank you, Norm. I'm really excited to be with you on Upzoned today. Thanks for including me.
Yeah, likewise. I think you've been on just a couple of weeks ago, or I was listening to you yesterday, and now you're back. So I love it, and I'm excited to have you take on this discussion about an article in the Washington Post that was published just recently by Tim Carman and Rachel Viner regarding the changes that the District Department of Transportation have introduced with respect to streateries.
So these are the little plazas that pop up in part what were parking spaces. They are useful for restaurants to be able to provide additional seating. They were very useful during the pandemic when outdoor dining was more of a requirement, but actually it's also an opportunity throughout the year to provide for outdoor dining in spaces where often the streets allow for that.
So new structure requirements have been established. I think the goal, or the idea of it, is they want better structures that are better maintained. But another key part of it is they've introduced rates of fees for these sites to be used. So on a $20 per square foot basis, restaurants are basically able to rent it for a year, as well as paying some fees related to the construction of their space. They are obviously creating these rules in response to some complaints and observations that others have had, that the amount of car spaces taken up by these streetside eateries are definitely a factor when you think about parking requirements and things like that within the community. But also that some of these sites have started to become run down in the perception of some, while at the same time, restaurants have made good use of them in a lot of places.
So really grappling with, hey, if we require $120 per square foot to be provided, what is the cost of that going to be for each business? If you have to pay $260 for your annual permit, okay, that's reasonable. But then they also have to provide Jersey barriers to provide safety at each site. The city said you can rent them from the city or get them from the city for $250 per barrier. So start to calculate—okay, we're up to several thousand dollars at that point. Then they also have to submit fees whenever they bring in a different document. So that includes architectural designs, which feels like a big stretch. If you know a good carpenter, you know that they can whip up really good structures quite quickly without necessarily needing stamps or approvals or things like this.
Along all of those things, one of the challenges is that the temporary program that's been in place since June of 2020 didn't require restaurants to pay for the use of public spaces—just to register that they were planning to use it and to basically make something of those spaces. But now they're going to have to pay significantly more and sort of follow much more standards.
Carlee, you've had involvement in this within Lafayette, and I would imagine you've also enjoyed eating in some over the years. What are your thoughts on this as we review this article together?
I think, to be honest, I have sympathy in a lot of directions. It feels to me like if you think about where we were when these were enabled—I wasn't in Washington, DC at the time, but I think some of what we saw during COVID was things that Strong Towns would advocate for: rapid responses, and what's the next smallest thing we can do. These restaurants were struggling, and this was a way to get people outside, keep our businesses alive. Those types of responses are things that we love to see and we encourage. I'm sure most of the folks listening today have enjoyed themselves in an outdoor dining establishment that may have been allowed by street parking. So I guess I start with that.
Now, I have also worn the hat of a city official, and when you start to get the complaints about something, you start to feel like something needs to be done. They are using public space. Other people might not be able to use that same public space for free. So does this thing that we did as a quick response, a next small step to a problem during 2020—does it make sense as a long term solution? Are we still facing the same challenge today, or does it make sense to adjust?
So I'm very sympathetic to the idea that over the years there have been some maybe unintended consequences and developments to these streeteries in DC. But in reading the article like you did, I certainly had some feelings that maybe we're going too far, too fast. The rapid response type behavior that was so necessary in 2020, maybe it isn't quite as necessary to rapidly put these new regulations in. What goals are we trying to achieve, and does this solve them?
I know we chatted about this internally as a team, and I thought our colleague Edward's response was really smart: Is this a zoning solution to address a code enforcement challenge? So it feels like you maybe have some city officials who are taking the tools that they know how to use best to try and solve and address some of the complaints that they've been having.
So as a city official, I think I'd be tempted—and certainly you have to work with your elected folks—to say, well, what are the values that we have as a city? Do we value these streeteries in our community? In Lafayette, Louisiana, we call them parklets. But do we value these, and do we want to keep them? Then, are these the right policies that then allow that or enable that?
So I know we'll get into conversations later about safety and things like that. But that's kind of my starting point: My goodness, this seems like something that's been a really great asset for parts of DC. Gosh, there might be some unintended consequences here.
Yeah, because I think a big, important part of this is, what are our higher order priorities? So if ample parking that is widely available is your highest order priority, then this is just so frustrating. The relief is within view because the idea is, "Hey, pretty soon we're going to have less of these, and we'll get our parking spaces back."
One of the restaurants took up 12 and a half parking spaces. I'm not sure what they did with that half of a parking space, or what it used to be. Maybe it was some motorcycles or something. But the consequence of this was that that restaurant was generating, according to the restaurant owner, $4 million in gross sales, which was a doubling of the amount of productivity for that restaurant, which turned into $438,000 in sales and use taxes for the district.
Now I've seen you start to ask the question, if that's $35,000 per parking space that is going into community coffers to be able to provide for core public services, what is the corresponding benefit of paid parking? Well, we know that that is $138 per square foot, was the calculation. I need to do the quick math of how much that is on a per parking space basis. But it's interesting to then say, "All right, if one is offering significantly more revenue to the city, which we can use to care for the Commonwealth, and we have other resources available to meet parking demands"—namely transit options in DC, as well as parking garages and things like that that maybe have a slightly higher cost to the user, but certainly allow for a greater diversity of uses on the street—that looks a lot like what we're talking about in terms of allowing for productive land use.
I would also say that it's good to recognize that the use of the public realm involves costs. In fact, I wish that we had this conversation more clearly and more openly on a regular basis: that when you use a space, there is a cost to that. We take this really dim view of never really seeing the cost when it comes to vehicles, but every other type of use—if people were to store their goods on the street, they would say, "No, no, you need to put that in a private storage locker. You can't just do that out there."
So it's interesting that these streeteries have really sort of moved the needle in terms of reassessing, what do we do with the public realm, and what more can we do with the public realm? That's what I'm drawn to. One of the concerns around safety, visibility, and all of those things, to me, feel like secondary issues. They're very solvable problems once we've gotten through that first level, which is, what do we want to do with the public realm? When we begin to innovate on this, like they did in 2020, you begin to see how this can be so valuable. It's sort of upending assumptions.
I wrote an article in my community in Delta in 2020 when they introduced their patio program for reusing parking spaces as patios. I said this actually does way more than we think it does. Yes, it's immediately about helping restaurants to stay afloat, and it's about creating spaces that previously didn't exist, and being, "Oh, this ain't bad. I like this." But it actually also signaled a rather interesting sort of robustness or nimbleness. Our rules in Delta were rolled out, I think within three weeks. They worked with local restaurants that said, "What do you need?" And they basically said, "Let's roll with that."
The consequences there are—they became very popular. It's interesting that this is an opportunity here in DC to also assess and say, "Yep, we probably can continue down this path. We can adjust the guidelines to standards, but let's do so with the thought towards really building value."
How did you handle any of the pushback? Or did you find that there wasn't much pushback in Lafayette when it was proposed? Or were there safeguards or guardrails that helped you to be quite purposeful? How'd you bring that in?
Interestingly, because we've talked about this internally as well, we actually used our parklet program—and therefore our streetery program, because ours are essentially the same thing—came into play before COVID. So our policy was active before COVID, and we had a couple of outdoor dining places up and running when COVID hit. We did it all as—so we did that policy and program all as part of one thing together, and we worked with our Downtown Association. We actually did it in the downtown area.
I think that one of the things that I was struck by in this article is that it feels like because they are operating at the full city scale, they're struggling to localize the response, maybe in the way that could make this program—make the program changes more acceptable to different parts of the community. Not being a frequent DC visitor, I'm not familiar with all the places that these streeteries are. But a Jersey barrier may be a perfectly reasonable thing on one street, and it may feel like a perfectly ridiculous thing on another street, depending on the street design and how the street is used.
The other thing that we did in Lafayette when we rolled out our policy is we did it after several years of participating in Parking Day. So we had given people, for several years in a row, the opportunity to experience the temporary installations, to get excited about them, to understand how they could work and not be that disruptive to the regular course of business. People got—we used that temporary installation to kind of share with people what was possible, so that by the time we came with the policy, people were excited about it. They had enjoyed the temporary installations and thought we could do something like this more permanently.
We also had worked with our Downtown Association to do a demonstration long-term parklet. It wasn't actually a streetery. It was just a location of a small little park in a parking spot. That had been popular. It had been across the street from a couple of fun eateries themselves, so customers could walk over.
So it can be really difficult. I'm sure that many of the folks on the DC staff have probably been fielding complaints from some of the folks who don't like it, or who are thinking that it's unfair. So it sounds like these proposed policies were their responses to that. It just feels like, based on the article, that perhaps the responses weren't always well calibrated to the situation of each particular eatery.
I think one of the things that I wanted to grapple with too is this Citizens Association of Georgetown. There's a piece that's linked in there. They say this program has caused an undue burden on public safety, proper traffic management, and Georgetown's historic character. What are some of those insights?
For example, there's—rodents are increasingly there. In some instances, the patios are not actually being used. They're being used for storage of goods, so chairs are being set out there. But also extra tables and things like that, with the idea that only in exceptional times when there's this influx of visitors are people actually ending up seated on the patio. Most of the rest of the time is sort of a no man's land.
There are popular ones, but then the unpopular ones maybe are the ones that are squarely in view of the concerned citizens, and the popular ones are the ones that are in view of the proponents. How do we grapple with that from a Strong Towns perspective, where clearly we have competing interests, but also people's perception of what the big issue is is often very clouded by their particular instance of what they—if you see only bad design, you're convinced that the whole thing needs to be gotten rid of. If you see only sort of improved productivity in restaurants that are able to stay afloat, and, "Isn't this wonderful? And I got to experience a street festival nearby, as I got to enjoy a fine meal in that context," your experiences are so varied.
How do we sort of grapple with some of those competing dynamics here?
I think it can often be really hard, especially when you have people that are, as you said, experiencing one side of this or the other side of this. I think that the thing—let's say you're talking to someone who is experiencing the streetery that's being used as a storage unit, that's not attractive, that they feel is maybe deterring customers from their business. Looking at the policies, proposals, and suggestions in the context of—I think the way you kicked off the entire episode was, "Well, what are our first principles? What are our priorities here as a community?"
Once someone is angry or upset or feels that their life or livelihood has been impacted by poor policy or poor management of those policies, it can be very difficult to kind of assist them in taking another perspective. That's why it's so important to, I think, foster a kind of continuous improvement, small steps, kind of philosophy like we're always talking about here. You never want to have a policy that you throw out there and then it freezes in place.
It seems to me in this case, they allowed these in 2020 and then they really haven't done the ongoing management to now prevent where they are in this more crisis state where they're really getting the sides, on both sides, really inflamed. I mean, when I was reading the article, I was stressed out, frankly, for some of the businesses who are putting their revenue numbers and their entire business model now depends on being able to operate that streetery. It shifts entirely if these policies go into effect.
I think that when I worked at the city in our planning department, one of the things that we would say internally is that we were trying to create a place that was predictable for people to do business. It's ideally not the local government's role to be kind of changing the rules on businesses in such a way that they can't plan and they can't adapt. It feels like this is probably coming quite abruptly for many of these businesses that have hired, staffed, and built business models around being able to do this sort of thing. Seems like it could use more time and more discussion.
Yeah, and providing off-ramps, I think, is important here. That's where one of the recommendations, I think, that's now been established is that they need to be seasonal, so you can no longer enclose them. They're largely being made seasonal because you can't enclose them and put heaters and things like that in there.
I was reflecting on that because the notion of outdoor dining in sort of fairly rudimentary structures seems to really present kind of a challenge of, "All right, are you just blasting heaters and things like this in order to keep enough people in those spaces? Is this actually in the Strong Towns lexicon, sort of the first version of those simple shacks?" What does that gradual development of those shacks to the next increment actually look like in the context of a streetery like this?
I'm actually kind of grappling with that, because I don't know if you could go and use brick and mortar and create more elaborate structures, in part because you're still perched on the side of the street that you haven't given up using, with its primary purpose being to move a lot of vehicles. So those are the ones that are in the crosshairs.
I see this in Vancouver, where you have buses and cement trucks running right past points where people are enjoying foie gras, and you're like, "All right, there's something of a mismatch here." But then a lot of our side streets are the places that, through our zoning regulations, we say you can't have any retail there. You can't have restaurants on a side street. It has to be on the main drag. Well, that's going to present a lot of challenges. You couldn't even say, "Hey, we're going to do a side entrance on the corner lot and create something really great in that side area," because those are the ones that nobody's objecting to. Those are the ones that work really well.
But then the idea too—maybe, and then we can go into the Downzone in a moment here—but is this a land grab? So that was one of the complaints that was raised by the Georgetown coalition: "Hey, this is an unsanctioned land grab, which is public realm suddenly just being made available over an extended period of time for private restaurateurs." If this person has made $4 million, that's not all profit. Obviously, there would be a portion of that that would be profit. But that is a good opportunity in the way that even if someone wants to use the park to film a movie or to host a festival, you're going to have to pay a park booking fee. Is that maybe more suitable, that you should be able to have to factor in the cost per square foot in order to do that?
The trouble for me, the way that I always grapple with it, is the "but what about"—because my mind immediately goes, "but what about cars?" They are the ones that, if there is paid parking, even then that paid parking is more for parking management than a true calculation of the cost of having them use the space in that way. So the movement and storage of automobiles—we discount it so heavily that everything else we're asking to give an account for. Yet when it comes to these devices, we've just sort of turned a blind eye to it.
But I also want to just touch on the fact that I do think there does have to be a real accounting for the cost of what we do with the private realm, but also the public realm. The idea that every street should earn its keep, or a street is a terrible thing to waste, I feel is a good step in the right direction to what we talk about as Strong Towns: that transportation systems are a means of creating prosperity, not an end unto themselves. Therefore, every investment that we make in a street is actually with a view of making it more productive.
I love asking that question: How do we make a street productive? It's having ever better buildings adjacent to the street, having ever better access provided by that street for a greater number of participants, ideally those that don't require a lot of space to store an automobile, but instead are nimble or are able to walk in. Making sure that smaller things like bike parking—bike parking can have a significant impact on providing a great resting place, creating the conditions for more people to be able to use that space in sort of an anonymous way.
The group in Ottawa—this stands out to me—the Strong Towns Ottawa group, they actually hosted a pop-up table on one of their streets that there was a lot of contention about parking. The business owners in particular said, "We need way more parking right now. It's being restricted. Go away with all your bike lanes. We don't want any of this."
So they asked people walking by, "Hey, you're a customer. These businesses have said they want parking, but actually what they want is customers. So if we can just get past the abstraction that parking equals customers—they might equal a few, but surely a business has more customers." So they asked people who were walking by, "What do you want?"
They said, "We want more shops. We want a greater variety of shops, and we would spend a lot more time here. We want better street lights. We kind of want that garbage over there to be dealt with. We want there to be fun things here, maybe even street performers, that sort of stuff." It began to tick off all of these things. Maybe there was—I think in their survey—there was a handful of people that said, "Oh, man, I wish there was more parking." But the vast majority said, "No, I want other stuff. I want things that from the perspective of Strong Towns we say would make your street far more productive and help to generate lasting prosperity."
That, to me, is missing in these pieces. There's a little bit of it, of, "Well, I guess that we can have restaurants, but it shouldn't come at such a cost." I'm like, "Okay, then let's account for that through standards that actually are going to require good construction and good upkeep."
I do think much like if you've ever camped your stuff on a chair in an airport because you're saving it, and then somebody just comes along eventually and moves it because you haven't been there—I guess airport's a bad example because they'll throw it in a bomb destruction device. But in other spaces where you're camping out, you're trying to hold it, and then somebody just comes along and says, "You're not using this actually anymore. We're just going to move your stuff. Now I'm seated there." In that context, that shouldn't be a declaration of war. That's just acknowledging you've kind of lost your ability to lay claim to this if you're not really using it for its intended purpose. I think that can be one of the steps forward for this.
But before we go to the Downzone, last thoughts on streeteries and everything that makes them great or not so great.
Oh, well, I love them. I think they're great. I guess my hope for DC is that they'll be able to kind of maybe take a more zoomed-in look at the problem and to see what maybe is an ongoing management issue versus—it seems like since the pandemic, they've created a lot of great local businesses. There's probably a way that they can support that local business infrastructure in a way that is maybe perceived as more fair than it is today. But it seems like their response is maybe a little too dramatic for where the community has been the last five years.
Yeah, totally. The idea of "our city needs to get to the point where everything is built out to a finished state and then leave it as is"—that's a little bit of the historic sort of layers of, "Hey, things were perfect the way that they are. Don't mess with it, especially not with timber structures, because we are a brick and mortar sort of place." That really betrays that sense, "We've created the neighborhood that we need that works for us, and now we're lifting up the drawbridge and making it impossible for any new entrants to emerge."
We saw some of the same pushback with street food, with food trucks and things like that. People saying, "Oh, they're noisy. They're loud." So you didn't do anything to help with being able to run cables from nearby businesses. Instead, "No, now that's a tripping hazard." So it was like, on the one hand, "It's a bad thing. It's really bad for everybody." Yet we're not going to do anything to address some of the secondary complaints because we just want it gone. I think that can be part of the challenge here.
So with that, let's transition into the Downzone as we wrap up Member Week. What has been something that has been lifting you and giving you some added interest?
Oh, well, luckily for me—as you know, Norm, I'm in Lafayette, Louisiana. I've said it at least once on this episode—Monty and Bernice and the folks from Neighborhood Evolution are in town this week, so I'm going to get to see them this evening, which will be great. It's always great to have people like them with their amazing expertise in incremental development here in my hometown. So I'm excited to hear what they've been up to today while I've been with you.
Then they brought from Bryan, Texas, Katie Develops, who is—apparently that's not her last name, that's her Instagram handle.
Cool, yeah.
She's Instagram famous, I'm assured. So I'm gonna get to see what she thinks of Lafayette this evening, so that's exciting. To see what they experienced today and to get an outside perspective on my hometown.
Yeah, so you'll have good friends and new friends. I love that. That's awesome.
How about you?
Yeah, I'm gonna stick to the original version of this, which is, what are you consuming? For me, I've been working my way through Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series for a long time. I'm actually circling back and restarted at book one. It just is this mythical world, magic is present in it, but it's also you've got battles and all sorts of portals and things like that. People are gallivanting around the countryside, but then simultaneously going through a wormhole and appearing in other parts of the world.
So it's the best type of fiction writing where I get to immerse myself in it. It kind of reminds me when I was tree planting, where I was reading Homer's Odyssey and the other, Les Misérables. In both cases, I would be so immersed in these worlds that these authors were creating, and then it'd be like, the truck would get to the block, and it'd be, "All right, everybody out." And I'd be like, "No, it's raining. I have to plant trees. Let me go back to ancient Greece, or let me go back to the streets of Paris."
So I feel a little bit of that, except that this is a fictional world, but I do get to experience that. So that's the delight of reading. If anybody out there is also reading Robert Jordan or has read them, definitely get in touch, because I want to find my people who have that Robert Jordan connection. So the Wheel of Time series—definitely recommended. It's hefty, but hey, so is everything good in this world.
So with that, I think we're at the bottom of the hour here. Thank you, Carlee, for jumping in at last minute for our session together. Yeah, I think in your honor and honor of this discussion, I'm gonna go use a gift card that I've got here for our restaurant in town that has a streetery. So there we go.
Sounds like a perfect end. That's right.
Have a great rest of the day. Take care, and thanks everybody for listening in to this episode of Upzoned. We're so glad to have you along for the ride and keep doing what you can to build Strong Towns in your communities as well. Take care.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership today.