It's hard to rent out all those street level shops. The tenants of a 4-6 story structure can't support those shops. There are not enough residents per shop for that. Such places are not usually convenient to drive to.
The SF peninsula is getting way too many of those things. Many shops are vacant.
>The tenants of a 4-6 story structure can't support those shops.
In the polish version of these, the stores are in one building of the cluster of 4+ buildings, generally on the main street of the area. The US has a retail store for every 500 people or so which is about how many fit into a few of these buildings..
>Such places are not usually convenient to drive to.
You don't drive to them, you take whatever local public transportation there is or walk. It's dense enough that you can visit all the important stores without driving or leaving your local area.
>Many shops are vacant.
That has more to do with the increasing rents and commercial rates being locked in for 5+ years. More economical to keep the place vacant for the landlord.
Do you have data for that? Having visited a number of countries in Europe, Japan and the US I've found roughly the same number of retail stores (at least in terms of area). The US tends to have fewer but larger stores in my experience. For example, Google indicates that Germany alone has almost as many grocery stores as the US despite being a fraction of the population.
Then the rent is too high for the ground-floor businesses. Lower the rent to allow niche retailers to use those storefronts as the physical presence for a largely online business. However, it’s often in the owner’s financial interest to leave them vacant at a high rent so they can make up the difference by charging extortionate rents to the businesses who bring in enough revenue to afford it. That’s why those first floors are inevitably filled with banks, Starbucks, and Chipotle.
All the major thoroughfares in Toronto (Queen, King, Dundas, College, Bloor, St. Clair, Yonge) were built like this. The residential, single-family unit side streets then have convenient, walking-distance retail.
Most of these were built pre-WW2, so they're only 2-3 stories, but recent condo redevelopments of lots have generally followed the template of street-retail:
I used to live on the Peninsula and know what you mean. It's worth mentioning though that you don't need a shop, or multiple, in every building. It would be enough for there to be a smattering of convenience stores and basic common services like barbers and salons. Moreover, they are not meant to be driveable so long as the surrounding density is sufficient. Polk Street in SF is very inconvenient to drive to but the shops there seem to do quite well.
