Does the classic American main street still exist? An exploratory look

ABSTRACT

The classic American main street ‒ walkable, well-serviced and supportive of mom and pop stores ‒ has been struggling for decades. This paper attempts to quantify the degree to which the American main street, or some aspects of it, still hangs on. It presents an exploratory, large sample look at the degree to which the blocks of one US city, Chicago, actually conform to idealized main street principles. The paper offers both an empirical and a methodological contribution: what metrics might be used to capture main street principles, and how does a large city like Chicago stack up to these stated norms? Eight variables are operationalized at the block level. While the metrics here do not reflect absolute consensus about what is important in an urban neighbourhood’s commercial core, they do cover three dominant narratives: servicing, opportunity and quality. The paper finds that the overlap in these three dimensions is weak.

Notes

1. Although these data are kept up to date, 9% of the businesses lacked a specific amenity category. The effect on block scoring is likely to be less than 9%, however, since similarly categorized businesses could be in the same block. For example, if a business with missing data is a restaurant and there are other restaurants in the block, the block still counts the presence of a restaurant and receives one 1 point regardless of the number of restaurants.

2. The sources for chain stores were: Technomic’s Top 250 Chain Restaurant Report (2016; http://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/top-500-chains), Balance’s report on the Top 100 Largest US Based Retail Companies (2016; https://www.thebalance.com/largest-us-retailers-4045123), and Wikipedia’s list of restaurant chains, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_restaurant_chains_in_the_United_States.