Bringing Neighborhood Businesses Back To Galesburg

A way to bring depth and resilience back to our neighborhoods

Over my last few posts I’ve had a focus on Downtown Galesburg. While I believe our downtown is important to the strength and future of Galesburg, we have to take steps to make every neighborhood stronger and more resilient. One thing that would help achieve these goals is to bring back small neighborhood businesses. 

Fond memories

If you talk to any of the older Galesburg citizens they can tell you about how there used to be little shops within their neighborhoods that they could walk to. Small grocery stores and food stands used to be all over town, but now there are almost none. 

The picture above is of 40 East Sanborn, just a couple blocks from where I grew up. The building always fascinated me when I was younger. What is this building? It is clearly supposed to be a store, but why isn’t it? Nonetheless I walked past it frequently on my way to my Grandparents’ house a few blocks over, always wanting to know why the little store wasn’t a store anymore. 

I recently asked my Grandma if there had ever been a business in that building in her lifetime, because there hasn’t been during mine. She answered that when she was young it had been a grocery store and later on a pressed flower shop. She reckoned it had been empty since the 60s/70s. Not only was this little shop within walking distance of my Grandparents’ house, it was one of three little grocery stores that they were able to walk to within the neighborhood. 

So what changed? Why has this store been empty for at least half a century? Just one block South is Judy’s Café (Formally King Gyros and Swedoughs Doughnuts before that) and that has continued to have businesses in it. What’s the difference? Can we someday have a business occupying 40 E Sanborn again?

We changed our neighborhoods

What has happened in Galesburg is not unique in modern American History, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less tragic. According to the caption on this picture in Patty Mosher’s “Images of America: Galesburg”, there were 134 grocery stores in town in 1928. It’s just so hard to imagine today, 128 SEPARATE stores! The population around that time was approximately 28,000, not much less than what we have today. How many grocery stores do we have today? We have two Hyvees, Aldi, Walmart, Cornucopia, Hi Lo; and other stores that sell dried goods like Target, Save a Lot, and Dollar General. Even if you count all of those as full service grocery stores that leaves us with just about 10 stores. In my lifetime even there used to be more grocery stores of different sizes. We are now left with just a few large retailers selling us all our food. And it’s not just food, it’s almost everything we buy at a physical store.

So what changed?

Cars takeover town

The first major change was the widespread adoption of the automobile. Everyone got cars, but why did this lead to the death of neighborhood businesses?

Owning a car, even today, is pretty expensive. The beauty of the car is that once you buy it, trips in the car are relatively cheap and very convenient. Once you are already paying for a car you might as well use it. What would be the point of paying for an expensive transportation machine if you aren’t going to use it? 

If you go from low cost transportation like walking and riding public transit to paying for a car, it’s going to affect your budget. How would that look? Let’s do a thought experiment. Say that you are a family in the 1950s and your combined budget for food and transportation is $500. Because you live in a walkable neighborhood, almost everything you need can be bought at stores within walking distance. If you need to go to a job or go downtown for anything extra you can take a bus, or even just walk. The kids play and go to school in the neighborhood so there’s not much cost for transporting them either. Between walking and having to take public transit you end up spending maybe $100 on transportation, leaving $400 for food. 

Since you don’t spend much money on transportation that leaves a fair amount that can be spent on food and other items. So while the small stores nearby may not have the lowest price in town, you don’t need to have the absolute lowest price because you have a little more room in the budget. And even if you went to the store with the lowest prices you’d still have to lug the groceries across town on the bus or by walking. This is what helped neighborhood businesses flourish. 

But then you get a car! It’s the hip thing to buy that provides personal freedom at a level you never knew. Once you get your car you’ll never need to ride the bus again AND you can go anywhere you want whenever you want. But now you are spending way more money on transportation. When taking into account fuel, maintenance, payment, and insurance, you’re looking at spending $250 a month on the car leaving only $250 for food.

What do you do?

Since you have a car it costs almost nothing to go shopping wherever has the cheapest groceries in town. You need to shop for cheaper groceries now because your budget for food is much smaller. This means the small neighborhood store can’t compete, it just can’t sell groceries at as low of a price that the bigger stores can. So once everyone buys a car it starts a trend of everyone going to the bigger stores with the lower prices. These new stores also have bigger parking lots to accommodate anyone who wants to come by car. Their prices are lower because they can sell at a higher volume due to being able to sell to anyone with a car and not just who is within walking distance. Once we buy cars and the city allowed for these car amenable stores to exist, there was little chance the neighborhood shop would survive.

It wasn’t just cars though

Sure, cars had a big hand in the downfall of neighborhood businesses, and may have even been the main culprit. But there’s another change that happened around the same time that essentially makes small neighborhood businesses illegal to start still to this day. I’m talking about zoning.

What is zoning? Zoning is when a government designates certain pieces of land to be used for a specific uses. There are three main zoning categories that matter: Residential, Commercial, and Industrial. Zoning first emerged as a tool for cities in the 1800 when there was a major problem of everyone getting sick while living next to polluting factories. The idea was to have factories in separate areas than people’s houses, and it worked amazingly. The one success zoning has ever really had was to get polluting factories away from residential areas, that’s it.

But cities didn’t stop there, during the middle of the 1900s cities all across the country started to have even more zoning rules. The theory was that if it was good to separate industrial from residential, it would be good to separate all the different uses for land, so they got to work! Galesburg’s zoning code currently has 16 separate zones that land can be classified as, all with their own requirements and standards.

Above is a zoning map of Galesburg which you can explore for yourself here. Generally the yellows and oranges are residential, blue is industrial, and the light and dark reds (not pink) are commercial zones. You can see that it’s all kind of a hodgepodge, how did they come up with all that? How do they know for sure what the best use of that land is? And why are two local small businesses, Judy’s Café and Kastle Kreme, not zoned for commercial but for residential?

Zoning in the mid-century made a move that was unprecedented; it believed that by controlling what could be built on every piece of land you could make a better city. Like it was stated before: it was very good to keep polluting factories away from residential neighborhoods, but what about everything else? Does a small restaurant have to be kept away from a single family home? Is there an imminent threat to the neighborhood by having a small convenience store without gas pumps on the corner? I’d argue not, but I know not everyone agrees with me.

Once neighborhoods were zoned for residential, commercial, or industrial, they were locked in. Once locked in, all structures that didn’t comply with the new zone were allowed to stay as long as they never changed. This is how Kastle Kreme and Judy’s Café came to be zoned for residential. The zoning plans have determined that the only allowable change would be for the land the business sits on to become residential property. But if the businesses never change, they can keep going on forever.

This is why these buildings and businesses haven’t ever changed much, because it would be an enormous bureaucratic fight to be allowed to change. If either location wanted to expand or change they would need to go before the zoning board to get the zoning changed on their property. And even if they were able to get the zoning change over the possible objections from neighbors, they would be responsible to bring the entire premises up to modern building and zoning standards which could cost a lot.

Zoning rules create roadblocks

So what would it take to get a business back into 40 E Sanborn, the little store front from the beginning of the article? What would it take to get it back to being a little grocery store?

First, if it hasn’t been grandfathered in like other old businesses it would have to go before the zoning board to get re-zoned for B1, Neighborhood Business. You can see the regulations on B1 businesses here.  There are some problems 40 E Sanborn would run into right away. First off, the building is built right up to the sidewalk. This would be in violation of the 20 ft minimum front lawn requirement for B1 businesses. You could try and get it zoned for B2-General Business District that doesn’t require a front yard, but what’s the point of having a Neighborhood Business zoning district if you can’t use it for neighborhood businesses.   

Okay, so let’s say the board allows the zoning to change to B1 and allows the building to be used even without an adequate front yard. We would then run into a problem since “Grocery Store” is not listed as an acceptable use in B1 districts. There are 50 types of businesses it can be by right and 42 other types with some conditions, but none of those business types is “Grocery Store”. B2 allows for grocery stores, but not B1.

So let’s say now  we just decided to go for B2 zoning. No issues with setback requirements, no issues with incompatible uses. The last issue is a big one that not many think about, and that’s parking requirements. I’ll someday do a whole post on parking requirements but this is what 40 E Sanborn would be up against. As you can see here in the municipal code for parking requirements, just about any building in the City of Galesburg is required to have a minimum number of parking spots. According to the schedule, a grocery store is required to have 1 parking spot for every 200 square feet of floor space

If we zoom in on the address in the Knox County GIS tool we can see that the building has about ~920 square feet of store space. With current parking minimums that would translate to needing 4-5 off-street parking spots. But look at the lot, the red lines are the perimeter of that parcel of land. There’s room for one parking spot and that’s it. You would need to demolish one of the houses next door just to accommodate the store’s required parking. And with parking minimums there is only so much the city is able to do under normal rules to help currently. You are able to petition to have your parking requirements cut in half, but that still leaves this business needing more off-street parking than it can accommodate.

How to Make Neighborhood Businesses Possible  

So what do we do? The current rules make it basically impossible for neighborhood businesses to exist. The smaller the business the harder it is to overcome even the smallest barriers. 

While we may want tiny neighborhood businesses that we can walk to from our homes, most of us don’t want big loud businesses in our neighborhoods. I am more radical on zoning policy than most but I still wouldn’t want a McDonalds or Walmart to pop up next to my house. I would however absolutely love a small store, café, or bar to spring up in my neighborhood. They can even build it right next to my house if they want to! So what can we do to create an environment where the smallest businesses can survive and bigger businesses can’t barge in?

My Proposal

We should create a separate class of business zoning called B0 (B-zero). The idea would be to allow B0 businesses on any plot of land in town. They could be on residential, commercial, or industrial land but with some restrictions. So what would this entail?

1. The list of acceptable uses is tailored to businesses that are small and would only be visited by people who are within walking distance. These are the types of businesses we visit often, not rarely. So a small grocery store, bakery, restaurant, or hardware store would be acceptable, but also specialized small retail could be allowed as well. There can be other uses but the goal is to make businesses that don’t attract many people from outside the neighborhood, because people driving to these stores is a big concern people have.

2. To address the car issue, there needs to be a parking MAXIMUM for B0 businesses instead of the standard zoning practice of parking minimums. I believe the parking maximum should be 1 or 2 which would allow access by those with disabilities. This would limit the number of people who could come from outside the neighborhood because there would be nowhere to park. The goal is to have the people who live near to walk to these businesses.

3. Make a maximum floor space for B0 businesses 1000 square feet in a stand alone building. This would mean that the business can only get so big before it needs to be rezoned. This way the businesses can’t get too big and if they want to expand they have to go through the rezoning process. 

4. Limit B0 businesses to only 1 parcel of land. This way they can’t buy up neighboring properties, demolish houses or businesses, and expand. Again we are wanting tiny spaces not big retail spaces. It would have to be made sure that there is no minimum lot size, width, or yard size requirement. Ideally the business would split off of someone else’s lot making it as small as possible.

5. No drive-through restaurants. Again we don’t want cars from outside coming in. Reducing disturbances is a huge consideration of this proposal.

6. Allow for businesses within homes. I know this is somewhat controversial, but if we want to encourage the smallest of businesses the best location for them to start up in is a building they already own. They couldn’t use their whole house, but would be limited to using only 500 square feet for business purposes. This would make the barrier to entry for business so low that anyone could try out a business idea they have. And if that idea doesn’t work out they still have their house. 

These conditions would make it possible for small businesses to start up without much money and without much risk. These rules would also protect neighborhoods from having big, noisy businesses come and make changes without any say from the community. 

Every neighborhood would be enhanced with small shops that you can walk to from home. If you have a neighborhood that is 100% residential then the only place to walk is to another house. Most of us also don’t want to walk in commercial zones either because it’s too loud and generally too far from our homes. So bringing neighborhood businesses also gives us more to do in our neighborhoods.

Neighborhood businesses add value to our neighborhoods

Neighborhood businesses have meant a lot to me over the years. From about the age of 4 my mom would send me with exact change to Swedoughs to buy a dozen donuts for the family. In my teenage years we would ride our bikes to Quick Stop, a small ice cream and greasy food shop near the corner of Seminary and Fremont that’s now a parking lot. When I was in college I lived a block away from a gas station so I would often walk there if I needed anything. Neighborhood businesses add value to our neighborhoods, they don’t spoil them. They have been a nice thing to have in my life throughout the years, and we should change our zoning so we can give them a fighting chance to come back.

If we want to unlock the entrepreneurial spirit and drive of the people of Galesburg, we need to lower the bottom rung on the ladder. If we allow people to take small risks on their ideas some of them will work out. If we make them take too big a risk then we leave out a lot of people who may otherwise run a successful business. Let’s try and get back to how Galesburg was for well over a century, with tiny little locally owned businesses servicing our neighborhoods.