The Return of the Mixed-Use Street

There is a particular kind of street that most Americans recognize even if they cannot name it. It has ground-floor shops with apartments above. A coffee shop next to a hardware store next to a dentist's office. People walking, sitting, watching. Children on bikes. An older man reading a newspaper on a stoop. This is the mixed-use street — and for most of the twentieth century, American zoning law made it illegal to build.

The Zoning Experiment

Euclidean zoning — the separation of land uses into distinct, single-purpose zones — was a twentieth-century experiment in urban order. The logic was understandable: keep factories away from homes, keep traffic away from schools, keep the noise and smell of commerce away from the quiet of residential life. In the industrial city of 1920, this was not an unreasonable goal.

But the experiment went further than its original intent. By mid-century, American zoning had not just separated noxious uses from residential ones — it had separated everything from everything else. Housing from commerce. Commerce from civic uses. Civic uses from parks. The result was a landscape that required a car to navigate, that produced no street life because there was nothing to walk to, and that concentrated poverty and wealth in ways that reinforced themselves over generations.

What Jane Jacobs Understood

Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, and her central argument was simple: cities need diversity. Not just demographic diversity, but use diversity — the mixing of housing, commerce, civic institutions, and public space at the scale of the block and the street. Mixed uses generate foot traffic at different times of day. Foot traffic generates "eyes on the street." Eyes on the street generate safety, vitality, and the informal social bonds that make neighborhoods function.

Jacobs was writing against the urban renewal projects of her era — the superblocks, the towers in the park, the highways driven through working neighborhoods. But her critique applies equally to the suburban sprawl that was being built simultaneously on the urban fringe: the cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the office parks, the residential subdivisions with no destinations within walking distance.

The Reform Movement

The good news is that the zoning reform movement is real and growing. Cities across the country — Minneapolis, Portland, Austin, Sacramento, and many others — have begun dismantling the most restrictive elements of single-use zoning. Minneapolis eliminated single-family-only zoning citywide in 2018, allowing duplexes and triplexes on any residential lot. Oregon followed with statewide legislation. California has passed a series of bills allowing accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and transit-oriented development by right.

These are not just housing policies. They are street policies. When you allow a corner store in a residential neighborhood, you create a destination. When you allow apartments above retail, you create customers for that store at all hours. When you allow a mix of uses along a corridor, you create the conditions for the kind of street life that makes a place feel alive.

Design Matters Too

Zoning reform is necessary but not sufficient. The design of mixed-use buildings matters enormously. Ground-floor retail that is set back behind parking, or elevated above the sidewalk, or wrapped in blank walls, does not generate street life — it just adds square footage. The relationship between the building and the sidewalk is everything: the height of the first floor, the transparency of the facade, the presence of doors and windows and awnings and stoops.

The best mixed-use streets are not designed as streets at all — they are designed as rooms. The buildings on either side form the walls. The canopy of street trees forms the ceiling. The sidewalk is the floor. When that room is proportioned well, furnished with benches and planters and bike racks, and activated by uses that draw people at different times of day, something remarkable happens: people want to be there. Not because they have to be, but because the place itself is worth inhabiting.

The Driftless Opportunity

In the small cities and towns of the Driftless Region, the mixed-use street is not a new idea — it is the original idea. The main streets of La Crosse, Viroqua, Prairie du Chien, and Richland Center were built on exactly these principles: ground-floor commerce, upper-floor housing, civic buildings anchoring the corners, public space at the center. Many of these streets are still intact, still functional, still beloved.

The challenge is not to invent something new but to stop building things that undermine what already works — and to allow infill development that reinforces the pattern rather than breaking it. A new building on a main street that turns its back to the sidewalk, or that replaces a two-story commercial block with a single-story drive-through, is not neutral. It is a subtraction from the public realm.

The return of the mixed-use street is, at its core, a return to common sense: that places work better when they serve multiple purposes, that streets are for people as well as cars, and that the quality of the public realm is a measure of the health of a community.