COVID-19 and Public Space: Why does it feel so good to have street-side dining?

On August 4th, San Diego’s City Council unanimously voted to approve Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s Economic Relief Measures for Small Businesses. This allows gyms, restaurants, hair salons and religious services to operate outside on private property, on sidewalks, even on street-side parking.

This is a fortuitous reversal of a decade-long prioritization of parking over seemingly all else in the urban environment. This initiative now places people and their livelihood as a priority above parking.

Lack of Cafe Culture

Although it has countless other endearing qualities, San Diego is seemingly most famous for its pleasant weather. Despite our storied climate, according to urban planner and local expert Howard Blackson, commercial outdoor dining, not enveloped in Plexiglas barriers, was prohibited by the San Diego municipal code until 2015.

Even with changes in the municipal code, there are still barriers to outdoor eating and commerce. Small businesses tend not to have garden space, and zoning laws mostly keep restaurants and retail out of residential neighborhoods.

However, land is even scarcer in European cities that famously boast vibrant street life. So, scarcity of private space cannot be the scapegoat for explaining our comparative lack of cafe culture. One key difference is that their sidewalks are often wider and more useful than ours. It’s not just Europe. Whether in Medellín, Istanbul, Mexico City or Buenos Aires, the more I travel and trade stories with others, the more I realize that the United States is exceptional in respect to the emptiness and uselessness of our typical 5’ to 6’ wide sidewalks. Without 15’ to 30’ sidewalks, there is not enough space for tables, kiosks, benches and all the other fixtures of street life.

Despite our storied climate, commercial outdoor dining not enveloped in plexiglas barriers was prohibited by the San Diego municipal code until 2015.

We have an unusual relationship with public space, and we are resistant to take ownership of it. Because most of our cities are molded by automobile travel, our sidewalks are narrow. We give up 8’ to 9’ on either side of commercial streets to park our cars. Try to envision all that area in a typical city, and then add the additional parking on private land—the strip malls and Home Depots and shopping centers.

Mobility expert John Rossant estimates that up to 200 square miles of greater Los Angeles are dedicated to parking cars. Pardon the pun, but we build lots of parking in the U.S. Despite its ubiquity, parking is sacred in America and many a neighborhood-planning meeting simmers with passion when parking comes up for discussion.

Pandemic Altered Priorities

It took a world-stopping airborne disease and its accompanying economic shockwave to convince us that perhaps parking space is more valuable than we always assumed. The space we use to park cars is too valuable, in fact, to be relegated to such a low use. Parking has the potential to be reimagined as a barbershop, beer garden or bingo parlor.

San Diego’s usually bustling Gaslamp Quarter was a ghost town during quarantine. The recent permission to close off Fifth Avenue from car access and to allow tables to spill out across the entire street has brought the city’s main bar strip back to life. As I pedal my bike through South Park, North Park and Hillcrest, I spot barbers trimming beards on the sidewalk, while restaurants have reclaimed street-side parking with hastily built parklets.

Taking it to the Streets

These makeshift, overnight interventions are inspiring because they call to my memory the scrappy entrepreneurialism of city life in Latin America, where public space doubles readily as commercial space. There is a simple excitement of seeing people doing their everyday things out on the street.

People watching people is a timeless joy that we’ve regulated away.

We go on vacation to cities where the streets host musicians, mimes, juice stands and food vendors, and then we come back home to a city where the sidewalks are narrow and empty. The impromptu adaptations we are seeing in San Diego hint at local residents’ latent ability to take ownership of public space and enjoy it, given the right pressure and clear permission. I say we lean into this further.

…improvements that could cement a prioritization towards people instead of cars.

In Santa Monica, the city has placed 4,000-pound concrete barriers between the street side parking and the travel lanes on Main Street. This has allowed restaurants to put tables in parking spots with peace of mind for their patrons’ safety. This kind of change is a vital half step towards the kinds of permanent capital improvements that could cement a prioritization towards people instead of cars. Conventional wisdom dictates that business cannot survive without parking, but these recent evolutions show the weakness of such conventional thinking.

These are all examples of more enriching ways we can use and bring life to the public space around us. Additionally, consider how much more a parking space is worth in commercial rent paid to the city instead of parking revenue.

Parking Versus People

Simply put, parking is worth more, and should BE more. This pandemic is forcing us to confront how much space we squander, next to the street and on the street itself. As we take broad swaths of our streets back for human instead of automobile use, we are, in one way or another, working to solve our original problem of lacking sidewalk space in urban settings.

Perhaps one day, today’s parallel parking spots will be poured over in concrete and be given permanently back to human beings. We need to remember that we lived without cars and parking for longer than have lived with them. We can get rid of some spots and still be just fine.

I hope this lesson sticks.

I wish that when things get closer to normalcy, we remember just how much we enjoyed eating at a bistro table on the sidewalk, or getting our hair cut on the asphalt, under the trees and in the thick of it all. I hope we remember the way we felt strolling down the middle of Fifth in the Gaslamp Quarter, the double yellow lines on the road under our feet, without worries of getting run over.

Hopefully a vaccine can drive us back together with each other without driving us back indoors. Old habits die hard, and street life dies easily. Let’s do what we can to keep it alive.

• Is Restaurant Dining on Sidewalks and Streets Here to Stay?, San Diego Magazine

• Santa Monica’s Sidewalk Street Project, Santa Monica Daily News

• San Diego Getting New Outdoor Movies…The San Diego Union-Tribute

Benjamin Arcia, M.U.D.
Senior Associate