Richmond Storefront Density News by Michael C. Hild - April 29, 2016April 29, 201616 A fascinating City Observatory study entitled “The Storefront Index” by Joe Jacobs was published recently showing customer facing storefront density for the top 51 American cites. How did Richmond do? Well, first off the study only shows the absolute number of retail stores in the central business district for each city and doesn’t control for the population differences. So that will obviously penalize Richmond because it is a significantly smaller city than San Francisco, New York, Seattle, etc, in terms of absolute population. Nevertheless, Richmond storefront density ranked 36th out of the top 51 largest cities in the US using the prescribed approach. If you use the interactive map below you can see how Richmond compares to other cities. Just select the city you want to see and each red dot represents a storefront. You can even zoom in to see specific neighborhoods. What I find particularly interesting is that this tool will keep data over time so we can track how Richmond and its neighborhoods change. This will be important specifically for watching the Hull Street corridor in Manchester. Here are some further thoughts from the author: “As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along the margins of public spaces (streets, sidewalks, parks and squares) and in and out of quasi-private spaces (stores, salons, bars, boutiques, bars and restaurants). Clusters of these quasi-private spaces, which are usually neighborhood businesses, activate a streetscape, both drawing life from and adding to a steady flow of people outside. In an effort to begin to quantify this key aspect of neighborhood vitality, we’ve developed a new statistical indicator—the Storefront Index (click to see the full report)—that measures the number and concentration of customer-facing businesses in the nation’s large metropolitan areas. We’ve computed the Storefront Index by mapping the locations of hundreds of thousands of everyday businesses: grocery and hardware stores, beauty salons, bookstores, bars and restaurants, movie theatres and entertainment venues, and then identifying significant clusters of these businesses—places where each storefront business is no more than 100 meters from the next storefront. The result is a series of maps, available for the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, that show the location, size, and intensity of neighborhood business clusters down to the street level…”
RT @DogtownDish: Richmond Storefront Density: How does RVA stack up to other cities? #rva #dogtowndish #manchesterrva https://t.co/7V2MCawA… Reply
RT @DogtownDish: Richmond Storefront Density: How does RVA stack up to other cities? #rva #dogtowndish #manchesterrva https://t.co/7V2MCawA… Reply
Hey John, here is an explanation for how they created the maps, including the data and age of that data. They acknowledge that it undercounts in certain cities. Perhaps if enough people from RVA contact the author, they can update their data with a new source (similar to how they did for Detroit and Hartford): “Here’s how we created our maps of storefront businesses. Storefront business data were extracted from the Custom Lists U.S. Business Database. Data were current for 2014. Using the standard industrial classi cation code attached to each business establishment in the database, we selected all the establishments that were coded as being in one of the 44 codes identi ed in Table 1. We compared the volume of listings of indicator businesses in the Customs Lists database with other similar sources of data and with the US Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns tabulations. For two metropolitan areas–Detroit and Hartford–we determined that the Customs Lists database signi cantly undercounted the presence indicator businesses. For these metropolitan areas, we utilized data from an alternate provider, USAInfo. We then used geographic information system (GIS) software to exclude from the database any business that did not have at least one other storefront establishment within 100 meters of its location. This step assured that we identi ed retail areas with multiple businesses and excluded isolated establishments that may have been mis-classi ed or mis-located in the database. For our radius analysis, we identi ed the center of the central business district of the principal city in each metropolitan area (usually a street intersection or landmark such as city hall) and used GIS software to draw a three-mile circle around that point. We then used the software to count the number of establishments inside that circle. Each circle includes the same total area in each city (about ten square miles); in most cases that radius includes non-buildable areas (bodies of water such as rivers, lakes and oceans). We constructed Walk Score heat maps with data provided by Red n (www.WalkScore.com). We used the Walk Score API to look up the Walk Score for a grid of coordinates for each metropolitan area and then used a smoothing algorithm to create the heat map of Walk Scores.” Reply
RT @DogtownDish: Richmond Storefront Density: How does RVA stack up to other cities? #rva #dogtowndish #manchesterrva https://t.co/7V2MCawA… Reply