For national development companies building in Boston, the temptation to replicate their last deal — fit a formula retailer on the ground floor — is just easier. There are many reasons landlords are more comfortable renting to a known food chain than a locally owned restaurant: rents are higher; they better speak the language of corporate leasing; it simplifies financing; it is more trouble to identify and deal with an independent chef-owner.

Throughout American cities, and certainly in Boston, a curtain of banality has been drawn across downtowns and Main Streets. Real estate developers and their cautious bankers continue to lease ground-floor retail to national food chains, big banks, and pharmacies (all tenants with the highest credit ratings), rather than infuse the neighborhood with amenities like chef-owned restaurants or independent coffeehouses. Cities compete with one another as unique places — when one place feels the same as any other, it ceases to be special. When formula retailers are put on the ground floor, the pedestrian realm is made bland. Boston City Hall should follow the example of other thought-leading cities and ensure that neighborhood retail environments are creative, interesting, and local.


The ground floor is typically a very small part of the overall deal; as such, many won’t bother fussing about it. But buildings are known for what is at the sidewalk rather than what is upstairs. Consider Jamie Mammano’s Sorellina, a restaurant that happens to be located within a Back Bay residential building called Trinity Place, which you wouldn’t necessarily know nor should you particularly care.

Some enlightened business leaders are helping to re-educate office and residential landlords — whether local or national — to better understand that the retail space is in fact the very branding of the project. Case in point, Matt Jennings’s chef-owned restaurant Townsman, on Kingston Street downtown, which sits within Radian, a 26-story residential building with 240 apartments. For most developers, the 4,500 square feet of retail space on the ground floor would be an afterthought — stick a Starbucks in there and call it a day.


Instead, father-and-son owners Ori and Noam Ron and development partner Forrest City teamed up with Jesse Baerkahn, of Graffito SP, who helped relocate Jennings from Providence. According to the Rons, their lease to Townsman was a fraction of what it could have been with a national tenant. But it paid off. Within 12 months all the apartments were rented, and residents of the building and the neighborhood celebrate an amazing new restaurant.

Baerkahn’s company calls itself “a retail development and urban placemaking advisory firm,” which means it rejects the national restaurant chains many of its competitors lease with regularity. His philosophy is driven by a very simple concept. People are more likely to rent their office, lab, or residential space above if the building has something interesting on the ground floor.

But well-informed development teams alone aren’t enough to ensure that Boston’s business districts help entice residents and visitors alike. City Hall must use the tools of zoning to keep ground-floor activity aligned with the “sidewalk ballet” concept introduced by urban-planning activist Jane Jacobs — a flourish of overlapping uses and activities that bring life and movement by pedestrians throughout the day.

In 2014, Capital One proposed opening a storefront bank along Beacon Hill’s Charles Street. Residents fought back to keep the village feel of their neighborhood intact, working with City Hall to restrict office space along the ground floor. It was a good step.


Another step Boston should take is to adopt San Francisco’s or Kendall Square’s anti-chain zoning. This places serious limits on formula retailers — defining those companies that reach a threshold of stores worldwide and then placing barriers to, or even prohibiting, their presence within certain neighborhood retail settings.

Today Boston is exploding with entrepreneurial chefs, makers, artists, and innovators who are willing to open their new businesses in trucks, shipping containers, and even moving buses. They should be encouraged to do so in our city’s storefronts as well. It’s not only good urban planning, it’s also good business.

Mike Ross, a Boston-based real estate attorney, writes regularly for the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @mikeforboston.