Meantime <\/a>is the nonprofit brainchild of architect Brian Phillips, someone I talk to regularly about cities and their amazing attributes \u2014 as well as their challenges. For several years prior to the Market Street project, Meantime has been activating vacant storefronts and hosting pop-ups in different locations around the city.<\/p>\n While I\u2019ve written before about San Francisco\u2019s Vacant to Vibrant program<\/a> and Pittsburgh\u2019s public art in storefronts<\/a>, one of the most valuable aspects of Meantime\u2019s approach to vacant retail is its design savvy. So many vacant storefronts have design challenges that are keeping tenants out \u2014 but precisely because of their condition, they struggle to find tenants willing to sign a long lease worthy of the landlord spending $100,000 on a fit out. Meantime\u2019s judicious deployment of paint and typography, semi-custom furniture and fixtures, has helped quickly turn worn-out spaces into workable ones.<\/p>\n Beautiful storefronts enliven our experience of cities and delight us the way parks and public art does.<\/p>\n On Market Street, Meantime is inviting in the kinds of retail you\u2019d normally find on a well-maintained neighborhood corridor into the flotsam-and-jetsam feeling of Market East. A coffee shop and a water ice shop, a vintage clothing store and furniture store, a music-listening lounge and a civic engagement space \u2014 they all feel like they\u2019re expertly plotted on an earnest, high-low culture matrix that gives passersby the sense that this strip is cared for, interesting, worth slowing down into.<\/p>\n It\u2019s great to hear that Meantime on Market is being extended past the summer into the winter.<\/p>\n Retail as a public good <\/p>\n A news release <\/a>touted Meantime\u2019s successes \u2014 added revenue, more foot traffic \u2014 beyond the simple sense that the street looks better. Those economic vitality metrics matter \u2014 as does the yet-to-be-quantified impact on the surrounding property values. But beneath even that economic case is a measure that won\u2019t show up on any spreadsheet at all: the value of connecting people to the ideas and talents of their fellow residents, the texture and flavors that are unique to their community, the simple pleasure of walking down that side of the street.<\/p>\n These aspects expose why every city should invest in retail \u2014 not solely for the economic case, but because retail is a kind of public space, and therefore a public good. We should start treating it that way.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t invest in parks because they help people burn calories or lower cortisol \u2014 even if they do those things. We invest in them for the intangibles \u2014 the experience of being in nature and looking up at the sky and treetops, a place to commune with friends and family, somewhere kids can run wild. People know parks matter because they\u2019ve personally felt that value \u2014 but also because they\u2019ve been conditioned to see parks as part of a basket of public goods that includes libraries, trash pickup, and other quality-of-life amenities.<\/p>\n Retail hasn\u2019t historically belonged in that category. Traditionally, its value was pragmatic: Storefronts were where you bought what you needed. But now that you can buy things online, that so much retail is occupied by chains and online-native companies, and fewer people need to be downtown at all, high-quality retail\u2019s purpose isn\u2019t just what you can buy there. It\u2019s about the human experiential value that, I\u2019d argue, could rival a park or a library.<\/p>\n We\u2019re comfortable with cities supporting beautification efforts like container plantings and banners, and yet a storefront is also an extension of the sidewalk. Beautiful storefronts enliven our experience of cities and delight us the way parks and public art does.<\/p>\n Cities have mostly addressed this issue by creating grants for storefront improvements to stave off their worst offenders. One outlier: the 20-year program, Commerce Design Montreal,<\/a> which gave businesses grants to hire architects to improve design quality \u2014 and changed the face of the city and the city\u2019s architecture profession in the process.<\/p>\n Meantime\u2019s judicious deployment of paint and typography, semi-custom furniture and fixtures, has helped quickly turn worn-out spaces into workable ones.<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s an expanded Meantime program or a distributed design approach, improving the design quality of storefronts could be a less expensive way of engaging pedestrians than street landscaping. There\u2019s been a recent outcry over the design and expense of new planters on Philadelphia\u2019s South Broad Street;<\/a> Meantime\u2019s impact on Market Street comes at much less cost and truly engages the street rather than just decorating it.<\/p>\n Beyond that visual delight, there\u2019s the deeper experience of the store itself \u2014 somewhere people practice eye contact, run into neighbors or meet strangers, feel like they\u2019re part of a place. This might sound overboard, but the truth is that so much retail \u2014 so many public spaces \u2014 no longer has these elements of human connection.<\/p>\n Retail is so focused on click-and-pickup that storefronts which delight our senses and exercise our ability to connect with others feel rare \u2014 and too often, the ones that still do are too expensive or specialized for regular people to visit. That\u2019s always a risk of curation: a \u201cpublic good\u201d that regular people can only look at, not afford or feel invited into, isn\u2019t really public.<\/p>\n What cities owe retail <\/p>\n If all this is true, cities \u2014 and their private and nonprofit partners \u2014 need to start treating retail as infrastructure worth funding directly, the way we already fund parks and libraries, rather than as a market problem that will eventually sort itself out.<\/p>\n Too often we treat quality small-business retail as an interim step \u2014 something to hold the space until \u201creal\u201d tenants arrive. The goal should instead be businesses with genuine capacity to grow and sustain themselves, and eventually pay true market rents. The \u201creal\u201d tenants should be the high-quality, local, curated ones \u2014 rather than the global entities that use Placer.ai data to decide their location. That means pairing retail space not just with discounted rent and a funnel into storefronts, but with capacity-building grants, mentorship, and loans.<\/p>\n We assume that because retail is for-profit, it shouldn\u2019t need the kind of support we give the arts or parks. But the fact is that retail\u2019s failure in many downtowns isn\u2019t just about a market failure that economists imagine in theory \u2014 it\u2019s about the mess that is reality in practice. There\u2019s the problematic condition of under-maintained buildings, the dysfunction and delay of our permitting systems, and absentee landlords who want 10-year leases and are willing to wait nearly as long for the tenant who can fulfill them. Solving these problems will require something more than just waiting for supply and demand to realign.<\/p>\n Indeed, positioning retail as a public good might also change how we see landlords. Landlords who deprive streets of quality retail should be held accountable in the same way owners who neglect their sidewalks are cited for endangering the public. When I first moved to Philadelphia nearly 20 years ago, I was fined for allowing weeds to grow knee-high in an empty tree pit in front of my house. Where is the equivalent deterrent we levy on landlords who leave their retail empty or without any engagement on the street?<\/p>\n I\u2019m not suggesting I have all the answers here. The naming of Meantime feels significant \u2014 it\u2019s not just that the retail is occupying space in the meantime, it\u2019s that we\u2019re all in this transitional time between old models of retail and new ones.<\/p>\n Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter,\u00a0The New Urban Order.<\/a>\u00a0Sign up for the newsletter\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n Scenes from Meantime on Market, courtesy of The New Urban Order. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Philadelphia prepared to host a run of major 2026 events \u2014 the 250th, the World Cup, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[15975,10889,69,71,70,2918],"class_list":["post-271874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-market-east","tag-new-urban-order","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-small-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} MORE FROM THE NEW URBAN ORDER<\/p>\n