[wwmiv]

I find discussions about lack of street level retail instead of first floor housing units to be really quite funny, considering that a majority of street facing buildings in pretty much every large urban core in the United States and Europe are residential units. People who make this complaint seem to simply ignore the vast swaths of attached and narrow lot semi-detached townhomes, flats, and small apartment buildings that dominate Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and others and think that mixed-used corridors are the norm. They aren't. Manhattan itself is probably majority residential on the first floor. If those cities can't sustain retail on every street facing first floor façade with the population densities that they have, then no other city can even come close. It's a pipe dream, people, give it up.