As Philadelphia prepared to host a run of major 2026 events — the 250th, the World Cup, the MLB All-Star Weekend — it got to work on public space beautification and wayfinding. Sidewalks were repaired; flowers were planted; new signage went in. The city wanted to look its best, and as someone who’s taken a daily walk down our most photogenic boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, for years, I can attest it looked better than ever this summer.
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But looking good also meant contending with a different scourge: empty, ugly retail. Between Philadelphia’s historic district and City Hall sits Market East — a bleak stretch in an otherwise vibrant city.
The Meantime model
To address the problem, the City granted $1.85 million to a partnership including the design firm ISA, Center City District, the Fashion District and a joint venture between Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment (HBSE; owners of the Philadelphia 76ers) and Comcast to revitalize a handful of sorry-looking storefronts on Market Street. Called Meantime on Market, the effort has shown the power of fresh design and thoughtful curation to turn retail into something more than just commerce.
Meantime is the nonprofit brainchild of architect Brian Phillips, someone I talk to regularly about cities and their amazing attributes — 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.
While I’ve written before about San Francisco’s Vacant to Vibrant program and Pittsburgh’s public art in storefronts, one of the most valuable aspects of Meantime’s approach to vacant retail is its design savvy. So many vacant storefronts have design challenges that are keeping tenants out — 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’s judicious deployment of paint and typography, semi-custom furniture and fixtures, has helped quickly turn worn-out spaces into workable ones.
Beautiful storefronts enliven our experience of cities and delight us the way parks and public art does.
On Market Street, Meantime is inviting in the kinds of retail you’d 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 — they all feel like they’re 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.
It’s great to hear that Meantime on Market is being extended past the summer into the winter.
Retail as a public good
A news release touted Meantime’s successes — added revenue, more foot traffic — beyond the simple sense that the street looks better. Those economic vitality metrics matter — as does the yet-to-be-quantified impact on the surrounding property values. But beneath even that economic case is a measure that won’t 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.
These aspects expose why every city should invest in retail — 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.
We don’t invest in parks because they help people burn calories or lower cortisol — even if they do those things. We invest in them for the intangibles — 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’ve personally felt that value — but also because they’ve been conditioned to see parks as part of a basket of public goods that includes libraries, trash pickup, and other quality-of-life amenities.
Retail hasn’t 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’s purpose isn’t just what you can buy there. It’s about the human experiential value that, I’d argue, could rival a park or a library.
We’re 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.
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, which gave businesses grants to hire architects to improve design quality — and changed the face of the city and the city’s architecture profession in the process.
Meantime’s judicious deployment of paint and typography, semi-custom furniture and fixtures, has helped quickly turn worn-out spaces into workable ones.
Whether it’s 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’s been a recent outcry over the design and expense of new planters on Philadelphia’s South Broad Street; Meantime’s impact on Market Street comes at much less cost and truly engages the street rather than just decorating it.
Beyond that visual delight, there’s the deeper experience of the store itself — somewhere people practice eye contact, run into neighbors or meet strangers, feel like they’re part of a place. This might sound overboard, but the truth is that so much retail — so many public spaces — no longer has these elements of human connection.
Retail is so focused on click-and-pickup that storefronts which delight our senses and exercise our ability to connect with others feel rare — and too often, the ones that still do are too expensive or specialized for regular people to visit. That’s always a risk of curation: a “public good” that regular people can only look at, not afford or feel invited into, isn’t really public.
What cities owe retail
If all this is true, cities — and their private and nonprofit partners — 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.
Too often we treat quality small-business retail as an interim step — something to hold the space until “real” tenants arrive. The goal should instead be businesses with genuine capacity to grow and sustain themselves, and eventually pay true market rents. The “real” tenants should be the high-quality, local, curated ones — 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.
We assume that because retail is for-profit, it shouldn’t need the kind of support we give the arts or parks. But the fact is that retail’s failure in many downtowns isn’t just about a market failure that economists imagine in theory — it’s about the mess that is reality in practice. There’s 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.
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?
I’m not suggesting I have all the answers here. The naming of Meantime feels significant — it’s not just that the retail is occupying space in the meantime, it’s that we’re all in this transitional time between old models of retail and new ones.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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