Cities and small towns have tried to revitalize their downtowns by rolling back certain rules and requirements to help promote new developments and bring life to empty streets.
Now, they’re returning to an earlier era, when craftspeople such as food makers, woodworkers and apparel designers were integral parts of neighborhood life, and economic activity revolved around them.
New York City changed its zoning rules last year for the first time in decades to allow small-scale producers in neighborhoods where they had long been restricted. The City of Elgin, a suburb of Chicago, approved a code change last fall allowing retailers to make and sell products in the same space. In 2022, Baltimore passed a bill that allows small-scale food processing and art-studio-related businesses in commercial zones.
And Seattle’s City Council will vote in September on a plan that includes changing rules to allow artisan manufacturers in residential neighborhoods. Supporters said the proposal would help create the kind of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that were common in an earlier era.
A goal of the rezoning in Elgin, said Jennifer Fukala, executive director of the downtown neighborhood association there, is to encourage part-time makers working out of their homes to open brick-and-mortar businesses, helping to diversify the local economy.
Over the past decade, hundreds of U.S. cities and small towns have revised their land-use codes to allow small-scale producers — from coffee roasters to makers of jewelry and furniture — in downtowns and neighborhoods. Many small producers started to disappear from those areas around the turn of the 20th century with the advent of mass production; as large-scale factories generated enormous waste and pollution, cities restricted them near residences. Now, most of the businesses allowed to operate under the new rules employ between one and 30 people.
Much of the reason for the recent efforts is that local officials see an opportunity in the maker economy, which grew during the pandemic, said Matt Waskiewicz, assistant director of economic development and regional planning at New York City’s Department of City Planning. And with new and more affordable maker technologies, like laser cutters, as well as the ease of selling to millions of buyers on online marketplaces like Etsy, the maker economy is expected to keep growing.
“We’re in the evolution of a sector maturing,” said Ilana Preuss, the founder and chief executive of Recast City, an economic development and planning firm that focuses on small-scale manufacturing.
Integrating small product businesses into their economic development strategies allows cities to diversify their economies, making them more resilient while also creating jobs, Ms. Preuss said. Ms. Fukala said small-scale producers also offered advantages to languishing downtown districts because they didn’t depend on foot traffic.
These efforts won’t bring back manufacturing on the scale that the Trump administration is talking about, but supporters of rezoning say small-scale manufacturing hubs can help fill some of the gaps as America builds up its manufacturing ecosystem, which could take years if not decades.
They are also an opportunity to meet shifting consumer preferences to shop local. Even global brands understand how this could disrupt their sales. Nike, for example, has built small plants near its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., for making things like customized shoes.
Small-scale, highly automated facilities allow brands to “position themselves with influencer and experience culture, where that perception of local, ultracustomized, personal, one-of-a-kind products are prioritized,” said Matt Weko, division president of consumer goods and services at the real estate firm JLL.
Shane Carpenter, who recently opened Hex Superette, a tasting room and market, next to his other Baltimore business, Hex Ferments, which processes 100 tons of locally grown vegetables annually, said allowing manufacturers to move back to urban neighborhoods puts them closer to customers and “make cities not homogenous everywhere you go.”
The new zoning rules aim for a return to the kind of vibrant neighborhoods that cities and towns had in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Until last year, New York City’s manufacturing zoning hadn’t been updated since the 1960s — “back when that use was mainly noxious factories that should be far away from where people live, play and shop,” said Mr. Waskiewicz, the assistant director of city planning.
But as retail trends evolved, these “outdated rules stymied the artisan and maker economy,” he said. The old rules meant that coffee shops in parts of Brooklyn, for example, could sell drinks to customers but were not allowed to roast the coffee on site without a special permit. The new rules mean now they can.
Not everyone agrees that the zoning changes are beneficial. Katherine Fountain, a spokeswoman for the Port of Seattle, said that city’s push to build maker spaces and housing near each other was worrisome because “the inclusion of residential housing would directly impact our working waterfront and industrial centers.”
And zoning changes alone are not enough to sustain small producers, especially in expensive cities. Nashville, for example, was one of the first to adopt an artisan manufacturing zone category in 2015, but as rents soared, many of these businesses “got swallowed up by development pressures,” said Greg Claxton, a city planner. The city now has carved out a small area that would allow developers to increase height limits if they incorporated small manufacturing in mixed-use development.
Creating support services for small manufacturers can help boost entrepreneurship, supporters of these efforts say.
In Elgin, officials are developing an incubator downtown for makers looking to expand.
In Baltimore, Open Works, the largest nonprofit maker space in the country, houses up to 50 businesses at a time and is planning to open a second location in West Baltimore in partnership with Coppin State University. In 2022, Open Works led a successful campaign to allocate state funding for a dedicated maker space, or collaborative workspace with tools and resources like classes and events for makers, in every county in Maryland.
The maker economy “can sound boutique, niche,” said Will Holman, executive director at Open Works. But in Baltimore, “a postindustrial city with grim problems,” there is a laser focus on economic development and community resilience, he said.
“People don’t realize how quickly makers could start to replace manufacturing for a wide array of consumer goods — to relocalize production not in a nationalistic pro-Trump way but in a very real way,” Mr. Holman added.
During the pandemic, Open Works leveraged its 3-D printers and laser cutters to make 28,000 face shields for the community, Mr. Holman said. The facility made 800 flat-pack desks for at-home schooling “at a time when you couldn’t get a desk at IKEA to save your life,” he added. “And we distributed them to local schools within weeks.”
And in Columbia, Mo., a community improvement district led a campaign in 2021 to allow construction of shared production spaces up to 15,000 square feet. The land-use revision enabled a commercial kitchen that in 2024 supported 52 food start-ups, 25 of them minority-owned.
“Adding small local producers creates a layering, a more fun city,” said Carrie Gartner, the district’s executive director. “Zoning sounds boring, but it creates major changes.”
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