Ban the Bars

Like L.A. and London, Canadian cities should limit bar density to help neighbourhoods thrive.

Even at the height of prohibition, Canadians were still able to purchase alcohol for discreet home consumption – provided they had a prescription from their doctor. It was public drinking that was the real enemy, and most provinces, heeding a popular slogan – "Banish the bar!" – shut down their watering holes during the late 1910s.

You may have heard: bars are back. Today, experts tend to frame questions about public drinking in non-judgmental terms like "harm-reduction," and nobody proposes an outright ban. Nevertheless, bar density – the number of bars in a given area – remains a live issue in cities across Canada. I would suggest that Canadian cities limit the formation of entertainment districts with a high concentration of bars. (Here I pause to adjust my schoolmarm bun and regard the reader sternly.)

Is this an anti-fun position? Maybe. It depends on whether you consider New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London un-fun. All of these cities regulate bar density (or are subject to such regulations, imposed by higher levels of government). New York, for instance, has a 500-foot rule: it grants licences to no more than three drinking establishments in a 500-foot (152.4-metre) distance (any additional applicants have to show that a new bar is in the public interest). The rule has not caused the city's nightlife to shrivel.

Limiting the concentration of bars in a given area promotes mixed use (good for neighbourhoods) and prevents the disgorging of thousands of drinkers into a single area at closing time (good for drinkers, police, and local people and property).

One objection to this kind of regulation tends to come from business associations, who object to the hindrance of commercial activity. The other objection (as I know from experience with my neighbourhood association) takes its purest form in the statement, "Move to the suburbs, loser."

Well this is one loser who is rather fond of a bar. But there is considerable evidence that sometimes a bar is not just a bar – like when it’s added to an area that already has many other bars. As alcohol policy researcher Michael Livingston and colleagues have observed, there is a point at which "a growing bunch of outlets becomes fixed in people's mental maps as an entertainment district." A neighbourhood with high bar density can reach "a critical point ... after which alcohol-related trouble increases more sharply with extra outlets." Trouble proliferates – and those who don’t want trouble flee.

Sleepy, boring towns like New York and London regulate bar density because they don't want their neighbourhoods to become like Calgary's "Electric Avenue": a stretch of 11th Avenue South West that in the late 1980s hosted up to 10,000 people a night in 24 bars – in one-and-a-half blocks. What happened to that fun, lively area? As Kathryn Graham and Sharon Bernards write in Nightlife and Crime, "Nightlife-related problems, including assaults and homicides, had a substantial impact on the neighbouring residential community ... with other types of businesses moving out of the area due to noise and crime …" That neighbourhood, unlike New York neighbourhoods subject to the 500-foot rule, really did shrivel.

Currently, Vancouver's Granville Street can host 6,700 drinkers of an evening. Toronto's Richmond Street packs in several times that number on a weekend night – and the city’s Queen West area looks like it’s next in line.

Regulating public drinking as other big, mature cities do would not be a step backward toward provincial priggishness; it would be a step forward to a thoughtful, evidence-based urbanism that helps neighbourhoods thrive, night and day.

By all means, let's have bars – dive bars, dance clubs, wood-paneled dens. If you wish, follow Baudelaire’s advice: be continually drunk so as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth.

All I suggest is that we not all be drunk in the same block.

For more on banning bars, watch this interview with Deputy Mayor of Toronto, Joe Pantalone.