Chain restaurants face increased scrutiny

The Town of Eastchester, N.Y., amended its zoning regulations in March to ban restaurants with 15 or more locations, a stand-up counter or menus on the wall.

Eastchester joined a number of communities in the past decade, many of them in areas dependent on tourism, that have amended or proposed changes in zoning laws to ban chain, or “formula,” businesses from their borders. This year, new proposals are being considered from Wisconsin to California.

Los Angeles’ city planning commission recently approved and sent to the city council the first of four community plans for South L.A. neighborhoods. The first plan, for the West Adams community, would remove exemptions, in place since 2008, on quick-service-restaurant distance requirements.

Existing eateries had been exempt from the community plan’s rules that barred new stand-alone quick-service restaurants from opening within a half mile of one another.

Los Angeles’ city council has yet to confirm a timetable on considering passage of the community plan, but the California Restaurant Association opposes the limits. “We advocate against these proposals,” said Angelica Pappas, CRA spokesperson, in an interview. “We don’t want anything to hinder consumer choice.”

“Robust community organizing ultimately caused the commission to overturn the Planning Department staff’s recommendation and the district councilman’s request to exempt restaurants and moved to throw out the exemption and apply the distance separation requirements to the entire community plan,” Pappas said. “This lumps restaurants in with businesses such as adult bookstores, smoke shops, etc.”

Vanessa Rodriguez, senior vice president for Mercury LLC, which represents the CRA in the L.A. community plan project, said new quick-service restaurants in mixed-use developments would be exempt from the West Adams community plan’s restrictions.

Rodriguez said she found it disturbing that cities are “highjacking” land-use legislation to limit consumer choices.

Bans reach cities big and small

Big cities like Los Angeles are not alone in considering limits on restaurants.

The planning commission in Richfield, Wis., a village northwest of Milwaukee, in April voted to ban construction of new quick-service restaurants in areas that are largely residential. Sit-down restaurants were not affected by the ban.

Also in April, officials in Wauwatosa, Wis., sent a planned zoning change to its city staff that proposed barring a “formula” restaurant with 11 or more outlets and two or more qualifications, such as a standardized menu, fa?ade, décor, uniform or signage.

The Wauwatosa proposal, which would affect a section of the town just west of Milwaukee, drew opposition from the Commercial Associations of Realtors Wisconsin. Jim Villa, president and chief executive of the CARW, said, “Ultimately, for us, it’s about protecting property values and options.

“We can certainly understand why a community would want to have some minimum standards and why they might want to promote local businesses, but our concern is when you drive rents and occupancy by those standards you can devalue your property,” Villa said. “Ultimately, that’s a negative for the municipality as well.”

Villa said the area for the proposed zoning restrictions already has a number of chain restaurants. “Sometimes the world circles around, and we don’t always remember,” he recalled. “There’s a McDonald’s in that stretch, and that was actually started as part of a community plan at one point.”

Some tourism towns in Wisconsin, such as Sister Bay in Door County, have already barred formula restaurants. “They are going for a certain clientele,” said Villa, referring to vacationers from Milwaukee and Chicago.

Fast-casual restaurants such as Panera Bread are drawing the eye of city leaders as well.

The Town of Eastchester’s zoning amendments in March were aimed at keeping fast-casual restaurants from entering the village of 32,000. Eastchester town supervisor Anthony Colavita told Fox 5 news soon after the new zoning passed that “we receive a lot of applications and a lot of inquiries from fast-food restaurants and also hybrids.

“There’s a new style of restaurant out there called quick-casual,” Colavita said. “It’s just like a fast-food restaurant but it’s not quite like a regular restaurant, and our zoning code was not adequate to deal with it. … We’ve decided this fast-casual thing is not something we wanted.”

Colavita said those options are available in the surrounding municipalities such as Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, White Plains and Yonkers, but that fast-casual restaurants are “inappropriate for our town.”

“Generally you have a corporate-driven architecture and a similar décor,” he said. That type of restaurant also generates a lot of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, Colavita said, and “diminishes the character of the community.”

A wide variety of municipalities – generally vacation destinations – have limited chain restaurants over the past decade, including: Bainbridge Island, Wash.; Bristol, R.I.; Cannon Beach, Ore.; Chesapeake City, Md.; Fredericksburg, Texas; Ogunquit and York, Maine; San Francisco; Springdale, Utah; and number in California, including last summer in Sonoma.

When a municipality considers bans on formula businesses, Villa of the Wisconsin group said land owners and franchise business owners must remind officials of their investments in the community.

“Our advice is to keep it local and remind them that it’s local,” Villa said. “The owners of these businesses live in or around the community. Their kids go to school here. People need to be reminded of that. When you look at the rents a national franchise will pay through a local franchise owner and the traffic, those are all positives.”

Rodriguez of Mercury LLC in Los Angeles added that “restaurateurs need to voice their opposition early and often.”