A few weeks ago a post about a business located inside of a single-family house on Grand Ave in St. Paul wanting to expand out to the sidewalk reminded me how much I like single-family houses with storefronts on them. As far as I can tell, this type of building represents the best of all worlds in urbanism: it’s an incremental intensification of land use that also preserves existing structures (resources), and is generally undertaken only by locally owned businesses, keeping money in the local economy.