Outdoor dining regulations in NYC, other cities leave restaurants at a standstill.

Four years ago, as pundits and politicians predicted the end of the city , an unlikely symbol of resilience emerged: a hastily built wooden platform, in the curb lane outside a restaurant, where people could eat and drink without fear of infection.

The message seemed to be: Not only are we alive and not moving to the suburbs—we're having a blast.

"Outdoor dining was one of the true silver linings of the pandemic," said Lincoln Restler, a New York City Council member who represents north Brooklyn. "On a dime, we reimagined large swaths of our streetscape, kept restaurants and bars afloat, protected and preserved the hospitality industry while making New York City so much more dynamic."

Four years later, however, New York's "streetery" scene is one of many that has been greatly diminished. Just under 3,000 restaurants have applied for sidewalk or curbside dining permits under the new, permanent program, down from more than 13,000 participants at the peak. Under the city's new seasonal rules, by the end of the month, New York will have no streeteries for the first time since 2020. There were more than 8,000 of them in the curb lane at the program's peak. The real estate will be returned to parked cars.

New York City isn't alone. Boston counted 135 restaurants with outdoor seating in public space this summer, down from more than 400 in 2021. Philadelphia had more than 750 outdoor dining licenses in 2022; by August, the city was down to 26 streeteries.

What once looked like a generational change to public space in the American city has instead returned to a bunch of curb parking. What went wrong?

Some of this decline was to be expected. After all, indoor dining was not permitted in many states for much of 2020 and was subject to restrictions for months thereafter. Remember 6 feet? Remember plexiglass?

Even afterward, though, surveys showed that the public was very supportive of the programs: In Seattle, for example, 90 percent of respondents to a city survey were in favor of restaurant seating in curb parking spaces in 2022. In Toronto, diners spent $143 million in summer 2022, in parking spaces that would otherwise have generated just a few million in meter revenue. But without the pandemic's trifecta of urgency—keeping people healthy, saving the restaurant industry, and letting people socialize—cities have found it hard to effectively revise and maintain the programs they quickly put in place in 2020.

In New York, for example, it took more than three years for City Hall to turn then-Mayor Bill de Blasio's emergency order of 2020 into a permanent program. Part of the reason for that delay was the need to get input from the alphabet soup of city departments that have control over the street. And outdoor dining did pose challenges to the city's management of trash, stormwater, snow, and repaving, to name a few.

For Restler, Mayor Eric Adams should have taken the lead on that coordination. "The bureaucracy lends itself to inertia," he said. "This is where you need a strong mayor who understands how government works and can push back on agencies and their resistance to change. You need adept leadership at City Hall that can push back and deliver solutions, and we didn't get that here."

New York's delay had consequences for outdoor dining's success in other ways too. "The longer the emergency program went on, the longer folks had to complain about unresolved rat, noise, trash issues—the litany of things you hear," noted Jackson Chabot, director of advocacy at the planning nonprofit Open Plans. Those were valid concerns, and the city's failure to more substantively address them by 2023 had supercharged a NIMBY coalition that had always been upset about the loss of parking. (Though, as Chabot was quick to point out, outdoor dining had only ever used a few thousand of the city's estimated 3 million parking spaces.)

Those gripes were compounded by a lack of investment on the restaurant side that stemmed from the same issue. "No one expected these outdoor dining setups to be there for multiple years," said Andrew Rigie, of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, a trade group. "Without a new permanent program to give confidence to restaurants to invest in the future, a lot of the outdoor dining fell apart." Sometimes literally. No restaurant wanted to put thousands of dollars into upgrades only to be told the city was changing its design rules the next month.

As a result, the once-proud dining shed had deteriorated into what New York magazine critic Justin Davidson called the "decrepit streetery era." Though people still loved eating in the structures, even in the colder months, the city has ordered them to be torn down each fall and reassembled each spring. The cost of disassembly, storage, and reassembly was a major deterrent behind the huge drop in applicants for the permanent program, according to a survey of restaurants undertaken by the alliance.

Other cities moved more quickly to formalize new rules but delivered restaurants with a laundry list of new requirements. In Boston, like everywhere else, outdoor dining began as the Wild West. The instructions from City Hall were: "You could draw a plan on a napkin and we'll say yes to it," recalled Ginger Brown, the head of a business group in the city's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

Over time, though, Boston tightened the requirements as controversy raged in the city's North End neighborhood, where outdoor patios were so ubiquitous it was hard to cross the street. In the end, restaurants had to adopt what Diti Kohli, in a Boston Globe investigation , called a list of "ever-changing and often expensive requirements." Those included new restrictions on the height of barriers, car-proof materials, Fire Department access, and disability access, as well as onerous insurance requirements, engineer-approved plans, and city fees. As in New York, the paper found that the new regime had caused outdoor dining to retreat to the city's more prosperous neighborhoods.

"It was expensive to do this, and everything we put into it the year before—lovely patios, some decorated by artists—all that investment was lost," said Brown.

In Philadelphia, where the curbside structures have all but vanished, an August report by the city comptroller found that the city had made the application too complex, confusing, and expensive, with unnecessary regulatory requirements.

Generally speaking, smaller cities seemed to have fared better. In Cincinnati, the economic development corporation 3CDC spearheaded the streetery program in the city's downtown and Over-the-Rhine neighborhoods. With American Rescue Plan funding from the city, 3CDC built out a network of wooden parklets for some 85 businesses, along with street closures and other pedestrian improvements. "We feel like the program has been successful," said Joe Rudemiller, the group's vice president of marketing. "It has not only added vibrancy and vitality to the streets, but there's a nice aesthetic element as well."

Something similar has happened in many small towns and suburbs, where concentrated zones of local restaurants—often under the umbrella of business-improvement districts—have pushed to establish open streets or preserve 2020-style outdoor dining.

In many big cities, though, keeping those initiatives alive and well has been less of a priority and more of a challenge. Maybe those rules just need a few years of fine-tuning before restaurants decide to jump back into the outdoor dining game. That's what happened in Toronto, where outdoor dining leaped back to 2022 levels this summer, after a 40 percent decline last year. "We kept hearing story after story that it takes forever to get a license ... an approval, to get the ramps. There was, almost every week, yet another problem," Mayor Olivia Chow said at a triumphant press conference in October. This summer, that process was streamlined, with the results on every corner.

In New York, though, a winter with no parklets feels like a setback, said Chabot, of Open Plans. Especially as climate change delivers ever-warmer winter months. "We may be rebounding from rock bottom. But why do we need to hit rock bottom with a new program, when we had a decent thing going?"