Research a ton, and yes, I use street view a lot to get the lay of the land. If you were possessed of more money than sense, you could consider just going to visit. If you're writing about a bigger city, like Memphis, there are probably travel message boards where you can ask your questions and get answers. While it's true that the honesty, the emotional connection is more important, I have been blindsided in workshops with some information that is apparently commoner knowledge than I thought and I'll have to change entire parts of the story to accommodate.

Sometimes it's enough to get the name and details of one shop on a street, and paint around it. You'll be forgiven for an impressionistic view of the surrounding if you've got one or two really sharp details to pull out.

Cheat, maybe. If it's a small town, the number of people likely to read it and get up in arms about how there's no street called "Main Street" is low. If it's a bigger city, there's rarely going to be a person who knows all the nooks and crannies, so you can write in a way that obfuscates the street details but invents a shop in a general area, and no one's the wiser. There's a middle ground that is dangerous there, of course.