In many Lefty cities and towns, including San
Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Portland and Santa Monica, the city
fathers pass legislation that is intended to keep quaint business
streets quaint and small precious neighborhood business districts
precious.
My problem with this is that these self-righteous,
know-it-all ideologs are the last people in the world to understand
what creates business and what makes business thrive or fail.
Having
Lefty politicos trying to make business work they way they want
business to work is like a Masters Degree English urban writer trying
to have sex with a sheep to lend realism to his novel about farm life.
It is preposterous.
I have probably had more experience with
small business, including small retail business, than any but
half-a-dozen other living people. I've advised several thousand small
businesses and visited their sites. I honestly don't know for certain
what, if anything will preserve a quaint or precious business district.
What
I do know are two things: (1) business environments are constantly
changing so nothing about business can be preserved and (2) any
government or zoning attempt to meddle with small business will have
perverse effects. I have seen perverse effects many times.
There are several examples of vital small business districts that failed on their own.
One
is the Obiko case. Obiko was a tiny original wearable art shop on
Sacramento near Presidio Blvd. in San Francisco that was so spectacular that
it created valuable foot traffic. The valuable shopping oriented foot
traffic attracted dozens of other interesting stores and created a
thriving small business district three blocks long.
The
savings bank next door to Obiko had been doing poorly before Obiko, but
the increased foot traffic saved the savings bank and it began to
grow. The bank, after the retail area had grown, had the profitability to expand by buying-up the Obiko
lease and driving Obiko out of the neighborhood. Within two years the
neighborhood was on a downhill path.
In several other cases, a
small vital business district was destroyed when a government building
(library, garage, police station, non-profit operation, clinic...etc)
was opened that had a long stretch of sidewalk with a blank wall. The
blank wall disrupted foot traffic and promptly destroyed the business
neighborhood.
I've seen zoning against coffee shops, street
vendors and bars that were disastrous. One rule of thumb must be that
anything convivial is good for business... don't zone against
conviviality like most Lefty politicos are so anxious to do.
Otherwise, leave small business alone. For
godsake don't ban chains or stores based on their large size. There is
no good definition of chains that doesn't include many wonderful
businesses (think UPS, copy shops, coffee shops, ice creameries,
bicycle shops, shoe stores, etc).
Lastly, don't mess with auto
traffic. Getting rid of auto traffic can deaden a street. Making the
wrong changes to parking can be harmful. People and cars are symbiotic
in ways no one understands. The greatest shopping mall, Santana Row,
has a good mix of cars, parking and walking space that people love.
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