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.