Even more on commerz in the 'hood

Flickr photo of the original Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street NW by Edward Hoover.

The Washington Post seems to believe that the impact of "gentrification" on business operations is a new impact, judging by the article "The Ben's Chili Bowl model for outlasting segregation," which says in part:

"One of the hidden stories of displacement is that it affects businesses and not just residents," says Calvin Gladney, a real estate developer and consultant who works with cities and neighborhoods on urban revitalization projects.

We talk a lot about how how people can be uprooted and priced out of their homes when a neighborhood like U Street transforms over time around $2,000-a-month apartments and high-priced gastropubs. But long-entrenched businesses get nudged out, too, overwhelmed by rising commercial rents or by new residents looking to buy things they don't sell.

Gladney counters that the displacement of businesses doesn't have to be inevitable, and Ben's Chili Bowl is the centerpiece of his case. Of course, every hairdresser or corner store in town won't benefit from cameos by Barack Obama or scenes in the Pelican Brief. But the Chili Bowl has made a few other savvy moves that are replicable, starting with that turkey burger.

Maybe Ben's is in fact unique and worth writing about, because they are expanding to new locations, and fundamentally, they aren't changing what they're offering very much.

Flickr photo of the Ben's Chili Bowl on Wilson Blvd. in Arlington County, Virginia.  The location is decidedly not in a traditional black neighborhood.

What they are doing is selling black authenticity as defined by chili dogs and chili cheese fries.

But that's still a form of polishing and refashioning their identity and selling it on new terms to new audiences and in areas that aren't necessarily black communities either now or historically.

(Note that Ben's hasn't been all smooth sailing.  A venture in the city-owned Reeves Center at 14th and U Streets lost lots of money and hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent.)

Retail businesses being impacted by changing demographics is something I've been dealing with and/or writing about for 10 years at least.  I wrote a series of pieces in 2006:

- Commerz in the 'hood... (aka "Commerce as the engine of urbanism")
- Commerz in the 'hood, part two
- Commerz in the 'hood, part three
- Commerce dans de quartier de la ville, partie quatre (this is about how businesses in a neighborhood in Paris changed their approach as the neighborhood changed)

Ironically, many of these pieces were in response to what I thought were facile Post articles.

Back then, it was a constant frustration to try to get businesses to rethink their business model, operations, and concept, in response to new and different customer segments.

Instead, proprietors typically criticized the new customer base.  (Note this isn't unique to DC.  I led a tour of public markets in Baltimore in 2005, and the working class vendors in Cross Street Market in Federal Hill denigrated the new higher income residents of the neighborhood.  Those residents, rather than deal with being demeaned, shopped at Whole Foods.)

Sign on the front door of Jak & Co. Hairdressers in Bloomingdale cities gentrification as a reason for the business closings its doors. (Perry Stein/The Washington Post)

In fact, this came up in a different Post article from April, "After 50 years, a D.C. store will close 'due to gentrification," where the business proprietor blamed their closure on "gentrification" and the property owner "asking for market rate rents."

But the reality is that their business remained the same and in the same place while their customer base moved on.  And now there is demand for the space from new tenants willing to pay higher rents.

Just as in the early 1960's, Ourisman Chevrolet moved from H Street NE to Marlow Heights in Prince George's County, following their customer base as it relocated, to stay in business, businesses must constantly grow and change and adapt to remain open.

But back in my Main Street commercial district revitalization days there were some changing businesses that stood out like Modern Liquors at 9th and M Streets NW ("A Liquor Store Makes It Back From Skid Row," Washington Post, 2006), two Korean-owned corner stores on the 400 block of East Capitol Street, and Lee Flowers ("NW Businesses Fear Skyrocketing Taxes Will Push Them Out," Washington Post, 2005) on U Street NW.

And some businesses fail, not so much because they aren't supported, but because there is a disconnect between their location, customer demographics, sales volume potential, and what they offer, such as the failure of the Culture Shop in the Takoma neighborhood of DC ("Struggling to Give D.C.'s Takoma Park a Shop All Its Own," Washington Post, 2007).

My sense was that as cool as Culture Shop was, it was in the wrong location.  Had it been located on U Street (but the proprietors lived in the Takoma area), it likely would have been much more successful.

These days, the Post and the Washington City Paper are publishing pieces about new and unique stores and restaurants like Upshur Books, the new Union Kitchen Grocery ("Union Kitchen Grocery promises more than an everyday corner store," Washington Post, 2015), Glen's Garden Market ("Glen's Garden Market launches dinner among the dry goods," Washington Post, 2014), Maketto on H Street, Broad Branch Market, the Red Hen restaurant, etc.  But the idea is the same--as demographics and opportunities and density changes, so do the activities and business plans and operations of smart business proprietors.

It's an ongoing process.

In 2012, I did two follow up pieces in response to new developments:

- More on Commerz in the 'hood
- Commerz in the 'hood revisited: Asian slurs edition.

From the latter piece:

This comes up because of the lighting up of the media because of Councilman Marion Barry's complaint about Asian-American owned businesses in his ward/poor areas of the city as "We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses, those dirty shops. They ought to go, I’ll just say that right now, you know. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too," according to WRC-TV and recounted in "Marion Barry apologizes for anti-Asian remarks" in the Post. But the apology included this:

But Barry renewed his critique of Asian-owned businesses: “Let me make it clear, I’m not castigating any group of people. I’m not doing anything except trying to have a renaissance of our community and get some respect. A number of these restaurants serve high caloric food, bad food, et cetera, but the more important thing, they don’t participate in the community. . . . That’s what I object to, I don’t care who it is. “ 

Asked why he singled out Asians in his remarks, Barry said, “Because that’s reality. Who owns these little restaurants? Who owns them? You know, Asians. . .Ninety percent of all the small restaurants in Ward 8, at least.” It is difficult to verify that claim.

African-American resentment about Asian-owned businesses is nothing new. People ought to remember the boycotts in the 1980s over such businesses in New York City. See this piece, "Review/Television; The Boycotting of a Korean Grocery in Brooklyn" from the New York Times about an episode of the tv news show, "48 Hours," on the topic. It even made it in as a recurring theme on episodes of the television show "Hill Street Blues," which ran from 1981 to 1987.

... The issue is important but we need to look at what's going on. First, it's not like African-Americans haven't owned stores in neighborhoods, but there has been a long period, co-incident with the outmigration of middle-class African-Americans from the inner city, where they sold their businesses.

Second, it's true that stores in inner-city neighborhoods, especially those extremely impoverished, can be second-rate.

It's a function of low profits, partly because of low revenues, but also because of "shrink," the impact of theft of goods--which is why some stores have everything, not just the clerk, but the stock also, behind plexiglass.

It's also a function of a higher incidence of robbery, some of which results in death. The number of stories in the Post over the past 24+ years that I've lived in the city about robberies of stores resulting in the deaths of clerks/owners etc. are far too many to be able to count off the top of my head.

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Last summer, I came across a book on the topic, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America, by Jennifer Lee, a professor at UC Irvine.

She worked in family owned businesses in impoverished communities while growing up, and then again while doing research for her dissertation.  I wish I had found the book much earlier.

The book is well-done, not only for its insights in the interactions between Asian business owners and workers and their African-American customers, but also for the discussion of how poorly capitalized and micro businesses operate generally, pre-crowdfunding community fundraising techniques within the Korean-American community, and the extranormal stresses on the business that come from operating in impoverished communities.

Also see "In the produce aisle, solidarity for Korean grocers, New York Times.