BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building
In writing comments on the DC Cultural Plan draft, while the survey of current conditions wasn't particularly detailed, it was surprisingly direct about the reality of DC's high value real estate environment making it difficult for arts organizations and low paid artists to compete for space for working and living.
Given that excepting extraordinary events, building prices only go up, they don't fall, the recommendations for action in the Cultural Plan aren't particularly direct and come up short. Typical of many final planning documents produced by the office, you don't get any sense of urgency that not only is action required, that now is the time to act.
For example, in reading about the history of the BART transit system, they had an early director who always made the point that "the cheapest time to build transit is now because costs of land, labor and materials only go up."
I have some writings that get directly to the point concerning facilities and spaces for arts and culture: buy the f* building.
-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building
-- "BTMFBA revisited: nonprofits and facilities planning and acquisition"
-- "BTMFBA: artists and Los Angeles"
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review
In terms of making a direct and obvious recommendation about the necessity of buying buildings (and in the case of artist/workforce housing, building it), and creating "culturally-focused" community development corporations to do so, the DC Cultural Plan fails as there is no such recommendation.
The West Seattle blog reports ("'It is a home. It is YOUR home’: C & P Coffee announces it’s raised the money ‘to purchase and preserve the coffee house’") on how C&P Coffee, faced with their landlord's putting the building up for sale, managed to organize a successful crowd funding campaign through GoFundMe and is buying the building.Model leases? Another element of this from a learning standpoint is that somehow C&P had a clause in their lease giving them the right of first refusal to purchase the property. In fact, the property owner had accepted another offer, but the coffee shop was able to assert their contractual rights and buy the property.
I don't know if there is a document out there recommending master lease clauses designed to best protect the interests of independent retailers, arts organizations, and other nonprofits.
There should be. I know that Maryland has the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts organization and it's worth checking in with them to see.
Labels: arts-based revitalization, arts-culture, civic engagement, cultural heritage/tourism, cultural planning, music-entertainment, nonprofit management, real estate interests, urban design/placemaking
posted by Richard Layman @ 9:47 AM&Permanent Link
4 Comments:
https://www.thestar.com/business/small-business/2023/01/27/is-building-ownership-the-secret-sauce-to-restaurant-longevity-in-toronto.html
The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same
These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.
Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.
If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.
... In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. “AirSpace” was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.
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My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.
... In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. “AirSpace” was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.
My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.
... It wasn’t just the spaces that were homogenous, but also the customers, [Sarita Pillay] Gonzalez observed: “If you go into the cafes, they’re predominantly white. But [Kloof Street] is historically a neighbourhood for people of colour.” Only certain types of people were encouraged to feel comfortable in the zone of AirSpace, and others were actively filtered out. It required money and a certain fluency for someone to be comfortable with the characteristic act of plunking down a laptop on one of the generic cafes’ broad tables and sitting there for hours, akin to learning the unspoken etiquette of a cocktail bar in a luxury hotel. The AirSpace cafes “are oppressive, in the sense that they are exclusive and expensive”, Gonzalez said. When whiteness and wealth are posed as the norm, a kind of force field of aesthetics and ideology keeps out anyone who does not fit the template.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718520303080
Geoforum, 2021
Abstract
Coffee shops have been described as ‘third places’ in urban lives separate from the work and home, providing places for people to meet, relax and develop connections. However, the growing presence of coffee shops in the urban landscape has meant that they increasingly take on a wider range of roles, becoming spaces of both leisure and work but also providing spaces of sociality in which people can develop connections, and potentially communities. The roles of coffee shops in five cities in England are explored in order to consider how they can be understood not only as spaces of consumption, but spaces which facilitate connection in increasingly isolated urban lives, and generate the potential for communities to develop. By understanding the varied ways in which businesses and consumers co-create these spaces, it may be possible to increase their potential as ‘spaces of community’.
International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2014
The English public house as a 21st century socially responsible community institution
Abstract
The changing nature of the British public house (pub) attracts much attention in the academic and popular literature. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the pubs located in a single suburban village. The concepts of community, hospitality, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and third place are utilised to develop a theoretical perspective from which to explore publican and customer views of the pub's role in the twenty-first century. The relationship between community and CSR is not always clear but the notion of the pub as a place to meet friends and acquaintances was expressed strongly by the customers of establishments that retain aspects of the ‘traditional pub’. The hospitality of publicans was seen as a key element of the pub's philanthropic responsibility despite a tendency for organisational reporting to focus more on charitable activities in financial terms.
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