Thinking outside the big box
Dana Eness
The recent uptick in big-box projects and proposals in the Crescent City, fueled by tax subsidies and other costly giveaways, has left owners of smaller home-grown businesses in related industries gritting their teeth and bracing for hard times.
They might not have a champion in City Hall, but an Emmy Award-winning journalist is working to shine a light on their situation with his documentary film-in-progress, "Independent America: Rising from the Ruins." The final feature-length documentary is scheduled to be ready for national broadcast by early fall.
Hanson Hosein and his assistants have been touring the city with their cameras to find out how a wide variety of mom-and-pop businesses are faring in post-Katrina New Orleans. See a three-minute in-production preview on Hosein's Independent America Web log: http://www.independentamerica.typepad.com/.
The clip includes comments from Edward Blakely of the city's Office of Recovery Development and Administration as he bicycles with Hosein through a Katrina-damaged neighborhood.
Blakely tells Hosein that "the pressure from the ordinary citizens" is to bring more big-box stores. Blakely concedes that big boxes may "put these . . . little guys out of business," but he insists that citizens he is hearing from say they're focused on their own rebuilding efforts and "can't think about that guy's business."
Granted, Dr. Blakely's sound bite was extracted from a larger conversation, but it is fair to ask whether his characterization is accurate. Are New Orleanians really clamoring for chain retailers per se, or simply for a robust local economy? It is a mistake to conflate the two.
Locally owned businesses have been critical in our city's recovery. Many reopened within days of the storm while corporate chains nervously kept their distance.
Now that federal recovery money is trickling in, big retailers are courting local politicians and scoring the sort of tax incentives our local businesses can only dream about.
Ironically, independent business owners will subsidize with their tax dollars those projects that threaten their very livelihood.
We believe that, in fact, most New Orleanians do understand the link between community well-being and their neighborhood businesses. For this very reason many residents of Orleans Parish resent the drive out to neighboring parishes to shop at the big boxes; they'd rather spend their dollars closer to home.
"If I'm going to spend my dollars at Target," the reasoning goes, "I'd rather spend them at a Target in Orleans Parish."
However, there are long-term costs in cozying up to corporate chains: Inevitably, profits are siphoned off from the host community and invested elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the citizen-owned businesses that have invested and re-invested in New Orleans -- and that collectively contribute hundreds of millions of dollars and many thousands of jobs to the local economy -- are ignored by the architects of public policy.
Not only is this unfair, but it is ultimately self-destructive, undermining local decision-making, wealth creation and retention, environmental sustainability and competition.
Hanson Hosein has documented the difficulties of independent small businesses around our country. His current film project exemplifies his belief -- and ours -- that New Orleans can be smarter, more diverse and more local than hundreds of less lucky American communities with derelict main streets and nowhere to go but the shiny big box on the edge of town.
Dana Eness of New Orleans is executive director of the Urban Conservancy and Stay Local.
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1208582526240690.xml&coll=1
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