I am sitting in the light-filled dining room, picking
mushrooms out of my magnificent roasted-vegetable sandwich. The
waitress (whose name I never learned) says, “Oh, I didn’t
know you didn’t like mushrooms! We’ll remember next time,
won’t we, Tom?” The restaurant owner smiles—oh yeah
sure, we’ll remember—but I believe them. I’m a
regular, and they remember other things—my favorite beer, for
example.
But there won’t be a next time. Morandi’s Record Street
Café closed its doors—“Sorry, the Economy
Sucks” note stuck to the door. I’m sad. It was a great
place to meet after class, and the Morandis served up great food and a
fabulous vibe. Morandi’s joins a growing list of local places
leveled by the recession just in the last month: Dreamer’s,
Sasha’s, La Bussola. After almost a decade of revival fueled by
unique local businesses taking up residence around downtown, Reno is
rapidly returning to the gutted storefronts that plagued the downtown
area throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
“It’s the casinos,” grumbled one storekeeper.
“They want to see us fail, to bring in national chain stores in
our place.” I don’t know if this is true. It’s easy
to scapegoat the casinos after decades of their dominating urban
development, and it seems like tough economic times are a more powerful
driver.
Whatever the cause, this epidemic of local business closures is a
tragedy on multiple fronts. Our local businesses help to create a sense
of community and unique identity in our downtown area, something that
national chains (if they come) can’t replicate or replace. But as
someone who does a lot of business over a cup of coffee, I notice that
the loss of places like Dreamer’s and Record Street also means
fewer public spaces where people can gather to brainstorm new ideas or
hatch projects. These quasi-public spaces foster a dynamic, creative
engagement that characterizes successful downtown renaissances from
Portland, Ore., to Brooklyn, N.Y., acting as anchors and springboards
for other ventures—a positive feedback loop. Their loss creates
the opposite, downward spiral, replacing the creative buzz with empty
spaces and lowering property values.
Is there something we can do as a community to help stanch the
hemorrhage? Should we even try? There is the argument that cyclical
downturns are normal events in capitalist economies, opportunities for
“creative destruction,” where the loss of the old creates
space for the new and innovative to come forward. There is some truth
to this argument. But what if it’s the new and innovative that
gets crushed while the stodgy and old consolidates and gets bigger,
more entrenched?
One of the interesting features of a Google search is that
sometimes, it can reveal the cultural differences among countries and
communities. My search on the topic of “saving local businesses
during recession” turned up several pages of results from the
United Kingdom, where both the central government and local
“Councils” and “Town Halls” have devised
innovative polices specifically designed to help keep local businesses
from closing down during the recession. The only United States results
focused on providing individual business owners with the information to
save themselves. That Americans might be more focused on self-help and
self-reliance than Brits is not so surprising in and of itself. But are
there really no American communities where the fate of local business
in the face of recession isn’t a matter of policy discussion and
concern?
I recently learned that small businesses provide far and away the
majority of jobs and tax dollars across the country and in Nevada. So
if we are to find a way out of recession, perhaps we should pay
attention to the little guys first.