03.08.08
Local Economy Weaker Because Of Practices
I was in another one of our local communities today. It was a bright, sunny day, and I was walking down the street. I saw someone putting up some signage for the city, telling pedestrians not to cross the street at that intersection.
I was not going that way, but if I had been coming from across that street and heading back the way I had come from, I would not cross the street three times to get to a place that was one crossing away. In other words, either they are making it harder and slower for pedestrians to get where they are going, or they are creating more lawbreakers.
In my own town, we have a whole corner shopping center that is now a ghost town, primarily because the town decided to put up median to prevent vehicles from turning into or out of the center and then put up signs telling pedestrians to walk a block out of their way in order to cross the street. This was previously high-traffic location, with a supermarket, fast food restaurant, clothing and shoe stores, an auto parts store, doughnut shop, a discount store and a drug store / pharmacy. In fact, it was the local high school Friday and Saturday night hangout.
What is the problem? If we want our local shopping areas to thrive, we have to make it easy and convenient to pull vehicles into and out of a central parking area, and we have to make it convenient for pedestrians to get to various stores, restaurants, and shops in the local area. We have to make that a priority, even to the extent of slowing the flow of traffic in the area. We then need to make sure that there is also adequate housing nearby, because many of the customers for local businesses will then walk.
In the quest to make things better for SLOBs, we have to make it easier for nearby residents to choose and support those businesses. We have to stop taxing SLOBs in order to give “incentives” to big corporations from outside the area. We have to give locally-owned businesses priority in zoning changes, setting taxes and fees, and even in deciding how to route traffic. We need to make sure that we continue to support and promote the locally-owned businesses that are going to hire many of our local high school graduates and support our local youth sports teams. Our civic leaders need to buy most of our city’s (or town’s) products and services from locally-owned businesses, too.
I hope that someone in our local community is reading this. We are about small, locally-owned businesses, about family-owned businesses (FOBs), and about owner-managed businesses (OMBs). All of these are suffering due to neglect by our local governments, who are busy pursuing the big companies that send their profits outside the community. What is it going to take to wake someone up and get us started with building up our local economy?
Local business: profits stay here, recycled within community. Often smaller, but existing in large numbers.
Out-of-area business: profits exported to another area, resulting in a net export of funds from the community to wherever the company is headquartered.
Let us join together and build our communities.
