Can anyone save New York City's mom and pop shops from chain store takeovers and rising rents? One man is trying. Jeremiah Moss has launched a #SaveNYC campaign—below, he explains what he's doing, what you can do, and why we should all be "mad as hell."
(Photo via neohxc's flickr)
#SaveNYC has been a long time coming. After eight years of writing the blog Vanishing New York, after trying and failing to save individual small businesses with petitions and rallies, it was time to mobilize in a way that could lead to real change.
There is nothing we can do to save our favorite small businesses one at a time. CBGB’s, Café Edison, Bill’s Gay 90s, Restaurant Gino, Big Nick’s, Bleecker Bob’s, Rocco Ristorante, the Lenox Lounge—so many places where legends—everyone from Debbie Harry to Billie Holiday to Tallulah Bankhead—caroused and entertained, places where everyday New Yorkers connected with each other and felt themselves connected to the soul of the city—they’ve all been wiped out, replaced by upscale businesses or chain stores. Or simply left empty to rot. The list goes on and on. And while some shuttered due to a changing marketplace or owner retirement, the vast majority were destroyed by landlord greed.
Time and again, I’ve talked to mom-and-pops who tell me, “My landlord says he doesn’t want any small businesses here.” What does the landlord want? Staples, Starbucks, Ralph Lauren. Small businesses aren’t just struggling—they are being targeted for assassination.
Countless times, we’ve heard of landlords tripling, quadrupling, and quintupling rents. Or simply denying lease renewals to businesses that had thrived for decades, through multiple generations, some dating back a century.
We have to stop the bleeding.
(Gothamist)
It’s time to pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act (SBJSA). It is simply the best first step we can take.
I first learned of the SBJSA in 2009, through an article by Jillian Jonas in the Gotham Gazette. It seemed hopeless to get it passed under Bloomberg, and it was. Christine Quinn killed the bill in the City Council.
Buoyed by Mayor de Blasio’s promise to heal the “tale of two cities,” over the past year, a groundswell of support has been growing for the bill.
When de Blasio was about to take office, The Observer asked me, among many others, to give him some advice. That’s when I first put together a rough “plan” for saving the city’s mom and pops. Passing the SBJSA was number one, followed by a citywide ordinance to control the spread of chain stores like they do in San Francisco. Over the course of 2014, the plan has evolved and I’ve pushed it everywhere I could—on my blog, in the New York Times, The Daily News, The Daily Beast.
At the same time, neighborhood newspapers like The Villager were also getting behind the SBJSA. Sharon Woolums wrote a series of passionate editorials for that paper. They recently organized a well-attended community forum at Judson Memorial Church to discuss saving small businesses. The Small Business Congress of NYC, co-founded in 1991 by Steven Null, has also been a strong and active advocate in the fight.
We’ve got a zeitgeist going.
If it really does take a village, I am grateful to belong to a virtual village of tens of thousands of readers. In comments to my site, people were tired of complaining and grieving. They wanted to do something. I started the #SaveNYC Facebook group back in December, after the outpouring of support and crushing loss of Café Edison. I then launched #SaveNYC the website in early February, inspired by a video from the UK called “Save Soho.”
The Facebook group is a place to strategize and plan actions. The site, savenyc.nyc, is a place where anyone from anywhere can post a video or photo sharing their #SaveNYC message.
Taking action can be as simple as sending a tweet to the City Council or printing out our #SaveNYC sign and handing it out to small businesses for display. It can also mean showing up at cash mobs and rallies. This is a grassroots, crowd-sourced movement. Talented individuals have volunteered their time and skills to create the website, design the logo, plan concerts, and run a top-shelf PR campaign. Many more are tweeting, talking to the press, and sharing their ideas. The response has been overwhelming. #SaveNYC has received supportive national and international attention. The whole world is tired of watching New York City turn into a dull outpost of suburban America.
When Bill de Blasio was running his campaign, many of my readers voted for him. Today, among 20,000 Facebook followers, not one says they plan to vote for him again—not unless he takes real action to save small businesses and preserve the cultural fabric of this city for everyone, not just for the mega-developers, corporations, and super-rich.
#SaveNYC has tapped into a city full of Howard Beales. We’re as mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take this anymore.
