Many of you may not understand or agree with the urgency we need to start and protect businesses in the black community, but these sort of numbers have to startle you to to say the least. In West Las Vegas, black owned businesses are dying at an alarming rate. This lead me to wonder is this trend is happening in our communities across the country?
Here is a bit of background from the Review Journal’s article on Las Vegas black businesses.
Ricki Barlow, the Las Vegas councilman representing Ward 5, which includes the now Hispanic-dominated community, says change is coming to the long embattled neighborhood, which locals say has for decades been largely ignored by the city.
“We’re talking about a lot of money,” said Barlow, 41, who was elected in 2007 on a platform that would bring West Las Vegas back to life and redevelop the rundown areas so people will move there instead of leaving.
“When you add it all up, it’s mind-blowing, and it took a lot of work, a lot of visits to Washington, D.C., a lot of coordination with our federal delegation.”
And yet small black-owned businesses, often considered the last stand in any struggling inner-city neighborhood, are failing even as the city and the Regional Transportation Commission inject money into what used to be a largely black neighborhood, where abandoned buildings and federally subsidized housing projects have long become a fact of life on the urban landscape.
Mom-and-pop businesses, from convenience stores to restaurants, are closing in unprecedented numbers in the area, which is bordered by Carey Avenue on the north, Interstate 15 on the east, Rancho Drive on the west and Bonanza Road on the south.
The drop has been 75 percent in the past decade, according to Ernest Fountain, a lender who has seen better days at New Ventures, a capital development company on Ninth Street in Las Vegas.
If you didn’t know these comments were being made about West Las Vegas, you could easily assume this was speaking about any major, black, urban community across the country. It seems to be the pattern that is taking place in our communities. We have less and less businesses to support and patronize.
Nevertheless, I was ROCKED when I saw the figure putting the decline at 75 percent and led me to wonder is this the trend happening to us across the country? We have seen the decline in black businesses, no doubt, but a 75% decline in a decade? This would put us on a trajectory that eliminates black owned businesses from our community completely in the next 10 to 20 years.
What is to blame?
The article goes on to blame a lack of business loans being available, gentrification, and black flight of the best and brightest in the community leaving for sunnier communities, but I have to add at least one more thing to this list.
It seems many in the black community just don’t understand the importance of supporting local, black owned businesses to ensure we own our assets and they are working for us. The concept of community economics continues to evade our knowledge base and not enough prominent people are pushing this issue to the youth and community. Many feel that paying the lowest possible price for something is best for them individually, rather than paying a bit more to support the local business in their community and ensure those dollars circulate where they lay their head.
This lesson is going to be learned through support or the hard way of watching all these businesses die, then the community suffering the end result of not owning anything.
What are your thoughts on the decline of black businesses in the community? And do you think the 75% decline over the past decade applies to all our communities across the country?
Source: http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/black-owned-businesses-struggling-west-las-vegas
I appreciate how you all listed the story from the Review Journal’s article on Las Vegas black businesses. A 75% drop in black businesses over the last 10 years is disheartening. It is very important that African-Americans support black-owned businesses in our communities. http://blackexpansion.com/2013/10/27/welcome-to-black-expansion/