Save Your Neighborhood

Buy local.

If you live in a city, town or village you probably appreciate the local amenities.

These include the local shops. If you want to preserve your neighborhood then buy local. Small independent stores and businesses are under siege and we need to support them if we care about preserving our neighborhoods. 

Let’s imagine a densely populated city like NYC for example with a few blocks of small local shops. In an ideal world what would you want to find in a five block radius?

A great neighborhood would have all the basics plus amenities such as a park, a Post Office and a Public Library branch. Perhaps there’s a college nearby to keep the place jumping.

Public transportation of course – a bus route or two and a subway stop. A good grocery store for basic food supplies that includes a good range of produce and a decent cheese, fish and meat counter. Perhaps a specialty store that brings in people from all over.

A bakery. A pizzeria. A diner, a deli, a couple of coffee shops and places to meet for lunch, go out for a drink and take the family for breakfast. Perhaps a place with a cat that establishes control of the immediate sidewalk and manages all passing dogs with haughty indifference.

Upscale and downscale restaurants offering the world’s food at reasonable prices. Somewhere you can buy a taco, an empanada, a Jamaican patty and a samosa;  buy spices, BBQ ribs, coffee beans and get your hair cut. A shoe repair shop that also changes watch batteries and sells luggage. An art supply store and somewhere to drop off the laundry. A wine and liquor store and somewhere to buy those household items you suddenly find you need in the kitchen or to mend, make, clean or fix something. A news stand of course, a couple of food carts and a street seller with fresh fruit and veggies.

And – if you are super lucky a chocolate shop and a florist.  And best of all – at least one bookstore. 

What else?

This ideal neighborhood does need a bank or two and a drug store but it doesn’t need a huge one on every corner.

And it certainly does not need the kinds of stores that take up half a block and cater to people who drive. There’s a place for such stores – elsewhere – but not in the ideal neighborhood where small and personal are the defining characteristics.

Change happens, but established shopkeepers know their customers and care about them. 

To keep such places in businesses and to maintain such neighborhoods we have to buy local whenever possible. 

Here’s the survival campaign being waged by Book Culture in Manhattan.These pics were taken outside their W112th street location – one of my favorite places to browse and shop. 

And just look at these statistics. 

• In 2015 Amazon sold $55.6 billion worth of retail goods while avoiding $704 million in sales taxes.
• These sales are the equivalent of 30,00 retail storefronts or 133 million square feet of commercial space worth $528 million in property taxes
• Amazon sales produced a net loss of 222,000 retail jobs nationwide.

This is how neighborhoods are destroyed.

Shop Indie. Shop Local. Read more about Book Culture’s campaign at their website.