Category: 4/8/16

Change in general is an inevitable process. Everything and everyone is constantly evolving and adapting to external and internal pressures, which sometimes creates a positive outcome and other times not so much. In the case of local shopping streets, change cannot be stopped. Technology is constantly evolving and continuously becoming a more central part of our lives. As we learned a couple of weeks ago in our trip to Civic Hall, services are being created that simply did not exist before. Along with high tech products comes a change in aesthetic. As described in Global Cities, Local Streets, “cheap” stores that once were popular on Orchard Street were replaced with “vintage” shops with exposed brick walls. Rents are increasing due to a variety of factors, leading to the closing of many immigrant shops.

Technology has caused a shift in the appearance and operation of physical stores. Many companies are labeling themselves as “tech companies” instead of traditionally labeling themselves after what they actually produce, such as pizza. However, technology (the internet) has created an entirely online shopping street where products are often offered for cheaper. This obviously does not bode well for store keepers as they are competing with global companies that have more resources. The only real ways a business can compete with such an entity is to offer a completely unique product, experience or environment or enter the online realm as well. Yelp as well as Twitter and Instagram can be vital for a business. These platforms can be used to gain a following and hopefully make the store more hip and trendy, creating more revenue.

Retail chains are another huge factor in the decrease of “mom-and-pop” shops. Due to changes in zoning laws and the allowance of government Kmart and Target have infiltrated the city. I usually avoid these chains like the plague but I have to own up to occasionally buying a pint of “Ben and Jerry’s” at Target when it is five dollars. The price is too good to pass up, but everytime I make this choice instead of going to a local ice cream shop I support a corporation with a vast amount of resources and connections and the ability to drive local businesses out of the neighborhood.

Overall, the future is not looking very bright. Some hope lies in the willingness of shoppers and storeowners to work with each other. This can be difficult as many people, especially immigrants, are distrustful of the government (rightly so) and sometimes each other. Perhaps if the BID (business improvement district) focused more on the preservation of local landmark businesses instead of trying to transform a neighborhood into the next Orchard Street, the “authenticity” of NYC would not disappear so quickly.

Local shopping streets are usually the face of a neighborhood. Local shopping streets some see as a relic of a past age that has been made obsolete with the advancement of technology and the growing popularity of online shopping. With the forces of gentrification in full swing and more and more ethnic communities being forced out due to gentrification many local shops have since followed suit and have closed down. While more and more local businesses close down, big chain stores have been expanding. While these big chain stores offer their customers more convenience and lower prices local customers feel a sense of lose with this change.

In Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, the authors state “ When local shops change from one type to another, longtime residents and user experience a wrenching sense of loss. They have lost their “moral ownership” of the street, a sense of belonging that goes beyond legal property rights, and is based on a deep identification with culture of the space”. Local long time customers feel comfortable in their local shops because its all they know and when they see the local shops they care for so deeply being taken away and the changing neighborhood, they feel as though they are being pushed out of their own city. The city their parents and grandparents grew up in and they are being forced out and replaced.

I personally don’t feel that local businesses will not die out because they offer something that chain stores and online shopping don’t and that is human interaction. I believe with local businesses lagging far behind the chain store’s in terms of adapting and applying new technology they have lost a lot of business. However with the increasing technological proficiency of each new generation local businesses will adapt to the new technology and gain a lot of ground. Especially because they actually care about there customers and their customers care about them. While technology continues to advance and destroy the normal person-to-person interactions that permeated our society I believe local businesses become a bastion for human social interaction.

In the past, local shopping streets have always been epicenters of every neighborhood. It was where people went for their everyday needs and it was where people socialized, whether it was just a good morning to an acquaintance met in a local cafe or talking about the weekly gossip with a friend while browsing over the fruit at a grocery store. Shopping streets were not just places where people ran their errands and went home. Local shopping streets “bring together in one compact physical space the networks of social, economic, and cultural exchange created every day by store owners, their employees, shoppers, and local residents” (Zukin, page 4). They are usually safe places where people can interact and feel at home with the people of their neighborhood and are not excluding of outsiders. It’s also usually eco-friendly, with shops being close to residents’ homes and allowing them to walk or bike through the market place and carry their bags home.

The types of stores on local shopping streets usually indicates the class of people that live in the area. Working class neighborhoods usually has small immigrant-owned shops with bright displays and affordable merchandise at low prices to cater to the people who live there while higher end neighborhoods will have more upscale and trendy stores with merchandise of higher prices that entices the more affluent. Changing storefronts is usually a good indicator of gentrification.

Change on local shopping streets is almost always inevitable. Local shopping streets can go through the process of ethnic succession. When a group of one ethnicity starts moving out of a neighborhood, they take their goods with them, leaving the space to the new group of a certain ethnicity that moves in after them, just as the Russian and Eastern European Jews did when the earlier German immigrants moved out of the neighborhood in the Lower East Side. A new ethnic group moving into a neighborhood with stores that represent their ethnicity can also push out a different ethnic group. However, just as you’ve mention in your book, Professor Zukin, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, neighborhoods retain their ethnicity and their charm, such as New York’s Little Italy and Chinatown.

In a similar process, local shopping streets can change through gentrification. As more upscale stores open in a neighborhood, more affluent people are attracted to the area, thus allowing the rents to rise and forcing small shopkeepers to close their stores because they cannot afford to pay the rent to keep their stores open anymore. These shopkeepers have to move their businesses to a different neighborhood with lower rent prices while more upscale stores move into the neighborhood, making the neighborhood more upscale and allowing gentrification to continue.

Just as Professor Zukin wrote in her book, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, the stability of the local shopping streets depends on the supply chains that bring merchandise to the stores, the demographics of the neighborhood, laws and policies of the state, and media image contributing to a street’s “brand”. A disruption in any one of these can lead to store closings and new store openings, thus changing the local shopping streets. Technological innovation such as online commerce and retail chains has a major impact in all of these aspects. Although there can be some benefits to shopkeepers such as good online reviews bringing in new customers and using technology to manage their inventory, technological innovation has many downsides for small shopkeepers. The ability of resident’s to get all their needs online diminishes the need for many neighborhood stores. Instead of walking over to get a newspaper from a corner newsstand, people can get the news online in their own homes. With huge online clothing retailers, people don’t need to go to clothing stores and can have clothes shipped to their doors. Some grocery stores allow you to order online or call in an order for groceries and have it delivered to your door without even having to leave your house. People don’t have to get their needs locally anymore either. You can order what you want from overseas online and have it shipped to you in a couple of days. One of the benefits of people going to local shopping streets is that the money stays in city. However, with all of this technological innovation, money is leaving the country and going elsewhere to different countries supplying the merchandise. This is a big problem for America that gets a lot of its merchandise from industrial countries like China.

Overall, online retailers who work out of huge warehouses of merchandise can really have negative effects on local shopping centers, especially small mom-and-pop stores. In this day and age, people are having less human interaction and more screen-time. I think that many retailers may have to start moving some of their business online if they want to keep up with the fast-moving, tech-based generation. Those memories of going to a familiar shopping street and feeling at home with shoppers and shopkeepers who know their customers by face if not by name may become just that: memories, a thing of the past.

It is difficult to say that gentrification is evitable because the demographics and the cultural and social makeup of a neighborhood is dynamically changing. It may first begin with a group of immigrants starting up a store in a low-income community, both benefiting by lower rents and catering to working class shoppers. As time goes by owners will have children, who will then grow up and climb the social ladder by going to colleges. As children leave, owners have no one else who can take over and the ethnic cluster of parents shops will disappear. Then another ethnic immigrant groups succeed the previous group, creating a different ethnic cluster. However, in recent years, as mentioned in Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, the authors highlight a trend called “super-diversity.” Many neighborhoods no longer cater to the specific group of ethnic community, rather the local shopping street, both shop owners, and its customers, is made up of a diverse group of mostly immigrant individuals. As the neighborhood become more diverse, artist, writers, and other hipsters are attracted to such community. Migration of these groups of people effectively causes development of “Art galleries, boutiques, and cafes,” the ABSs of gentrification as noted in Professor Zukin’s book.
Local shopping streets provide a natural community center for nearby residents, engaging in social interactions as they shop. Nearby stores also provide a convenient place to quickly get things they need either by a walk or bicycle. Most things the residents need – Grocery, dry cleaners, hair salons – are all within minutes away from the residents’ home. However, due to technology, people are more willing to buy cheaper goods from elsewhere with more variety. With the development of e-commerce, such as Amazon, people can order goods that their local shopping stores do not have. With cars, some people are willing to drive to chain retail stores that offer goods that are cheaper prices than their local stores. New York, with its many crowded streets, helped slow down the development of large chains stores because these needed routes for trucks. It was also because New Yorkers lived in smaller apartments with smaller refrigerators that didn’t require bulk purchase for weekly or monthly stock up. But still, large chain stores started making its way into New York City, starting with Kmart and Target. Many large discount chain stores like Target also allow “one-stop shopping” where customers can shop for grocery, school and office supplies, clothes, furniture, and electronics all at once. Whereas individual small stores require their customers to shop regularly, chain stores can afford some loss, buffered by other stores in its chain, as long as they can attract few customers away from local stores. In doing so, slowly but eventually local stores cannot sustain without the few customers and ends up closing down.

The recent wave of gentrification that has been impacting Brooklyn is not something new to New York or any city. Cities always change. Prosperous cities draw in many immigrants. Immigrants begin making up larger portions of neighborhoods. Current residents feel that their culture and livelihood is being displaced, resulting in them leaving and also causing property values to plummet. Immigrants dominate their respective neighborhoods. Eventually, new immigrants chasing opportunity come in and begin displacing the now entrenched immigrant populations. Decades pass and then eventually, property values plummet so much that it begins attracting hipsters, students, and artists. Hipsters, students, and artists start gentrifying their places of residence. This attracts higher-income residents, raising property values and threatening to displace the immigrants. Though seemingly local in nature, the cycle is part of a much larger global economic cycle that pushes immigrants to certain parts of the world in search of stability and that drives investors to coalesce around certain parts of the world for financial opportunity. Currently, New York City is attracting both large immigration and large gentrification. These conflicting movements are distinguishing themselves in interesting ways.

What is interesting is how differently the movements of the immigrants and the wealthy propagate themselves in cities. As the article Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, puts it: immigrants who come from the Global South populate lower-income neighborhoods while immigrants who come from the Global North populate higher-income neighborhoods. The Global South tends to open businesses built on low-prices and a distinctly ethnic feel, which changes depending on the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. The Global North tends to open businesses built on high prices and a more homogenized, which is shown in the fact that upscale neighborhoods tend to be similar all around the world. As the article points out, ABCs, or art galleries, boutiques, and cafes, tend to be widespread in Global North neighborhoods.

One can say the Global North is a natural result of globalization and is a representation of multiple cultures, which is why the style is so similar across many borders. However, there is an argument that the Global South better represents globalization in that shops tend to reflect the ethnic character of not only the owner, but the neighborhood and the area around it. For example: the article points out the sandwiches at Ali’s roti shop, which are halal meat wrapped in Indian flat bread, brought to the Caribbean by East Indian migrants. Global South’s shopping streets are unique in each neighborhood, but have their own twists in that they are heavily influenced by their environments. The Global North, on the other hand, tends to force its culture upon places, replacing environments rather than embracing them.

What is also interesting is the somewhat differing and somewhat similar views that both the Global North and the Global South have for the rise of national chain stores. The Global North tends to see these stores as signs of decline since they tend to cater to all income classes, including those with lower income. The rise of these stores in neighborhoods of the Global South tend to be seen as signs of improvement yet at the same time they threaten the livelihood of small businesses who cannot compete with the pricing of the chain stores. The labor practices of these stores tend to be questionable. As a result of these many factors, there is fierce opposition to the proliferation of chain stores in New York from both sides of the aisle. Online stores face similar scrutiny from both sides. Online stores are similar to chain stores in that they typically cater to all incomes for their low prices. Thus, they are looked down upon by the North and are feared by the South. Though the North are generally more accepting of online stores. Online stores are even worse in that they have practically the same negative effects that physical chain stores do just without any possible social interaction.

Overall, I believe change to our shopping streets is inevitable as change to our cities is inevitable. The rise of online stores and more homogenized shopping districts is both unifying the world and isolating those who are not in tune with change.

That the phenomenal world is a constant state of becoming is prima facie– we may reasonably assume that shopping streets will in fact change. However, once we have accepted that shopping streets WILL change, it remains to argue how they will change. In the reading, a historical narrative is built in which local shopping streets have recently restructured due to forces of globalization and gentrification. Districts which were once bastions of ethnic homogeneity have become fragmented and diverse as new, more cosmopolitan immigrants of various backgrounds take up residence wherever it is convenient for them to do so– increasing sophistication in communication and transportation technologies has allowed these prospective residents to be freer in their choice of neighborhood and workplace, and contemporary neighborhood and business demographics reflect this shift. Due to these same technological factors, people have become less reliant on their local communities, further increasing the drive to locate based on pragmatism rather than the consideration of self-same sympathies. This population reshuffling directly affects the businesses in any given neighborhood as new interests develop and capture real estate and old, obsolete business is pushed out. Additionally, as new economic and cultural classes develop and expand, notably the Hipster class, neighborhoods must change to accommodate new ways of living and levels of wealth.

Globalization and Gentrification aside, the continual rise of the digital on-demand market and superstore developments put additional pressures on local businesses, as local services become less desirable in comparison to the former, and viewed as limited in comparison with the latter. Thus, unless local businesses can be savvy enough to appeal to an ever-shifting populace and provide unique services, most will drown and sink amidst a sea of alternative, flashier options.

Based upon current trends, the immediate future of the New York shopping district will entail the dismantlement of local stores in favor of economically and politically powerful superstores, and the dissolution of local service businesses in favor of specialized luxury service businesses and on-demand digital service businesses. In an increasingly connected world, people no longer crave direct community as strongly as they once did, and many (including myself) may indeed prefer impersonal yet reliable and efficient shopping experiences over more personal, unreliable, and ambiguous transactions. It may be tempting to decry this trend as a loss of humanity, yet one must consider the increase in time and cost efficiency, quality control, and innovation as counterpoints worthy of consideration. Additionally, though nostalgia and tradition have their appeal, it is simply the case that the modern human has different and less tribal needs than his predecessors, and thus to insist upon values inconsistent with the current zeitgeist is needlessly atavistic.