Rolled up

My newspaper did not arrive at the top of my driveway this morning. I hope that Monica, who delivers it, is doing OK. She has had a hard few last years, wrestling with cancer herself after losing a sister to it and a brother to either it or something else. To top it off, her mom passed away recently, having lived a pretty full life.

On Friday I had lunch with Alberto, an old friend from Yale. He had been a Poli Sci grad student there but deigned to hang out and party with some of us younger folx. He hails from Guatemala but has had a pretty global life and splits time now between Rome and Brooklyn. We were talking about the state of the world and politics and US vs Europe in terms of the fabric of life, pluses and minuses. The things one talks about. I broached my thesis that one of the underdiscussed and perhaps underappreciated factors in the emptying of the countryside and the rise of populism everywhere has been the rise of corporatism in almost everything and the way that has made it so difficult to be a small businessperson in the country.

Far from disagreeing, Alberto said that he thought it wasn't a phenomenon unique to the country but was equally true of the city. That the city was increasingly hollowed out and wiped clean of businesses run by small proprietors in favor of chains.

I can totally see this, and how sad it is to see the Jane Jacobs idyll of the urban neighborhood get scrubbed out. There is a simple capital maintenance aspect to it, which is illuminated by some recent dynamics on the main block of Franklin St here in Chapel Hill. The old Spanky's space got taken over by the chicken tenders and fries chain Raising Cane because the 1910s era building needed a lot of upfitting (probably to come up to code) and only a chain had deep enough pockets to undertake the work and have the patience for it to pay out. The building had been owned by the 411 Restaurant Group since the 70s and had likely been able to take advantage of some grandfathering of compliance (bringing bathrooms up to ADA standards, for instance). Meanwhile, down the block, Linda's struggles to raise enough money to do some upgrades and has started a GoFundMe to fill some of the gaps. So there is a regulatory component to this too. Higher compliance costs make it harder for small businesses to compete.

Five or six years back I had coffee in NYC with Katja, whom I had met in '95-96 when she came to Columbia on a Fulbright. A Kievan Jew, she want to college in Tartu, Estonia and then grad school in Moscow. When I was there for my dissertation in 97-98, we hung out, including a memorable excursion up the Moscow River to some island where Mary and I had to take separate boats because of the crush of people boarding and Katja took care of Mary while I waited with Kirill for the next boat. Katja eventually married a nice German guy, moved to Berlin, won a major prize for her first novel written in German and then moved to Tbilisi. At least until Putin invaded, it all seemed pretty glamorous to me. But when I told her I lived in my hometown and hung out with people i had known since I was a small child, she was incredibly jealous. And it's true, I'm incredibly fortunate to live in a place where it's still possible to have these kinds of relationships. Even though the inexorable rise of chains (and the cost of real estate) even here in Chapel Hill makes them harder to imagine going forward.