Wouldn’t it be better to have the lights on?
Like many families ours has a number of relatives whose lineage exists outside of the clan’s bloodlines. These “aunts, uncles, and grandparents” are universally long-term friends who earned their position through caring good works and support when it really counted. One of my childhood favorites was an elderly gentleman, whom I knew as Pop Whistler.
Like most of their peers, Mom and Dad barely managed to keep food on the table during the early years of the Great Depression. Dad worked numerous seasonal jobs to meet his family’s needs. Eventually the folks tired of the day-to-day nature of their existence. Realizing they needed to make some basic changes in their family’s ongoing operational cycle, Mom and Dad started looking for opportunity outside of their current box.
Legend has it that Mom filled a paper sack with enough sandwiches to sustain Dad through a five-day reconnaissance trip. He “rode the rails” from Butte to Missoula. While there he strolled through the town’s business district and some of its residential areas; and someplace along the way he met Pop Whistler.
Pop was managing properties of the defunct Savage National Bank at the time. Dad, the guy without a lot of money, was able to strike a favorable rental deal for a couple of rooms on the second story of the Higgins Block with his new acquaintance. Bam LaCombe’s business plan included the idea that his family would live in one room of an upstairs apartment while starting a business in the other. Six years later his business was located in the building’s prime location. By 1943 the LaCombe’s were living the “American Dream.”
So what the heck does this “nice story” have to do with either the city of Spokane Valley or any of its neighboring communities?
Like many of you, I often ask, “Why does our community’s commercial façade more closely resemble the smile of a jack-o’-lantern than the grin of a teenager who’s recently completed orthodontia?” What’s the problem? Are today’s entrepreneurs, driven away by the tax load related to doing business in Washington, or does part of the blame lie elsewhere?
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that one of the biggest start-up costs in any business venture, and a major monthly expense thereafter, is rent. Pop Whistler wisely chose to steeply discount rent on the folks’ first storefront. In doing so he recruited someone who would turn some lights on in his nearly abandoned building while gaining a loyal tenant, who eventually became a prosperous employer within his community.
We know that there are more than a hundred empty store fronts scattered along the Valley’s major thoroughfares. Many of those slots, like the abandoned Home Base site at Farr and Sprague, have been vacant for years, and some have become dilapidated, weed-infested eyesores.
Recent conversations within my small circle of friends have led me to believe that budding entrepreneurs are driven away from this marketplace because it simply costs too much to rent a storefront. You have to sell a lot of gizmo’s or thingamabobs if you hope to pay $4,000 to $7,000 a month in rent.
I know of three businessmen who, in the last 18 months, simply gave up the ghost and walked away when confronted with those numbers. And incidentally, the slots they either occupied, or bid on, are still empty today.
When I roll these facts around in my head, they make no sense. How can individuals, or corporations who own commercial properties, make their bottom lines work if they receive no income from a significant portion of their inventory? I know their economic realities are different than mine. But, it seems to me that it would make good business sense to fill the open slots, even if they have to cut projected revenue flows to do so.
I suspect some property owners/managers are saying, “Nonsense!” about now. But, I think Pop Whistler probably would have responded to their statement by saying, “A bird in hand is worth much more than one flitting around in the bush!”
Me? I’d just like to see someone turn on some lights!