In an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, LISC CEO Maurice Jones and program vice president Joseph Horiye describe how entrepreneurship is lifting a long-disinvested neighborhood. With LISC’s help, small businesses in the Bayview area of San Francisco are creating jobs, energy and opportunity for residents old and new—and offer a model for how to shrink the income gap.
Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Investments in small business revive whole neighborhoods
Photo courtesy of Yvonne’s Southern Sweets and Chloe Jackman Photography.
The Bay Area is well known as a mecca of innovation and opportunity. But it’s no secret that as the local economy has flourished in the years since the recession, opportunity — and the prosperity that can result — have not spread evenly.
We need development strategies and policies that empower existing residents and businesses to stay in the places they have long served and call home, such as the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. The Bayview is home to a close-knit African American community, but became known as a site of toxic dumping, entrenched poverty and crime, and marginalized from the dynamism of other parts of the city.
Businesspeople and property owners in the Bayview knew well what was needed. By listening closely to their ideas, the city of San Francisco, together with our organization, the Local Initiatives Support Corp., sought to revive the neighborhood’s Third Street business corridor. The Local Initiatives program connects entrepreneurs with capital, city services and technical assistance to get nascent enterprises off the ground, strengthen existing ones and recruit new ones to the area.
Without such development strategies, the trends of rising income inequality and poverty will have a lasting effect on the integrity of the whole Bay Area and the well-being and quality of life of residents. Areas with a more even distribution of wealth enjoy long-term economic growth, which, in turn, sparks more investments in education and other programs and services that allow families to climb the economic ladder.
We believe a key is investing in small businesses which, after all, employ nearly 7 million workers in California. Continue Reading[+]...