Squeezing the golden eggs out of the goose
South Congress is becoming a victim of its own success: fun stores like Terra Toys (which has been down there as long as I can remember) and Lone Star Illusions are losing their leases, presumably to make way for tenants that can pay usuriously high rents.
South Congress has, of course, become a happening area, especially with First Thursday. The landlords, no dummies they, see the high foot traffic, see storefronts being rented to trendy, expensive boutiques, and decide to cash in.
This will backfire. Squeeze the goose that laid the golden egg and you will kill it. I’ve seen this happen before.
I grew up in Lincoln Park, Chicago. When I was born, it was not a great neighborhood–not even a good neighborhood. It supported three kinds of businesses: gyros palaces (which had mysterious fires with great regularity), resale shops, and prostitution. Gradually, thanks to people like my parents moving in, the neighborhood was rehabilitated. Rents on Clark Street (the main commercial street in the neighborhood) rose and rose. By the time that my parents opened a shop on Clark in the early 90s, much of Clark Street’s retail space was owned by a handful of landlords; my parents’ landlord, Marvin Winkler, was greedy to the point of madness. He would rather leave a storefront sit empty for a year than lower his rents. He may have been an extreme case, but ultimately, the greed of the landlords was self-defeating. The rate of business failure was very high. Stores that were useful to local residents, like copy shops and cobblers, got priced out of existence (not that the residents could afford to shop in their own neighborhood anymore, as housing prices had also skyrocketed to the point where people spent all their income on rent). A large number of new business openings were poorly conceived nicknack shops run by people with no business acumen and less chance for commercial success.
South Congress today is successful because of the shops that are there today. There’s no magic pixie dust in the air there that creates success, it’s a vibe that those shops create that will not last long beyond their absence. The landlords owning the storefronts on SoCo can raise their rents to the point where only national chains can rent from them, at which point SoCo becomes a strip mall. Or where nicknack shops with clueless operators spring up and vanish like mushrooms after a summer shower.