How Phoenix Became an Unlikely Champion of Local Business (Episode 60)

Under Kimber’s leadership Local First Arizona has grown to a membership of more than 3,000 independent businesses across the state. Kimber herself is an entrepreneur and she’s also a community development specialist who works to cultivate strong, self-reliant communities and inspire a higher quality of life for people across Arizona.

Kimber, welcome to Building Local Power.

I think it’s important to understand that as we grew, the chain model, the model of chain store was actually also hitting its stride. They didn’t have to fight any brand loyalty that was already here. They could just come on, set up shop and people would support them, particularly if they were coming from another area that we had a lot of transplants from. You could take a company like Culver’s that was popular in Chicago, they’d set up shop here, and there’s a bazillion people from Illinois that would immediately flood their stores because the people that are living here that came from Illinois, they don’t put their roots here, they want to bring Illinois with them. And that shows in everything from their habits in terms of commerce to the landscaping choices that they have. They brought their grass and their pine trees with them or oak trees or other such things that are not native to the desert here.

I think that the first thing to contextualize in Arizona is that it’s taken us a minute to figure out who we are because everybody moved here and tried to convince us who we were, and there weren’t enough local Arizonans to say, “No, that’s not who we are. This is who we are.”

When we started Local First Arizona it really resonated with people. They went, “Yeah, wait a minute. You’re right. There are local businesses here and they don’t have a voice and they’re being overrun by chain stores. Let us link arms and do this.”

I think it catches people off guard how large we’ve grown, but really I think it was a matter of resonating with enough people that we really needed it. You don’t need to go to New York City per se and say support local businesses because people are already doing that by and large. Now they’re just facing an influx of change now, but we already went through all of that and now the local restaurant scene is striving over the chain … We’re seeing chain restaurants close left and right.

We’re also seeing banks cut off capital in rural areas at an alarmingly high rate. When the last bank pulls out of a small town, it’s hard for that small town to survive. This is an issue we’ve been drawing attention to, and I think that it’s one of those sleeping giant issues that everybody should be moving their money into local credit unions or community controlled banks, that it’s just sort of like keeping an eye on your money. You need to know where it is and where it’s invested. If you have it in one of those three big banks, then frankly you have no idea where it’s invested and somebody’s making money off of you that could be in a very non-values aligned manner.

Tell me a little bit about like as you’ve been delivering this message about local banking, have you gotten a response from that? Have you seen anything shift in that work?

We also convinced the city of Tucson to move about $30 million. Then I think we’ve tracked almost 100 businesses that have moved their money and then countless individuals. We’ve been very excited about the impact that we’re having.

One of the things that we found and I know that you found is that land use is really critical to the health of local businesses, like how your planning and zoning works, what kind of built environment you’re creating has everything to do with whether you’re creating opportunity for local entrepreneurs or room for chains to take over everything.

I guess just having visited Phoenix and other parts of Arizona, it seems like a place where there’s been not a lot of attention to having good zoning for a long time, and I think you’ve sort of alluded to this in the beginning when you were talking about this is a state that really has grown up around the car and not around having walkable places.

Tell me a little bit about working on the issue of land use and whether you’re seeing any shifts in movement in Arizona?

The shifts that we made with the adaptive reuse program here in Phoenix has led to what is really today the most progressive adaptive reuse program in the country where it spans city, all 500 square miles of the city of Phoenix, any building up to 100,000 square feet, so that’s going to be a big box size building, and anything that was built before 1990. It is an extensive program, anybody can apply to go through it, and it’s just slightly different process that allows more tolerance for  older components to a building that may be safe for humans … I mean, we’re not talking about endangering life safety. Things in regular building code, maybe more rigidly interpreted and therefore more cumbersome to get a certificate of occupancy. It’s been a wild ride. It’s been hugely successful. I would credit those shifts in policy, to why we now have 100, 125 new, small businesses, have opened in our city center, that we’re formally in a blighted or abandoned buildings.

Rather than tear those buildings down and build large new develops, we’ve been able to make the case that protecting the older building stock is a better economic development strategy. I do wanna just shout out, Preservation Green Lab did a fantastic study that can be useful for your listeners called, Older, Smaller, Better. If you just Google Older, Smaller, Better, you can read the report. It measures a wide variety, jobs per block are higher in places that protected their older building stock.

Small business owned by people of colors, there’s a bunch of measureables there that make an economic case for protecting older building stock and zoning that doesn’t allow enormous footprints, to come in, abandoning alleys and dominating entire blocks, because that’s not how to create the most jobs.

We’ll also link to some materials about Phoenix as adaptive reuse program, which has been just hugely successful. I mean, that’s just terrific to hear that 125 businesses have been able to start up in buildings that were previously derelict, because the city has stepped in and made that easier to do. I mean, that’s … It seems like a very … It’s kind of, a low hanging fruit, and yet the results of it have been really terrific.

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We’ve been talking some about policy areas that are really abut leveling the playing field, like making sure that local businesses have access to capital the same way that big businesses do, making sure that land use policies are actually creating the kind of build environment that works for local entrepreneurs. I wanna turn a little bit to this question of, okay, in addition to leveling the playing field, how do cities do further? How do they actually use their policy tools to grow local businesses, to really actively promote and develop a different kind of economy?

One of the places I wanna talk about is procurement. It’s really interesting. As some of our listeners know, back in July, we released a report about this national contract that Amazon has secured to supply cities and school districts across the country with things like office supplies and classroom supplies. Our report details a lot of the problems in that contract. We learned that about 1500 local governments have already signed on to that deal, and are shifting their purchasing increasingly to Amazon.

What was interesting is that we pulled data on a bunch of different cities as we were doing that report, looking at how much are different cities spending with Amazon. We found that Phoenix basically spends no money with Amazon. That really stood out in the list of cities. How is it that Phoenix has managed to avoid purchasing on Amazon. Tell us a little bit about how the city approaches its procurement.

They’re not technically preferencing the Arizona companies, they’re just using a process where only the Arizona businesses get to bid on those particular contracts. The only way it will go to a national full bid is if they don’t get at least three competitive bids on any particular item they’re sourcing. I think having those relationships with city staff, has been one key thing that has helped us stay on track.

Also, reminding the elected officials who come and go. City staff might there 30 years, whereas the elected official is gonna come and go every eight years, or four years, depending. It’s important to engage them both. It’s important to give credit to city staff, when they make smart decisions like this. I was mentioning to you earlier, we sent thank you cards to all of, the decision makers after your study came out, because they really made us shine. They made us the smart city that we are, which is that no, we aren’t going to put our money into a company that extracts wealth from our community. We are going to invest in the companies that are here investing in our future together, with a shared vision. We’re very proud of that.

I think that the procurement process in its first year, was significantly smaller than it is today. I think in year one, we did an additional 22 million dollars worth of business locally. I don’t have the latest statistics, but it’s significantly higher than that. We host doing business with the city, study sessions, two times a year. We had 170 businesses come out to the last one. They can ask questions. We had about six or eight city staff there, to answer questions and to walk people through the process of getting registered and helping them understand how to watch for and reply on bids. It’s been a great experience. We think that … We’re very proud of the city and the decisions that they’re making.

As part of that, we created a business accelerator program called, Fuerza Local. That’s F-U-E-R-Z-E-A, Fuerza Local. That is a Spanish Business Accelerator program, that it’s a six months to get through the program. They have to come to class one night a week. They learn not only about how to run stronger, more efficient businesses, and they’re all small business owners already when they start the program. In addition to getting the business curriculum, they need to build better businesses.

They also have a financial literacy component, that help them gain access to fair market capital. Like many states, we have a crisis of having a huge number of predatory lenders here, like check cashing places, and title loan places, that are feasting and victimizing our Latino population through Spanish language advertising and promotion. The average interest rate our small businesses, that come through this program are paying at the start of the program is 48%.

So our program takes a … It’s called a money pool, or in certain parts of the world it might be called a tanda or a cundina. It is a model that families have used for centuries to save money together without paying interest. We had digitized that in partnership with a local company called eMoneyPool, and we put our students in pods of 12 people. They each make payments into the money pool each month with a goal of saving a $1000 over six months. So they make those payments together and all of them get their money back out of it. At the end of the six months, they’ve all saved $1000. We, through our foundation, we match them at $1000, so now they have $2000 and an updated business plan. Many of them have a business plan for the first time of how they’re going to invest that money.

But what’s most important about this is we take their payments and report them to the credit bureau Experian, so when they graduate they have a credit history. We have a relationship with two credit unions that will accept that certificate of completion and six months of credit history in lieu of any other background at all. That’s all they need to access a $2500 line of credit to get them started.

We really believe strongly in this program. We had over 400 graduates who have gone on to create over 500 jobs in a community. We just have some amazing success stories where people just needed a fair deal and an opportunity to learn so that they can be more competitive in their business. So it’s a wonderful program and it’s really changing the face of some of our more diverse communities of color here in this area.

In a three year period, she went from having one failing home-based business to having six full-time employees. It’s quite remarkable when you see somebody that would just needed to be able to learn in their primary language. She speaks English, but she learned better in Spanish. And be given an opportunity to access capital at a fair market rate, and it just transformed her entire life.

But also, Stacy, the honest to God truth is that I bought my building 15 years ago, and that has enabled me to keep my cost down. I’ve been able to fight the gentrification that’s occurred around me by simply owning my own property. So I want to help other small businesses figure out how they can buy their buildings as well. So while the rents of all my neighbors have gone up two and three times, I’m still there with my mortgage and my tiny little building. I mean, my building is 1000 square feet, and it’s sort of like a little engine that could. But that’s a very real reason for why we’ve been able to stay this long. We’re trying to figure out how to get more small independent businesses to be able to buy their buildings.

As we’re wrapping up today, I think one of the last things I want to ask you about is you went from being an entrepreneur to being a community organizer and a policy advocate. You’ve grown Local First Arizona into this large, vibrant organization with a lot that’s going on, and you’ve changed a lot of policies in the state and within Phoenix and other communities. I’m curious what kinds of advice you would have for people who want to do this in their state. What is it that you’ve learned along the way that you wish you knew when you started?

People, you lose them if you’re gonna constantly talk about big, huge systems change things because it seems overwhelming. What we need to do is show them individual people who are succeeding, how they’re succeeding, and then tie it back to an action that we’re asking them to do. The reason this guy could meet with this bank president is because the community bank is only chartered locally, so we need to get more money to that guy so he can lend to more people just like Jim, or whatever.

That is really the secret sauce. It’s giving it to people in a way that they can relate to it.

If anybody is pretending to do good in a community while they’re doing harm in the community at the same time, we need to hold them accountable for that. We can’t just rush to support the companies that offer free yoga on Tuesdays for all their employees while their money is invested in coal, and oil, and other extracted economies somewhere else. So he’s really encouraging big picture thinking and accountability, and I just love the book. Highly recommend it.