Publisher’s Note — September 2007
Publisher’s Note — September 2007
Written by John Garrett Friday, 07 September 2007
Supporting business whether large or small
One weekend while visiting Houston, I noticed a long stretch of road that had retail center signs as far as the eye could see.
It had only been five years since my wife and I moved back to Austin from Houston, and I didn’t recognize a single one of these shopping centers. I wondered if people who lived in the area knew what businesses were around them. This is where the idea of our Community Shopping section, page 10, was born.
Many of us enjoy the conveniences that large retail chains bring us, but there’s also a thrill in shopping small, local and new businesses. Telling about the people behind the storefronts and explaining what their business has to offer is one of our core missions.
One shopping center we have written about – the Domain – has recently raised questions about how a city should balance recruiting large developers with tax incentives while keeping a competitive environment for small businesses. This isn’t an issue unique to Austin. Competition between Central Texas cities to gain new tax revenue has heated up in the last decade, despite a claim that everyone wins with “regionalism”.
As we look at the Arboretum in Community Shopping this month, it is interesting to think about what the Domain really brings to the city in tax revenues that it didn’t already have. Some of the stores (like St. Thomas and Victoria’s Secret) in the Domain simply changed addresses from the Arboretum. An argument has been made that these tax incentives were given to a project that wasn’t really needed.
If true, the argument that these tax incentives give unfair advantages to these retailers makes our mission of supporting local businesses even more important.
John P. Garrett
jgarrett@impactnews.com
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