36: Turn the soil

People buying stuff near constantly and when they stop for even a few weeks things start to crumble

May 16, 2020

Still Life with a Golden Goblet, Pieter de Ring, 1635-1650

It really struck me just how fragile capitalism is, in this particular go round of economic meltdown at least, when the Cheesecake Factory went on a rent strike. Here you had a company with 294 restaurants and some 40,000 employees, with a time-honored, 50-year legacy of stuffing carbohydrates into people, and on March 23—like two weeks into the pandemic—the company told its landlords well we are sorry but we cannot pay our rent, extenuating circumstances, you understand. Because, they explained, our entire existence is predicated on people constantly eating cheesecake and if there is a break in that eating of cheesecake for a mere two weeks we basically have zero money and can’t even keep these lights on.

The company laid off thousands of workers who then were presumably unable to pay their own rents (we know from all the folk songs what happens to a town when the local factory closes down). Those employees—many likely immigrants ineligible for government aid—had far fewer backup options than the Cheesecake Factory, which ended up having a $90 million line of credit and then a $200 million capital investment that showed up after the news spread. So who knows how dire the company’s situation ever really was, at the risk of questioning the integrity of the Cheesecake Factory.

But the whole affair illustrates rather well the unending need for a massive churn of spending, lest the wheels come off of this entire operation, that is so chilling during times of economic downturn. For all the talk of the power of the American economy, it makes you wonder how sturdy of a system we created when it is based on people just buying stuff near constantly and then when they have to stop for even a few weeks, things start to crumble.

Aside from the resulting precarity for workers, it does feel like a lot of this stuff that evaporates when spending grinds to a halt was maybe not necessary in the first place, because otherwise I don’t know that we’d really need a $1.7 trillion marketing industry. But the mass closure of businesses is unfortunately about much more than the loss of a mall restaurant that a coastal elite like me can so easily, and let’s be honest, cheaply ridicule. Because when the mechanisms that keep our institutions going turn out to be quite delicate, it also means we just as quickly lose some of our most precious community resources.

Where I live in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston, we’re experiencing this in our own business district, as is pretty much every community. Roslindale Village had become this thriving little center with some of the best restaurants in the city, a small independent grocery store, cute little shops. Recently a coffee shop/bar combo opened up that had become a bustling, essential meeting place for local politics, nonprofits, teachers, artists, and on any given day you’d hear at least three languages spoken at its tables. The community fought hard since the 90s to turn the square around—with the help of government grants—and has benefited from both local volunteering and crowdfunded improvement projects.

But right now, over half the businesses there have at least temporarily closed their doors, with some essential stores and restaurant takeout keeping the pulse going. Like a lot of main street business associations, ours has been running fundraisers, providing financial assistance to its struggling members. But who knows which businesses are going to survive. For all of the country’s professed adoration of the scrappy small business, we don’t seem to be doing a very good job of supporting them, with some 100,000 of them closing for good since the pandemic began.

There are some heartening local success stories. Down the road in Jamaica Plain, a beloved independent, feminist bookstore called Papercuts, which hosts readings and events and runs its own small press, raised nearly $60,000 to help cover its costs, which residents were more than happy to donate.

But not every neighborhood is so fortunate to have that kind of private wealth that it can donate to sustain its institutions. Columnist Jeneé Osterheldt recently reported for the Globe that the relatively small number of Black-owned restaurants in the city are facing imminent shutdown. Government relief is notoriously difficult to secure for any business, and those owned by immigrants, Black people, and other people of color struggle to secure loans, liquor licenses, and contracts even absent a health crisis or recession. As Osterheldt points out, these are more than just places where people buy things. They host events to celebrate the community’s teachers, hold gatherings for professionals of color, organize food banks to feed the homeless. “This is often where Black Boston builds, networks, and thrives.”

I think everyone has felt the weight of the loss of such institutions in their own communities, even if it’s just the closure of a local bar. We can feel in our bones that it’s more than one owner’s personal financial enterprise going away, that lots of people have built it into more than a place where money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Two Irish bars in Jamaica Plain have closed in recent years for financial reasons, and both were home to long traditions of community and political organizing. When it was announced this month that after 44 years, bar and rock club Great Scott could not cover its rent, the punk community and young people in general (and also not so young people ahem) were devastated that this scene staple was going away, but you know, too bad so sad.

A slightly different, but trust me it is related example, the comics industry has come to rely on a single distribution company, Diamond, which effectively operates as a monopoly. When it abruptly halted operations it sent an entire creative field into a tailspin. The entire news media is a macro example of something we’ve all come to rely on that lives and dies based on an ill-fitting profit-seeking model.

I guess what I’m getting at is that, though consumer cash flow allowed all of these institutions to take root, it just seems deeply wrong to me that something as fickle as that can bring them to their knees, sometimes after decades, in a matter of months or weeks. We have to be able to do better than this, and the compounding crises of the era, especially, demand it.

One of my favorite things I ever covered was this organization serving Boston’s neighborhoods of color, called the Boston Ujima Project, which is kind of hard to summarize succinctly, but I tried to do it already so here, this is what I said:

At its core, Ujima is a place-based investment fund, controlled democratically by community members to support businesses, real estate and infrastructure projects that would otherwise struggle to find financing. It also layers philanthropy with other forms of capital to mitigate risk and to make it easier for working-class and local people to invest in the fund themselves. Beyond investing, Ujima organizes the community in support of its projects and other social justice campaigns.

So a bunch of people in the neighborhood get together in a big room and collectively hear proposals for businesses that will serve the community, and decide what to back. It completely upends the risks and incentives of most investment capital in order to fund projects that would otherwise struggle to get off the ground and then stay open, and acts as an organizing platform for broader change.

“I think we're trying to propose what a new economy could look like,” Lucas Turner-Owens, fund manager for Boston Ujima Project told me at the time. But you should really go read it not just because it is my article but because it is a fascinating undertaking that has become a model for other others like it popping up elsewhere.

I think folks at places like the Ujima Project would be the first to tell you they don’t have this all figured out, but they are trying to imagine a better system, stealing fragments of an old one we know is broken. I particularly like something adrienne maree brown wrote on this topic in her book Emergent Strategy so here it is for the big finish:

I like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now. When Wheatley visited Detroit on a learning journey, she said systems built on greed eventually collapse on themselves, topple under their own top-heavy weight. Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt. It is time to turn capitalism into a fossil, time to turn the soil, turn to the horizon together.

Listening

Angelica Garcia is my new favorite.

F it let’s do another one

Jamie and I are both big podcast listeners and we used to do this fake weekly podcast by ourselves with no recording or audience that we called “Good Eps” in which we discussed our favorite podcast episodes from the week. On Fridays usually, it would always start, so you heard any good eps lately? And then we talk about podcast episodes. I guess when you think about it, two people talking and listening to each other talk is the purest distillation of the podcast medium. Honestly, we’ve had some pretty good eps of that show.

Now that as a couple we are never, ever apart, we still walk around the house sometimes with our separate earbuds in, listening to our podcasts, because our small but loyal audience demands that Good Eps continue even during these challenging times.

But you know what my favorite podcast is? Your podcast. Even if you don’t have one. If you had one, it would be my favorite. Keep those eps coming.

Tate

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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