Black Garnet Books Builds Inclusion into Its St. Paul Bookstore
Ever since Dionne Sims decided to create Minnesota’s only Black-owned bookstore, she has considered what an inclusive, accessible and welcoming business should be.
Tag Archives: small businesses
Ideas to help small businesses bloom in Saint Paul
[This post first appeared on the blog The Smallest Cog, a bike shop in downtown Saint Paul that recently closed after a robbery. You can read more about why they shut their doors here.] As we close out our second season in the business we have been reflecting on who we are, what our niche […]
National Links: Curb Management Costing Cities Billions
Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes […]
Cars are Tragedy not a Boon for Small Businesses
I’ve been going past the red brick triangular building at West 7th and Leech for most of my life, and for pretty much the whole time, it’s been a dilapidated, sad place. For a while in the early 2000s, the building housed a marginal coffee shop. It was once one of many such cafés in […]
Map Monday: A Chain Retail View of Saint Paul’s Ford Site
Here’s a map that comes from the real estate marketing packet for Saint Paul’s famous Ford Site, the 100+ acre former truck factory in Highland. It shows the “retail” near the site, using logos and arrows. For one thing, this map shows how many Paneras and Targets are nearby. But on top of that, the […]
Chart of the Day: Metro Restaurant Trends, Chains versus Locals
Via Slate, Yelp has some fun new charts that break down restaurant ranking data according to type of establishment. They chart broad trends over time that show online reviewers are more and more likely to be critical of chain restaurants and positive about local or independent restaurants. Here’s are the Twin Cities trendlines: The point […]
Podcast #90 – Talking West Saint Paul with City Council Candidate John Justen
Here’s new podcast for you discussing the opposite side of the Metro area from the previous episode. This week’s podcast is a conversation with John Justen, a father, small business owner, and resident of West Saint Paul who is running for city council in that suburban city of 20,000 on the north edge of Dakota County. John and I sat down at […]
Chart of the Day: Small Business Turnover vs. Gentrification in New York City
From City Observatory, here’s an interesting chart ripped from a study about small business turnover and gentrification in New York City. It compares the number of businesses that close, go vacant, or are replaced with new businesses in gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods (gentrifying neighborhoods were defined as meeting a certain change in income within a census tract). Here’s […]
Nice Ride and the Birchwood Exception
Please donate to streets.mn for the “streets to the max” day! Thank you for your support. Note: This post is part of the streets.mn/Nice Ride crowdsource conversation, a series of crowdsourced looks at how to expand or improve Nice Ride planning.Check out the rest here. One of the cooler facts that I learned from the recently […]