With more demand for property and land in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, small businesses are being priced out. This year, during 97.9 the Hill’s annual Forum on The Hill series, FRANK Gallery, The Gathering Place and The Purple Bowl came in to talk about the stages of change they have experienced as a result.
Last March, FRANK Gallery left the University Place mall for a storefront in Carrboro. The gallery cited decreased foot traffic and building construction as reasons for leaving. In November, The Gathering Place narrowly avoided being forced to move out of its location on E. Rosemary Street for a proposed 12-story luxury condo building. This summer, The Purple Bowl will relocate to West Franklin Street, and Longfellow Real Estate Partners will start development for a new life sciences center and wet lab in its place.
Paula Gilland, the owner of The Purple Bowl, said the experiences of these three small businesses are part of a broader theme in Chapel Hill she believes need to be addressed.
“We definitely need to think about in our leadership and our town, how we are going to help these small businesses. We have some work to do as a community to build some structure around helping get through the inspections, permitting and health department relationship,” Gilland said.
For her, part of the solution involves tasking the town government with creating better channels of support for small businesses that are just starting out or need help navigating a move.
“We need to think about how we’re going to develop a concierge service for inspections and permitting because right now,” Gilland said, “you get one set of information from the town inspections opening a restaurant, then you hear [different things] from OWASA and the health department. So how can we get these groups to work together in a more effective way, in a time-effective way?”
She said she hopes a system would take some of the burden off of the town employees who are forced to tie up the loose ends.
The Gathering Place owner Joshua Goodsell said he thinks some of this aid could come in the form of an online packet, or a collection of helpful documents and recommendations for small business owners to easily access.
“Here’s your step-by-step: here’s how you get your business license, here’s who to call for the health department, here’s how to get your certificate of occupancy,” Goodsell said. “I mean, there were a million things I just didn’t know as we were opening up because I’ve never been a small business owner.”
Avoiding the move out of their current location has allowed his team to start thinking about the future, Goodsell added. He said they hope to renovate the building’s basement and outdoor patio, adding late night pizza and a vintage shop or comedy club to their space in the future.
Goodsell said he pays a lower rent in exchange for having taken on the building’s initial renovations, and said he isn’t sure whether The Gathering Place would have been able to compete with other rent offers if it had had to look for a new home in Chapel Hill.
Natalie Knox, the gallery director of FRANK Gallery, said rent is their biggest challenge as a small business too.
“You breathe the sigh of relief when you move in,” she said, “and then you’re like, okay, now how are we going to sustain ourselves?”
She said FRANK Gallery faces unique challenges as a nonprofit, and doesn’t reap some of the same benefits as small businesses that make the majority of their money on retail sales.
Before deciding to leave University Place, Knox said FRANK Gallery explored what it would be like to rent one of the other storefronts in the mall with an outside entrance. She said she was surprised to learn how much developers save by having empty space. She said she wishes there were some kind of tax incentive for landlords to prioritize small businesses, since high rent prices are often what force them out of town.
“To us, we see all these empty spaces and we’re like, ‘Oh, but why are these businesses having trouble filling? There’s so many empty spaces!’ And it’s like, they’re not making it a scenario where you can afford it because it doesn’t benefit them in any way,” Knox said.
Now, FRANK Gallery has been settled at 370 E Main Street in Carrboro for almost a year, and Knox said they are enjoying the sunlight and blue floors in the new space.
The three small business leaders each shared their desire for increased support in their different stages of change, but agreed the community they have found in Chapel Hill and Carrboro make the fight for their businesses’ success worth it.
If you want to hear more from this panel, listen to the full Forum on The Hill.
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