Rafael Gomez - Small Business and the City: The Transformative Potential of Small Scale Entrepreneurship

This brings me to my own city of Toronto. Anyone searching for a case study substantiating Glaesers and Jacobss insights, need only look at the Kennedy Road Business Improvement Area (KBIA) and the Wexford Heights Business Improvement Area (WBIA), which straddle Kennedy Road and Lawrence Avenue East, respectively, two of the main thoroughfares in the ward of Scarborough Centre that I represent in the east end of Toronto. The community of Wexford, in particular, with its collection of small businesses, is the ultimate microcosm of Canadas economy, with virtually every sector represented, from financial and professional services to retail and manufacturing.

In a world seemingly dominated by chain stores and corporate fast-food giants, Lawrence Avenue East and Kennedy Road stand as unique bastions of independent entrepreneurialism and eclecticism. Defying mono-ethnic neighbourhood appellations, Lawrence East is at once the Middle East, the Far East, the Caribbean, Britain, southern Europe, and, for good measure, a bit of 1950s and early 1960s North America. Where else can one find Chinese food takeaways, Guyanese-Trinidadian curry shops, Lebanese bakeries, British pubs, and Greek delis on the same street block? The defining architectural form is the sometimes unfairly maligned strip mall. Unlike the vast parking-lot-dominated malls that would be built after the 1970s, Lawrence Avenues are almost sixty years old (built in the 1950s and early 1960s) with design features reminiscent of the early Las Vegas strip. Yet these are not stagnant period pieces but dynamic and evolving structures reflecting the ebbs and flows of demographic change and economic transformation: from burger joint to used-car outlet to frozen-food store to bicycle shop to post office to organic grocery store, and so it goes.

But economic growth doesnt happen in a vacuum; it takes vision and collective action. When I and a few local businesses began the process of forming the Wexford Heights BIA in the early 2000s, the long-term future of the strip was by no means a given. A lack of investment in both public and private infrastructure, fear of crime, and a lack of consensus and vision on how best to position the community within Toronto threatened to undermine its long-term success.

Through a series of BIA-led investments in the streetscape, marketing programs, street festivals, and community policing initiatives, the neighbourhood continues to be a lively hub of business and leisure activity, even garnering enhanced coverage in local media. A key element of this success is the number of new Canadians and immigrants who form the nucleus of entrepreneurs taking forward new business ventures in the ward. Undoubtedly, for Toronto and my ward, immigration is a vital demographic and economic lifeline.

But getting people and entrepreneurs to move to your city and community, as weve learned in Scarborough Centre, requires a focus on quality-of-life issues (good schools, parks, public safety) and amenities such as public transit. At a time when public finances are under threat, this is of course not an easy job, but one that nonetheless needs to be seen as a critical investment in future economic success. Bringing together public and private-sector players through BIAs is certainly one way of achieving this objective.