Main street business owners: aging in plain sight

PurposeAging is the most important social-demographic issue worldwide, supported by the initiatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) in its global strategy and action plan for aging and health (Rudnicka et al., 2020). The average age of business owners in most industrialized countries is on the rise. In the United States, fifty-one percent of small private businesses are owned by someone age fifty-plus (SBA Office of Advocacy, 2018).Design/methodology/approachThe authors shed light on small business owners, who age in place. The authors suggest that their importance as long-term actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems nor the issue of “Main Street churn” have not been meaningfully explored. They become embedded in their community and possibly stuck there in retirement. Understanding the risks they face offers an opportunity for academics and practitioners to provide insights for business owners, the next generation of the acquirer and advisors. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has elevated the status of many of these businesses from invisible (and perhaps taken for granted) to “essential” and amplified the co-dependence of business and the local economy.Findings The anticipated “silver tsunami” caused by the retirements of Main Street business owners is not a national and homogeneous wave. Rather, each wave will land on beaches locally. Small business owners age in place, and their importance as long-term actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems nor the issue of “Main Street churn” have not been meaningfully explored. They become embedded in their community and possibly stuck there in retirement.Originality/value The embeddedness of these owners – who likely have social connections, community identification and feelings of responsibility to the community directly impacts the places that they care deeply about – is often unquestioned. However, their retirements call for increased visibility within entrepreneurial ecosystems and translations of scholarly work from several kinds of literature into policy and practice.

From the Birth of the Soundscape Concept to the Sound Ambient in Disneyland-Paris

Giovanni De Zorzi traces the historical and aesthetical background of ‘soundscape’, from the sound/noise opposition in physics to the reconsideration of ‘noise’ by the avant-gardes of the twentieth century arriving to the conceptions of Murray Schafer and Steven Feld, which gave birth to many nowadays disciplines. After this, Alessio Calandra deals with the possible influence of the soundscape of Disneyland Park, an amusement park in Disneyland Paris: he begins from some ‘physical’ places of the Park, such as Main Street U.S.A., Frontierland, Adventureland, and arrives to the detailed analysis of their specific soundscape related to the sale of Disney-branded gadgets and products within the park.

Motivating Banks to Lend? Credit Spillover Effects of the Main Street Lending Program

We study the effects of the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) an emergency lending program aimed at supporting the flow of credit to small and mid-sized firms during the COVID-19 crisis on bank lending to businesses. Using instrumental variables for identification and multiple loan-level and survey data sources, we document that the MSLP increased banks' willingness to lend more generally outside the program to both large and small firms. Following the introduction of the program, participating banks were more likely to renew maturing loans and to originate new loans, as well as less likely to tighten standards on business loans than nonparticipating banks. Additional evidence suggests that the MSLP, despite low take-up, supported the flow of bank credit during the pandemic by serving as a backstop to the bank loan market and by increasing banks' levels of risk tolerance in the face of uncertainty.

Enhancing Ecological, Functional, Social and Aesthetic Quality of Street Green Space by Planning Green Pockets

City residents do not always have an opportunity to visit larger parks or nature areas on a daily basis as the rhythm of their daily life does not allow them to spend enough time in a natural environment. More and more time is spent on the way to the place of work or home. As well as tourists on visiting the city use main streets as touristic routes. On the one hand, major central streets affect ecological balance of the city due to the heavy traffic and contamination from it, but on other hand, they are mostly visited public areas because of the public transport and various public buildings and touristic objects concentrated there. Thus, street green space plays an important role in the city landscape pattern and often requires much more diversity of plantings, humane and safer environment than other areas of the city. Street green space can be very limited especially in the centre of the city with dense building areas or places where historic pattern of buildings does not allow to expand green areas. But it is possible to find small green spaces or green pockets in several places along the street. Green pockets that developed as multifunctional, ecological and aesthetical green spaces can compensate insufficiency of street greenery. The socio-economically active, medium-size city of Rezekne in Latvia has been chosen as a pilot area for the assessment of potential to develop green pockets along main streets of the city. The central street of Rezekne is the main axis of the urban landscape which provides access to the city from other regions, although it is historic heritage area with active public life. Unfortunately, within the development of the city there were needs to increase the flow of the main street by reducing the green space. Therefore, it was not possible to develop classic street greenery of tree alleys. Due to the random spatial structure of buildings along the main street, there are open spaces of different size and shape between or in front of buildings. Those are appropriate for development of green spaces. The approach of green pockets was adapted for the main street of Rezekne as a tool for enhancing ecological, functional, social and aesthetic quality of street green space. As well as, this makes it possible to give the street landscape a diverse and multifunctional image and provide necessary functions and environment for residents and tourists. The aim of the article is to analyse problematic issues of the greenery of major central streets of Rezekne and present an approach of green pockets as a tool for their solving.

A Main Street framework leveraging data and technology for good

The COVID-19 pandemic has hollowed out corporate office spaces in large US metropolitan centers, resulting in three potential downstream differential impacts: (1) on places, as demand for urban office spaces, commercial real estate, and housing have changed; (2) on profits, as small and local businesses in proximity to these office spaces depend on office workers and other foot traffic; and, (3) on people, as the livelihoods of many diverse but historically marginalized communities have been disproportionately affected. In this article, we examine these impacts, with downtown Seattle used as a case study to validate some urban trends. In leveraging data and technology-based approaches to assess and support urban vitality and equity goals, policymakers can explore the value of a Main Street data-driven analytical framework. Here, we explore how such a framework can support more targeted responses, including implementing technology policy initiatives that increase the digitalization of Main Street businesses and support their resilience. Complementing this data-driven framework, institutionalizing equity analysis in regional decision-making systems can better account for differential impacts on vulnerable communities to implement more inclusive future of work recovery strategies.

The Impact of Main Street Revitalization on the Economic Vitality of Small-Town Business Districts

The Main Street Program is a popular smaller-scale economic development strategy used to revitalize historic town centers across the rural United States. In this article, a difference-in-differences design using longitudinal business establishment data is implemented to estimate the program’s causal impact on job and establishment growth in downtown retail districts. Using a pooled sample of four Midwest states, the author found no significant effect of Main Street Program adoption on downtown jobs or establishments. However, for each individual state, a substantial degree of structural heterogeneity across states exists. Iowa emerges as a state where the Main Street Program appears to yield its hypothesized economic benefits to the downtown business districts of participating communities. These findings suggest that Main Street Program participation effects are not generalizable across states and that implementation and local context matter.