Seattle Small Business Owners in Harm’s Way Support Protests

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The One Year, One Neighborhood series follows small businesses in the Pike/Pine corridor in Seattle, the first coronavirus hot spot in the U.S., to get a sense of what cities will look like as they reopen.

Karyn Schwartz has a rule when there are protests near her shop in Seattle: She turns off her cellphone alerts.

Worrying about property damage when there's not much she can do about it seems unproductive, she says. It's also beside the point when people are protesting injustice.

“If someone smashes the windows, I'll fix the f---ing windows,” says Schwartz, whose small apothecary SugarPill is two blocks from the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct, where officers have used pepper spray and tear gas to disperse large anti-cop demonstrations for the past two nights. “I'm going to stand in solidarity with my community.”

For retailers and businesses in cities across the U.S., the week of protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has brought a fresh bout of uncertainty. Many, like Schwartz, emphasize that any property damage pales in comparison to the structural racism that demonstrators are bringing attention to. But they're also having to weigh how best to support activists and what the uprisings will mean for their plans to reopen, just as officials are relaxing some rules on businesses related to the coronavirus.

From Atlanta to Chicago to Los Angeles, the protests are deliberately taking place in some of the wealthiest parts of cities, underscoring the economic divides that have only gotten worse in recent decades as downtowns and close-in neighborhoods have undergone gentrification. While most of the demonstrations have been peaceful, some have led to property damage and looting.

Seattle is no exception. Over the weekend, some demonstrators broke into Nordstrom's flagship store downtown and set police cars on fire. Businesses along the Pike/Pine corridor—which has gotten much fancier with the city's tech boom—were also targeted. A Ferarri dealership and Amazon.com Inc.'s new cashierless grocery store had their windows smashed.

Then, on Monday evening, a demonstration that started downtown and wound its way to Capitol Hill devolved into violence as police declared the gathering a “riot” and shot flash-bang grenades and tear gas to disperse the crowd around 9 p.m. Overnight, several shop windows in the neighborhood were smashed, though Schwartz's was spared.

By Tuesday morning, a neighborhood that had slowly reopened in recent weeks was getting boarded up in anticipation of more protests. Crews from the city were pressure-washing graffiti off of a sign for Seattle Central College. A worker was putting plywood over the door of the Walgreens, while a security guard stood in front of a broken window at the Amazon grocery store.

To Liz Dunn, a local landlord, the past couple of days have been heartbreaking. She has spent the last couple of months helping her small-business tenants, many of whom are women or minorities, stay open in whatever way they can, while much of Seattle went on lockdown. She paid for security guards to keep her Chophouse Row property safe rather than boarding it up.

But on Tuesday morning, she was out surveying the damage to the businesses in her complex, including a hardware store and Thai restaurant that had windows broken overnight. Dunn's job for the day: help tenants put plywood up if they wanted. She planned to pick up the tab.

“I am super supportive of Black Lives Matter,” she says, adding that the damage could have been much worse. But she confesses that she's worried that the protests will “take the wind out of people's sails as they try to reopen.”

Figuring out the right response has been difficult. At least one business in Pike/Pine turned over its space to supply protesters with water and other supplies, and there have been calls for ordering food from black-owned restaurants. Linda Derschang, who owns a bar and a cafe in Pike/Pine, had reopened her businesses for takeout a few days a week. On Tuesday she was thinking through whether it sent the right message to keep them open during the protests, but also adamant that she wasn't worried about any financial hit.

“I don't want this to be about me,” she says. “We're fully supporting the protest. Absolutely. This is important. I'm not concerned that this is going to disrupt our reopening.”

For Robert Townsend, the last few days have been another setback in an already tough couple of months filled with uncertainty. Around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning, he woke up to messages that the window at his hair salon, Essensuals London, had been smashed. Nothing had been taken, but it put a damper on his plans to start cutting hair for the first time since March. He was worried that the protests, along with curfews imposed on the city, would dissuade people from coming to the neighborhood.

“I don't even feel like opening up this week now,” says Townsend. “It's just too much.”

Molly Moon Neitzel, founder and chief executive officer of Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream, closed two of her Seattle shops that had just reopened, because of property damage and looting in the area. Her Pine Street location was due to reopen soon, but she has delayed that because of the protests. Several of her employees have been participating in the demonstrations, causing her to worry they'll become infected with the coronavirus and spread it to other workers.

“To be clear,” she says in a text message, "BLACK LIVES MATTER, and I would be protesting, too, were it not for Covid.”