In the age of “standing on business,” the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative (AWBI) is doing just that. Their latest brief, titled “Standing on Business,” advocates for legacy Black businesses in Atlanta being crucial components of Black wealth and community prosperity.
The report was made possible through the support of United Way, according to the AWBI. It was first conceived around a year ago; the team officially started going door to door to get insights from business owners in November of 2023. It was released on Aug. 20, a day after the City of Atlanta announced a grant program for legacy businesses, largely in tune with what the report was advocating.
Jarryd Bethea, senior research and policy associate at AWBI and lead author of the Standing on Business Report, said being an Atlanta native helped inform the report and personalize it.
“This report is a labor of love and reflective of the kinds of businesses that I knew of growing up and making sure that they are being actively supported,” Bethea said.
The door-to-door strategy the researchers employed to engage black businesses on a personal level opened their eyes to a few realities. One challenge in the making of the report was the realization that much of the data is not readily available or simply doesn’t exist as a dataset. This emphasized a need for more research in areas like this to gain a better understanding of the racial dynamics of the city.
“The city doesn’t necessarily have a registry of [Black-owned businesses], so we went through a number of different routes trying to figure out how we could get to Black-owned businesses in the city,” Bethea said. “That was one thing that shocked me — that we’re having a conversation about a city where the largest demographic is still Black… and we don’t know where the Black-owned businesses are.”
The team looked through minority business certifications and business licensing data to fill in some of these gaps, along with soliciting the datasets from private companies like Dun & Bradstreet.
Like past reports from AWBI, the report features both quantitative and qualitative components. One anecdote from the report recalled a coffee shop that was going to close their doors in a week due to a 22.2 percent rent increase — a story they would have missed had they focused only on quantitative data and not gone door-to-door, Bethea said.
“You read in the news that businesses are closing… but to have been in the midst of it in real time — it’s really interesting,” Bethea said.
According to the report, majority-Black zip codes in Atlanta saw a higher rate of increase in commercial rents compared to those in majority-White zip codes. However, the absolute increase in rent for majority-Black zip codes was lower than that of majority-White zip codes, likely explained by majority-Black zip codes having lower levels of initial rent than majority-White neighborhoods in that 10-year period.
One of the largest points the report was sure to emphasize is that Black-owned businesses are an asset to their communities. Researchers used a child well-being index and compared it against the presence of Black-owned businesses, and found a correlation between the two.
“For every additional small Black-owned business per Black residents, we could see a neighborhood’s well-being score increase by 1.8,” Bethea said. “It’s this linear relationship where you can see the presence of these businesses is beneficial to child well-being.”
The report finishes with five conclusions that the city can do to support more Black businesses:
- Launch a vacancy tax that will deter unscrupulous investors from purchasing property with limited intent to activate property
- Dedicate public funds to support commercial tenant rental assistance.
- Partner with local mission-driven developers to develop smaller retail space and community-owned real estate.
- Enact a legacy business program to support historically Black commercial corridors.
- Establish a strong resource navigator network to help local businesses discover, apply for, and secure capital
With the announcement of the aforementioned Atlanta Legacy Businesses program, which will prioritize businesses that have been around for over 30 years and aid them with technical assistance and facade improvements, it seems already that one of the recommendations is coming to fruition, at least in some capacity.
Bethea hopes that with the report, more people will learn of the asset that these businesses are to a community, value them, and let developers know they must be valued, too.
“[With a luxury apartment complex], you’re thinking about how to maximize profits — they’re not asking the question ‘what does it look like to keep the fabric of the neighborhood together,’ and I think that’s reflected in the types of tenants they bring in and the types of rents that they want to offer,” Bethea said.
Bethea added the he hopes the city is intentional about championing Black businesses in new development projects that are handled with care going forward and built around the people already there, not the next people coming into town. He pointed to one example from the past of the city being intentional about looking out for Black businesses, Hartsfield Jackson International Airport.
A previous report from AWBI, Building a Beloved Economy, talks about 25 percent of all procurement contracts for the construction of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport being awarded to minority firms at the direction of then newly elected mayor Maynard Jackson — the first Black Mayor in the city’s history. According to that AWBI report, “His efforts increased minority contracts from 0.13 percent in 1973 to 23 percent in 1982.”
These intentional steps, said Bethea, are essential in helping Black Atlantans bridge the racial wealth gap that permeates throughout the city.
“There are ways that developers can have mandates; if we’re going to write tax rebates, if we’re going to give out tax incentives, subsidize this and that, then I think there’s a good opportunity to be included.”
AWBI is hoping that the report will make its way to policymakers around the city to enact change on an official level. Moreover, Bethea said, AWBI hopes community members also find the report insightful and understand how valuable their businesses are to the city.
“Our conversations with business owners let us know that a majority of them who want to own their business want to do so in the neighborhood that they live in, and they want to work for those neighborhoods,” Bethea said. “They create these businesses as assets because they see what the community has, they see what it’s lacking, they are a part of it, and they want to make sure that they are contributing to it.”
