Успех Buchanan Street в Нэшвилле грозит вытеснить малый бизнес из-за роста налогов

The price of success: Can Buchanan Street afford to keep thriving? NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) — When I first started reporting in Nashville in the 1990s, Buchanan Street had a very different reputation. It was one of the city’s highest-crime corridors. Today, Buchanan Street is alive with coffee shops, restaurants, neighborhood businesses and people walking from place to place. It is safer, busier and growing. The question now is whether Buchanan Street could eventually become a victim of its own success. Across Nashville, rising property values have brought rising tax bills and growing anxiety for small-business owners. Lower Broadway is already feeling the pressure. In 12South, once considered a business frontier, longtime local businesses have closed as the cost of operating there climbed. More than 300 small businesses have now joined a coalition seeking property-tax relief. Some of them are on Buchanan Street. The sound of success At The Loading Dock, success has a soundtrack. The hiss of a coffee machine. Plates moving across tables. Conversations spilling from one corner of the room to another. Owner Juan Vega-Romero loves what Buchanan Street has become, particularly the neighborhood feel that allows people to leave their cars behind. “Unlike a lot of places in Nashville, [you can] walk to everything they want to do here on Buchanan Street,” Vega-Romero said. “They can walk to get a pizza they can come here, have a coffee, walk back, meet somebody, meet a friend, sit down, have a drink and go back. You don’t have to get in your car every time.” That kind of walkability and neighborhood energy is exactly what many Nashville communities say they want. But it can also make a neighborhood more desirable. And in Nashville, more desirable often means more valuable. PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Is Nashville favoring big business over small business? A story about tax breaks A dream with very thin margins Just down Buchanan Street, Karys Bennett opened KB Home and Hardware, a neighborhood hardware store built around an increasingly rare concept: personal service. She knew running a small business would be difficult. She says she did not fully understand just how difficult until she was in the middle of it. “You don’t really understand how much work it is until you’re doing it, and then it keeps piling on,” Bennett said. “I didn’t expect this to take this long or for this to cost this much I’m having a great time, to be honest. Yeah, this is my dream.” Bennett is willing to put in the work. What frustrates her is watching government offer large companies tax breaks and incentives while neighborhood businesses absorb ever-increasing costs. “It’s just ridiculous,” Bennett said. “They want to keep some of the history and keep some of the charm, the small-town charm of Nashville. And you’re not doing that by building 30-story buildings that nobody is going to be in. And you’re not going to do that by putting Starbucks on every corner in my neighborhood.” That tension is becoming increasingly familiar across Nashville: City leaders want growth, investment and thriving neighborhoods, but small businesses worry that the success they help create can eventually price them out. When success raises the price of staying To be fair, Buchanan Street has not yet experienced the same property-tax explosion seen in some other Nashville neighborhoods. But business owners are watching what has happened elsewhere. As neighborhoods become more successful, property values rise. Higher valuations can eventually mean higher tax bills for property owners, costs that can also be passed along to tenants through rent. One business owner suggested Nashville needs to look more closely at who is actually operating inside those buildings. “They just need to evaluate what are the businesses that are operating in some of these spaces?” the owner said. “Do we categorize them differently? Do we tax them at different rates?” The argument is simple: A major corporation and a neighborhood business may occupy commercial property in the same city, but they do not have the same ability to absorb rising costs. “If Starbucks is coming in and they’re bringing 2,700 jobs, they have deep pockets. They can absorb some of that tax,” the business owner said. “But when you hit somebody who’s taking home seven to 10 cents for every dollar they earn, you take two more cents out of that, that changes whether or not it’s still worth it.” PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Critics question Tennessee's corporate handouts, is Starbucks worth $30 million? Seven to 10 cents on the dollar. Those are the kinds of margins many small businesses live on. So when those businesses face both higher property valuations and a 26% property-tax increase, it is easy to understand why owners lose sleep. Buchanan Street spent decades trying to become the kind of neighborhood people wanted to visit, live in, and invest in. It succeeded. The challenge now may be making sure the people and businesses that helped create that success can afford to stay.