The BID: Destruction of Immigrant Networks and Community

The proposed extension of the 82^nd Street Business Improvement District (BID), along the Roosevelt Avenue commercial corridor, has jumpstarted a growing wave of discontent and collective neighborhood opposition.Opponents of the BID have made their case on economic and procedural grounds. The economic perspective argues that the BID will accelerate gentrification and inevitably result in the expulsion of immigrant firms and economically vulnerable residents. While the procedural perspective argues that the BID “voting” process is non-transparent, undemocratic, and thus fundamentally flawed. These two perspectives are intimately linked and stand on the shoulders of mayor De Blasio’s narrative on New York’s growing inequalities.

Including a third perspective – the immigrant network approach – adds depth to the BID critique. Research on ethnic entrepreneurship makes the case that immigrant networks play a key role in the growth of small family-based ethnic firms, the development of stable communities, and the social ecology of neighborhoods.

An immigrant network can be understood, for our purposes, as informal and interlocking range of social relationships that provide co-ethnic members with crucial business information and access to scarce economic and material resources.

Network resources can be accessed and mobilized by members to create addition value. In the language of social scientists, networks are a crucial form of collective social capital. Invoking the term network, in effect, is just another way of saying community. Networks and community are the flip sides of the same coin. They are an organic unit.

BID proponents have manufactured a strategic story-line that paints the Roosevelt Avenue commercial corridor as a dirty, crime infested, and disorganized place in desperate need of rehabilitation and regulation. Using an immigrant network approach, one can see that this is simply not the case. The BID narrative demonizes our newest New Yorkers and willfully distorts local realities. Yet, a deep and grounded analysis of local immigrant landscapes highlights a different reality. It is there for all who choose to see.

For example, with regards to regulation, formal and informal merchants and entrepreneurs, along Roosevelt Avenue, have long utilized networks to informally monitor non-acceptable co-ethnic economic behavior. While these practices do not represent a concrete regulatory framework, it does highlight how local informal social forces modify and restrain economic action. In effect, extensive grounded research has shown that self-regulating immigrant networks monitor and guide member’s economic behavior through group-based norms of solidarity, trust, reciprocal practices, and meaningful sanctions. While serious violations of rules and generally accepted practices result, under certain circumstances, in exclusion from the network and loss of 030access to scarce resources.

Small-scale immigrant entrepreneurs also rely on local networks to evaluate business prospects, secure start-up capital, hire workers, and establish working relationships with suppliers and related firms. This circuit of value – which circulates within the bounded immigrant networks – facilitates the launching of new ethnic businesses, encourages the clustering of local economic activities, supports the growth of immigrant labor markets, generates growing levels of local demand, and reinforces a sense of community. These positive outcomes are particularly important for unbanked entrepreneurs because they generally lack start-up financing and the crucial working capital that would allow them to maintain and expand their businesses. In short, immigrant networks are crucial for cash poor immigrant entrepreneurs.

Immigrant networks also provide neighborhood residents with a crucial context for local engagement in civic and political arenas. Collective neighborhood engagement and mobilization are made possible by local conditions and well lubricated networks. As the old adage states: “All politics are local.”

It is a political given that local folks are civically and politically mobilized through shared values and local concerns. At the local level, values and concerns are interpreted and acted upon by neighborhood-based ethnic networks. Moreover, New York’s ethnically driven model of neighborhood-based politics clearly demonstrates that place matters, and it matters deeply for immigrant New Yorkers.

The top-down establishment and imposition of the Roosevelt Avenue BID will destroy the delicate and intricate web of bottom-up networks. We know that immigrant networks and community grow slowly over time. We know that they are bottom-up, intricate, social and economic processes. We know that networks reflect local circumstances, and are not easily duplicated or reinvented. And we know, based on a reading of New York’s historical record, that the dismantling of immigrant networks will create a void that will be filled by self-serving landlords, real estate speculators, and external corporate interests.

The replacement of local bottom-up organic immigrant networks with external top-down bureaucratic corporate networks should be strongly discouraged by our locally elected officials. From the perspective of public policy, the extension of the BID and the destruction of immigrant networks is short-sighted and unacceptable. The BID is not good for immigrants, it is not good for Queens, and it is definitely not good for New York City.

Arturo Ignacio Sánchez     /   arturosanchez@queenslatino.com

Arturo Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is chairperson of the Newest New Yorkers Committee of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught contemporary immigration, entrepreneurship, and urban planning at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, and Pratt Institute.