Editor’s note: This commentary is by Dan Jones, of Montpelier, who is the executive director of the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition.
You can walk around my downtown Montpelier and see the empty cafes, the stores waiting for customers. As our businesses empty and most of us rapidly prepare to self-quarantine, we are about to face a really difficult prospect. Could we lose our beloved downtowns?
Everywhere I have been downtown in the past few days, I could feel the local future closing up and the closing in. Some business owners were on the verge of tears as they attended in their empty shops. For them, it’s like being tied to the tracks watching the train of destruction barreling down on you.
Already, too many many stores have shut down as the economy slowed. In the face of this unforeseen disaster, the remaining small businesses that are the lifeblood of our small city cannot remain open without customers. Customers stop coming because they are told to stay away from crowded places, and because they want to curtail spending. Our beloved art house movie theater will close without audiences. Our great restaurants will close without diners.
We face a dread prospect. Either we self-quarantine until the danger of spreading the virus passes, or we hasten the infections and deaths, simply by going about our lives as normal. But to not regularly use our downtowns condemns our merchants to bankruptcy and failure.
To that challenge, I have an suggestion: Let’s put our precious towns in suspended animation.
Could we, as a living community, come together and put our towns on hold for a few months until this disaster passes? Might we then take them out of cold storage when the virus danger is over and we can return to normal shopping, eating out and finding local entertainment?
To do this, would require commitment and coordination from all levels of our local economy. To start, local landlords would have to agree to a moratorium on rents during our collective hunkering down. This shouldn’t be a hard decision for them. After all, it’s not like there will be others coming in to rent the space if a shop or restaurant owner is forced to close their doors and remove their inventory and fixtures.
Keeping the spaces intact for the current businesses to reopen easily would be just a smart way of restarting the local economy. They could begin charging rents again as the economy ramps back up. And it would save everyone money in the long run, because restarting from scratch would be impossible for many of our current business owners. In the difficult period that will follow this crisis there is not going to be much capital available for business startups.
The banks and other financial institutions then need to provide an even heavier lift. VSECU, TD, Northfield Savings, Peoples, Citizens and others will need to offer mortgage holidays for all those landlords and other folks who are losing their incomes. They would do this under the assumption that parties that are not forced into bankruptcy will get going again quickly once the crisis is gone.
Our merchants will still have a hard time working with suppliers to put their bills on ice until the economy thaws. But if they are rational, those suppliers would probably be happier with deferred debts with some possibility of payment than being stuck with returned merchandise.
The rest of us may have to accept a certain amount of sacrifice over our lost incomes. To cover the lost revenue, our accounts at the participating financial institutions may have no or even a negative return for the crisis. Basically, all of us must invest in our collective future.
Working together, as vibrant communities, we could keep our precious downtowns ready to emerge from this crisis and continue being the place we shop, we visit and where we feel at home. Otherwise we can watch the slow collapse of our commercial centers, with no promise of any return of its vitality. It’s a challenge, yet Montpelier, and other Vermont cities and towns can meet with local energy and local imagination. We have to move quickly though because our time to respond is short.
