In the Spring of 2017, the Whole Foods located in Washington, D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood shut down ahead of plans for major renovations. The problem was that the owner of the building in which the high-end grocery store was housed blocked the remodel with lawsuits. What used to be a major lure for shoppers who lived inside and outside Glover Park was suddenly closed. And it remained shuttered for years.
The closure of what was Glover Park’s biggest and most prominent commercial tenant proved more than challenging for the neighborhood. While politicians and pundits talk and write romantically about the nobility of small businesses, the simple truth is that small businesses all-too-often attain vitality from the large. As Cal-Berkeley professor Enrico Moretti has long made plain, the small businesses and the abundant jobs they create are frequently a consequence of the large businesses around which they cluster.
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