What were Bickerdike’s mistakes on the El Mercado project? Among the most significant were several bad assumptions:
- Everyone would love to shop at a public market. Although there was no modern history of public markets in Chicago, Bickerdike expected El Mercado to catch on and succeed.
- Local residents of limited means would be willing and able to open and successfully operate small businesses. The decision to favor small businesses owned and operated by low-income area residents meant that in practice, most of the vendors would be novices. They had limited experience, very little capital, and limited technical knowledge of business planning and operation.
- Bickerdike could achieve multiple goals through one project. From the outset, the organization wanted to develop a project that would have an impact beyond the tangible outcomes: jobs and economic opportunities for area residents on the one hand and choice and quality of products on the other. We were trying to make a statement — about culture, economic opportunity, democratic economic structures, and community control — all the while expecting to generate significant economic activity and benefit to consumers. This was simply too much to ask of one project.
- Bickerdike’s competencies would easily transfer to success with El Mercado. Bickerdike’s current director, Joy Aruguette, the leader responsible for the project’s successful turnaround, says: “We see the same thing in our new mixed-use rental development. People think that just because we do residential property management that means we can do retail property management as well — and it just isn’t that simple. You’re dealing with different sorts of people and they bring different issues to the table.”
- The executive director will pull this off. I brought to the role a good set of skills, drive, and a commitment to Bickerdike’s values of community control, honesty, integrity, and doing things well. Unfortunately, I also brought to El Mercado an unflinching commitment to the project’s multiple goals. It took my departure, and the work of a new director who has comparable values, skills, drive, and commitment — but not the emotional attachment to this particular vision — to guide the organization through a successful restructuring of the project.
Bickerdike embarked on El Mercado largely because of its uniqueness and potential for benefiting the community. When the project was restructured, many elements of its original qualitative metrics were retained. Jobs have been created for local residents. A mid-sized minority entrepreneur flourishes there. Also, fresh products appealing to the area’s ethnic groups are readily available; and financial gains are shared by the community institution — Bickerdike — through rent of the space. That makes the project relatively distinctive from a CDC economic development project, and it still benefits the local economy. Yet it lost the more substantive ways in which it was distinctive — the public-market concept and the local economic empowerment through micro-business development.
No one at Bickerdike considers the project a “failure,” and my sense is that the community at large feels the same way. The group should be commended for turning the project into a success, with as many community benefits as it has to offer. Still, it raises the question of how many “successful” CDC projects differ significantly in terms of concept or beneficiaries from their original plans. Is the CDC community — including government and private funders, associations, and CDCs themselves — prepared to put a project into the “failure” column if it deviates from the group’s purpose? My sense is that there are many, many such projects out there, and that those projects are not considered failures unless there is a loan that goes unpaid or the property is abandoned to another use entirely.
What are the most important take-aways from the El Mercado project? For me there are three.
First, some the best ideas of those of us working in community economic development never should get beyond the early planning stages. We should continue to dream, plan, and get enough funding for feasibility studies, undergirded by a realistic assessment of the risks. And if the risk assessment doesn’t lead to a reasonable expectation of success, the organization should drop the project. Why? There is just too much to lose.
Second, if we apply rigorous planning to innovative new initiatives, maybe we’ll do a better job of setting them up. For El Mercado, Bickerdike should have had an anchor tenant giving small businesses a chance to succeed surrounding a well-run grocery and meat store.
And third, we shouldn’t abandon our non-development strategies for changing the local economic landscape, such as organizing and advocacy on policy changes. Whether the issue is protecting good jobs, or better education and increased access to the jobs that are available, there is no shortage of activist strategies that may have the potential for greater impact on the local economy than even our most successful development projects. For those of us who are committed to the notion that community development can play a critical role in the struggle for community empowerment, we need to chose our development strategies carefully and assess our success or failure based on whether or not our efforts have served that broader mission.
Bickerdike made several key mistakes in the planning and operation of El Mercado. On reflection, I have come to believe that if we had done a better job and avoided those mistakes, this project would still have failed in its original format. What we should have done was to take a closer, more critical look at the business model during the planning phase.
I am just as committed today as I was in 1990 to the notion that community development makes sense only if there is an agenda that entails using the development activity to support organizing for community empowerment. The experience of El Mercado has not changed my perspective on that notion — however, if the development project we undertake does not succeed, it can provide no community-empowerment gains and in fact the organizing agenda suffers for that failure.
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