L.A. Small Business Health is Mediocre, According to Our Reading of American Express Study

By Dennis Romero Wed., Oct. 19 2011 at 3:48 PM

Jon Sittner

L.A. is No. 7

L.A. city leaders like to make much of how business friendly they are, what with the bending over backwards for a proposed NFL stadium and the $1 million of your money being given to a rich architectural firm that would have relocated downtown anyway.

But for all the hot air that comes from the City Hall podiums, our fair burg still ranks middle-of-the-pack when it comes to small-business-friendliness.

That, at least, is according to American Express' latest OPEN Independent Retail Index:

Los Angeles has strong independent retailers, but its independent eating and drinking establishments are a smaller part of the local economy compared to the national benchmark.

How kind of Amex. It's really a watered-down way of saying, You suck, Los Angeles.

How else could you explain that, among 15 major cities, from New York to Phoenix, L.A. came in dead middle at number 7 in terms of small-business-friendliness.

American Express

That's pretty sad, given that many economists believe small business and entrepreneurship are keys to a economic recovery.

L.A. is only the second-largest market in the nation (and it's number 1 status is debatable if you go metropolitan-region-to-metropolitan-region against New York), and we have America's largest port complex (San Pedro/Long Beach), which rakes in all kinds of stuff from China, yet we can only rank middle-of-the-road in small business viability?

Really?

Yeah, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is known proclaim L.A. the capital of this and that (might we suggest glowsticks and yoga pants?) can now say we're the global leader in small business mediocrity.

[@dennisjromero/djromero@laweekly.com]

Tags:

American Express, business, economy, entrepreneurs, Los Angeles, recession, small business, Villaraigosa

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rickabrams

This type of comparison means very little to me. My focus is whether LA adds to or subtracts from the quality of life of its citizens. In 1993 and again in 1996, the City warned itself, the excessive density (with its humongous gifts to developers and banks) was cause a deterioration in quality of life and an exodus of people. About 12 years ago, the City Council went hog wild in giving developers everything they wanted and starved the city's infrastructure. The 2010 census confirmed that wiser Administrations had predicted -- significant decline in not only number of people in the "development areas" -- (CRA), but those who remained had a measurably lower socio-economic status.

When the state abolished the CRA due to massive corruption, LA re-constituted them as VARP's. The main difference between a CRA and a VARP is that a VARP has to start by paying a $98 Million bribe to Sacramento for the privilege of giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the developers and banks who support the councilmembers.

In order to make up for the obvious financial deficit, the city is working on two plans:

(1) Repeal Prop 13 in stages -- first the commercial properties and then for homeowners

(2) But first ACE and new duties on the property owners. The City plans to take complete control of citations for "property defects" and be the cop who cites you, the prosecutor who decides to prosecute you, the "court system" that hears your case by a lawyer (called "judge pro temp" to mislead you into thinking it is a real court system. There is no due process and no courts only an Administrative Hearing run by the people who cited you in the first place. The city gets to be the "jury" and then put a lien on your property. It's kind of like Judge Dredd with Stallone.

But is gets worse. The city is in the process of making property owners take care of the City's property-- sidewalks, curbs, trees in the median. If you do not take care of everything right up to the street itself, the city can hire some corny of a councilman to do the work, stick the homeowner wit the entire bill + 40% Supervision fee. In fact, if the roots from the city's trees are causing pavement problems in the street, the homeowner has to pay for that also as the homeowner is responsible for the trees roots.

If you think you were unfairly cited, then you get to go to the City run ACE program, but you will never get a day in a real court in front of a jury.