
“Let's bring a goddamn bookstore to the Bronx.” - typographer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/nyregion/bronx-bookstore.html
======
Jun8
This news totally made my day! Read the owner's (Noëlle Santos) poem "The
Bronx is Burning with a Desire to Read":
[http://www.thelitbar.com/odetolitbar](http://www.thelitbar.com/odetolitbar).

How can the HN crowd help independent bookshops like these? Schedule a meetup
at the venue? Help with the webpage? Free cloud hosting? Help with the books
and/or legal?

~~~
noer
Apart from buying things? I'd think that helping people discover shops would
be tops. Leave positive Yelp & Google reviews, tell everyone you know about
the shop.

~~~
deveac
Mostly walking in to their shops with your feet and handing them your money
though.

Beyond your good suggestions of leaving good reviews and telling others, I'd
suggest buying gift cards from these shops for people you need presents for,
thus forcing them to patronize the shop at least once and upping the chances
the store gets another regular.

~~~
lotsofpulp
And this is why I'd rather get nothing instead of a gift card.

~~~
bdowling
The way it’s described, it’s like a gift to the shop rather than to the card
recipient.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Even if that’s not the intent of the gift giver, gift cards are always a net
negative to the receiver versus cash, and a positive for the shop who gets
cash before having to provide a product.

~~~
JasonFruit
They may be a net negative versus cash, but they're still a net positive
versus nothing at all — that is, it's a gift. There are all sorts of
inefficiencies we engage in for the pleasure of giving and receiving gifts.
Your attitude smacks of ungratefulness.

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duxup
How does this work financially?

I have a lot of vacant retail near me and they're nice spots, but the leases
are all sky high. For whatever reason the folks making decisions about what
goes in there are happy to sit and wait for yet another Noodles & Company or
Chipotle, nails salon, but that's kinda it... and if not those places, empty.

I'd love to find good ways to encourage local shops and things beyond just the
business with the highest margins.

~~~
anbop
The owners of the building are sitting in the most enviable position in the
economy — just by owning the asset, they will get money in the form of
appreciation, from work done by other people.

The rent is the cherry on top and they’d rather just go for a contract with a
safe mega corporation than deal with any actual work in interacting with a
business.

~~~
ThrowawayIP
This is a great reason to have a local-level tax on vacant space. Both
commercial and residential.

~~~
slavik81
A vacancy tax seems weird to me. It's effectively the same thing as a higher
property tax, but with a discount for non-vacancy. That is, a discount for
putting _anything_ in that space. I just don't see why you would give out a
discount without ensuring the use of the property is doing something that
provides a public benefit.

~~~
4ntonius8lock
The way I see, to care for vacant property, you need police, roads, and a ton
of infrastructure. This is also needed for property that is used.

A non-vacant used property will provide a city with money in the form of sales
taxes, jobs, growth, fees and in general prosperity. A town with a ton of
small independently owned shops and restaurants (a side effect of forcing
property on the market) is more attractive than one with strip malls filled
with franchises. It will make people want to live there and drive prices up.

Why should a vacant property pay the same tax? It's taking up the same and
paying less, in fact, in many cases, the vacant property is pulling down the
value of the city. It's only fair for the vacant property owner to have to pay
to blight his community. Such an arrangement is dealing with externalized
costs, which is one of the best functions of government.

~~~
akincisor
Does this same logic apply to promote a Wealth Tax on people who have wealth
that's being hoarded?

~~~
4ntonius8lock
Nope. You hoarding wealth won't make the neighborhood less appealing. The
hoarder is not free loading.

New wealth can be created, we don't need yours. If your investment real estate
is contributing $1/square foot in property taxes but everyone else's occupied
property is contributing $5/square foot in wages, sales tax, property tax and
municipal fees... then it makes sense to charge the free loaders. This isn't
even dealing with the blight and community development points. Just from a
financial perspective it makes sense.

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cabaalis
So there just...wasn't one? The Bronx is 57 square miles, with a population
density of 35000/sqmi. The town I live in is 58 square miles, with a density
of <2000/sqmi.

I searched "bookstore" on google maps around my town, and quit counting at 13.

Can someone explain the benefits of living on top of one another in such a
congested area when nobody delivers services even as basic as a bookstore,
while my podunk place in "flyover country" has now 13x the number of available
outlets for something like this?

~~~
Alex3917
There was one near co-op city, but it closed a few years ago.

There are also several specialty book stores, e.g. the NY Botanical Garden has
a really good one, there is a Jewish bookstore in Riverdale, etc.

Because The Bronx was largely designed for residential housing, it's very easy
to just hop on the subway or in a car and get to a bookstore in a few minutes.
It's actually much easier to get from The Bronx into Manhattan or into
Westchester, Fairfield County, New Jersey, etc. than it is to get to other
parts of The Bronx. So other than that some people seem to be morally offended
by the fact that there isn't a general purpose bookstore in the borough, there
isn't really any especially good reason to have one.

~~~
bertomartin
"out of sight out of mind" is reason enough to have one. people may
serendipitously walk into a bookstore and change their lives; doesn't work the
same when commuting.

------
skookumchuck
"If you were around Manhattan in the 1990s, you hated Barnes & Noble the way
you hated garbage strikes or Celine Dion. The chain seemed to expand on a
weekly basis, and it got in the way — of the independent book stores it
displaced"

I loved B&N in the 90s, and regularly went there to browse the stacks. They
had the selection, and the independent book stores didn't.

"Those who lived in the Bronx couldn’t help feeling that the gatekeepers of
cultural commerce found them unworthy."

More like they found the community didn't buy enough books for the bookstore
to pay the bills.

------
bertomartin
This is great. At the same time, WTF...it took this long to bring a bookstore
to the BX?? Living in Harlem in the mid 2000's I always wondered why there
were no B&N around. What's strange is that Starbucks wasn't around either but
then they opened up 2 on 125th and they were always packed, so I really don't
buy the bogus argument that "there just isn't enough demand". I usually don't
indulge in Schadenfreude, but I can't say I'm unhappy with the b&n closings
and amazon beating them to a pulp (pun intended).

------
sonnyblarney
Yes we all like the notion of 'bookstores' \- but there's very hard economic
realities to why they are not very common.

This is 80% a function of supply and demand. No amount of good will will make
this work unless people are buying books.

Surely - someone making a statement, catering to a niche not otherwise catered
to, encouraging reading - this is all good.

But people need to buy books (or whatever else they sell) and that's most of
the story.

So this looks like a 'good news' story, I wish them well. But we need to buy
books (there, and a places like this) for it to work.

------
suff
In high rent areas of the country, like New York, don't count on proving
anything about the independent bookstore model that has been bankrupt for 20
years. Maybe first focus on the things you can control, like not chasing the
world's largest book seller out of your city. Maybe start with that. With
25,000 more techies walking around, I'm sure the local market demand for books
would increase not decrease.

------
bpyne
I hope we're seeing the pendulum swinging a little back. I'm not giving up my
e-reader. But, there's a place for paper books and the culture they bring to a
neighborhood.

------
scrape_it
I often wonder when reading articles on African American news, whether it's
more than a concidence that areas with high concentration of African American
population is lacking the same access to public institutions as the rest of
America. For instance, why is there so many liquor and gun stores in the 'hood
so to speak?

Really happy and proud of this owner for this initiative, but other than just
being another Model Minority Today piece, the institutional racism evident in
the US is clearly visible to me as an outsider, and it appears to me, a sly,
covert, purposeful, institutionally enforced ignorance prevalent in American
society as a result of Nixon's attack on ethnic political expression through a
caricature that is the war on drugs, in accelerating their collective demise
through economic and educational deprivation. It wasn't like African Americans
weren't trying either, for example, there once was a thriving economy called
"Black Wallstreet" that was destroyed by the white establishment.

It's not evident just from the treatment of African Americans throughout US
history but other minorities. For instance, disarming Koreans who were
defending their stores from looters, and letting the communities they built up
burn to the ground, and only then, sending in the national guard, Japanese
Internment Camps, more recently the plight of hurricane Katrina victim's
treatment, kids of refugees and asylum seeking parents who are stuck in a
privatized camp with reports of sexual abuse from the caretakers in the
absence of their parents, are escaping an increasingly violent narco-economies
in South America that were formed out of the same institutional deprivation
and usurpation of national resources by American corporations throughout Latin
American history, ex) United Fruits Company, comes to my mind.

~~~
marcinzm
>For instance, why is there so many liquor and gun stores in the 'hood so to
speak?

Because they make money. I suspect you'll find many liquor and gun stores in
poor red neck areas as well. You can blame outside forces all you want but at
the end of the day multi-generational poverty causes and perpetuates many
issues on it's own.

~~~
skookumchuck
That's right. There's no conspiracy why people open liquor and gun stores and
where they locate them, and no mystery. People open stores to make money.
Greed trumps racism.

Good luck opening a bookstore anywhere. They don't make money anymore, and any
business model that relies on pity purchases is doomed to fail.

Besides, there are already bookstores offering free books - public libraries.

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intrasight
As a Bronx boy (Bronx born anyway), this makes me happy.

~~~
kkylin
I didn't grow up in the Bronx, but did live there. I remember the one Barnes &
Noble (fondly) and am glad to hear this news.

~~~
saalweachter
The fun thing about New York City is that what everyone else considers
national box stores are your hometown chains.

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trentmb
Why isn't there a library?

~~~
aplusbi
There are several libraries in the Bronx (33 by my count). But just as a
bookstore isn't a replacement for a library, a library isn't a replacement for
a bookstore.

Sometimes you want to own a book, be able to write it in, tear pages out, and
make it your own.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Or, if you're Pepe Carvalho, rip off and toss the page you just read into the
fireplace.

(Some writers know how to pull strings.)

