Black Fridays

Target Corporation has announced it will close two stores on Chicago’s South Side. The communities are up in arms. They demand investment in their neighborhoods and expect Target to remain. Meanwhile they are calling the company names with darkest meanings.

This is unfortunate. Target did invest in their communities. They hoped for others to do the same. They also expected the city to step up investment in the area, too. But spontaneous investment did not happen and Target Stores were left marooned in an economic field that could not sustain store operations.

No doubt the communities need and deserve the stores. After all, that’s what the stores believed when they made the decision to build new stores there. But the actions of too few have made this a mission of folly for Target. Belief in neighborhood and community is a group thing. It is a self-springing dynamic that builds sustainability. Without it the neighborhood is just a collection of people housed in old, deteriorating buildings and streets. Hopelessness follows and quality of life drops to new lows.

Target has done its job. The larger community did not do its job. Blame does not belong on Target.

To make good things happen in its place, the community’s phoenix stage must appear to design its own destiny. That’s how these things work. It comes from within. It is a micro-economic process. Big enough it may become a macro-economic process. But that is way off in the future.

It takes a few people with vision to build a community’s future. It also takes collaboration and support from within the community to power the building of that future. It will take loyal patronage and attention for that future to live long. The process can be helped by outsiders like corporations, city and state government agencies, and a host of other folks with keen minds focused on the problem. But it is the within that must be there in the first place.

A phoenix comes when it is ready. And willing.

November 23, 2018