Curating the City: Legacy Businesses

Curating the City

Legacy Businesses

Legacy businesses are long-standing neighborhood anchors where people connect, memories are made, and our sense of community is nourished. Legacy businesses are also a major source of employment and in some areas, an essential neighborhood amenity.

The Conservancy is excited to share that the City of L.A.’s Legacy Business Toolkit is now available! We created this new digital resource for the City’s Legacy Business Program to help legacy business owners safeguard, strengthen, and grow their businesses. Learn more →

Overview

Keeping ‘Mom and Pop’

Longtime businesses found in neighborhoods across Los Angeles County add to our rich history and culture.

Whether it’s the family-owned bakery down the street, the dry cleaner locals swear by, or the restaurant where your partner proposed, these familiar and beloved places are our legacy businesses. They’re a huge part of what makes each of our neighborhoods and communities unique. As neighborhood anchors, legacy businesses help shape our city’s cultural identity, drive our local economies, and provide needed jobs, goods, and services.

Building on our track record of supporting legacy businesses and acknowledging their many contributions, the Conservancy launched our Legacy Business Initiative in November 2019. Our initial goal and work concentrated on awareness-building, promotion, and education to bring attention to increasingly threatened and at-risk small longtime businesses throughout the City and County. Six years into this work, we have helped define what a legacy business is in Greater Los Angeles – a community-serving, locally-owned commercial establishment in operation for at least twenty years.

We hope this microsite brings you a greater understanding of the important role legacy businesses play in our communities, the challenges they face, and how you can take a more active role to ensure these places remain vital components of L.A. County.

About This Issue

What Is a Legacy Business?

Legacy—or longtime—businesses are important to our region’s heritage and economy, yet many are not fully appreciated and acknowledged for what they provide to communities, with increasing numbers at risk post-pandemic. Soaring rents, development pressures, and lack of succession plans are some of the ongoing challenges faced by many legacy business owners.

A legacy business is a longtime community-serving business that typically has been around for over twenty years and serves as a mainstay of a neighborhood.

What if a long-term business changes ownership—is it still a legacy business? Not always, especially if a new owner provides a completely new use, good, or service unrelated to the longstanding business that closed or moved elsewhere.

What defines a legacy business is not only its longevity but also its contribution to the neighborhood’s identity and traditions, creating a sense of place, culture, and belonging for customers and neighbors.

Policies & Programs

How policy and programs can protect legacy businesses

In 2013, San Francisco Heritage launched Legacy Bars and Restaurants to encourage residents to experience the history of 100 of San Francisco’s most cherished longstanding restaurants and bars. By 2015, the Board of Supervisors approved the creation of the San Francisco Legacy Business Registry, which is now open to businesses and nonprofits thirty years or older that have made a significant impact on the history or culture of their neighborhood. San Francisco voters have now passed a measure creating the Legacy Business Historic Preservation Fund, which provides grants to legacy business owners and property owners who agree to favorable lease terms with legacy business tenants.

In 2016, the City of Seattle funded a Legacy Business Study to better understand issues affecting legacy businesses and consider recommendations to support them. Completed in 2017, the study found that programs in U.S. cities primarily assist small, local businesses as opposed to legacy businesses. In cities abroad, including Paris, London, and Buenos Aires, governments provide funds to promote and preserve cultural heritage assets such as legacy businesses. Seattle is currently developing a multilingual toolkit to help businesses with commercial leases and plans to support succession planning and to assist with the marketing and branding of legacy businesses.

San Francisco Heritage’s policy paper, Sustaining San Francisco’s Living Heritage, credits Buenos Aires Bares Notables, an official designation program initiated in the 1990s for bars, cafes, and other legacy businesses as inspiration for their own Legacy Bars and Restaurants initiative.

Our Position

How can we help legacy businesses impacted by factors such as neighborhood change, economic challenges, the rise of digitalization, aging building stock, and aging founders?

Legacy businesses vary widely and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to meeting their needs. They may be housed in older buildings, both nondescript and those that are architecturally significant. Some buildings may have been altered over time to support new uses by the longtime owner, or by a new owner.

Owners of legacy businesses housed in architecturally or culturally significant buildings, or are located in eligible historic districts, may consider landmark designation to protect and manage change to the building over time. In these cases, the property owner may take advantage of financial incentives like preservation tax credits and grants available to owners of landmarked buildings. Legacy businesses that are primarily culturally significant may have a harder time making a case for landmark designation.

While landmark designation may help with neighborhood stabilization and, in some cases, even help offset rent increases, it does not alleviate many of the day-to-day operational challenges facing a legacy business owner. To this point, landmark designation primarily benefits property owners, and not necessarily legacy business owners, who may be tenants.

Technical assistance and access to capital provided by municipalities or nonprofit organizations may offer needed business resources, but some business owners may find these difficult to access, or not specifically designed with a legacy business in mind. In these cases, legacy business owners would benefit from the creation of specific city- and county-wide tools and programs.

A local study conducted in Long Beach found the future of its legacy businesses will come into question when baby boomer owners retire in the next five to fifteen years.

In September 2019, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a motion by Councilmember Curren Price, Jr., instructing the Economic and Workforce Development Department to study legacy business programs created in other cities and to provide recommendations for implementing a similar program in Los Angeles. The City Council’s Economic Development and Jobs (EDJ) Committee began consideration of a new citywide legacy business program in March 2022, which the City Council adopted later that year. The Conservancy joined over 20 community-based organizations in support of the program. More information about the program’s approval can be found in City Council File No. 19-0781.

In 2020, the City of Pasadena created its own Legacy Business program. In the same year, the City of West Hollywood directed staff to explore the establishment of a legacy business registry, preservation fund, and other incentives for legacy businesses in their jurisdiction.

Join our Legacy Business Network to stay informed about important updates and resources in support longtime businesses.

Legacy Business Toolkit

The Conservancy is excited to share that the City of L.A.’s Legacy Business Toolkit is now available! We created this new digital resource for the City’s Legacy Business Program to help legacy business owners safeguard, strengthen, and grow their businesses.

To introduce this new resource and connect legacy business owners with the Toolkit’s expert referrals, the City of L.A. will host a live Legacy Business Toolkit Webinar Series later this month. The first five webinar dates have been released (October 28, November 4, November 18, December 2, and December 9, 10:00-11:00 a.m.).

Save the dates, and for now, check out the resources (free and available in English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese)!

A Guide to Accessing Capital to Grow Your Small Business
This toolkit provides comprehensive guidance on essential information on accessing various forms of capital, understanding lender expectations, and utilizing available resources to foster growth and stability.