EXPERT SOURCE #1: CYNTHIA BROTHERS (VANISHING SEATTLE)

Cynthia Brothers is the founder of and driving force behind Vanishing Seattle, a long-term project documenting the disappearance of small Seattle businesses, and the ways of life that found a home in those venues. Since its founding in 2016, Vanishing Seattle has recorded the comings and goings of hundreds of local businesses. The premise may sound like a plaintive exercise bemoaning the passage of time; but Brothers is careful to celebrate what’s still here, while also casting a light on the more structural reasons establishments might close (rising rents and costs, changing consumer tastes, speculative commercial real-estate ventures reshaping neighborhoods), and doing so without, in our opinion, veering into crotchety NIMBY-ism.

Brothers’s social media accounts are often the first to announce a business’s impending closure — if there’s any forewarning at all. Sometimes there isn’t: A devastating fire breaks out, a personal tragedy forces a permanent closure, an eviction takes place. Columbia City Ale House, the Waterwheel, and the Shanty had enough time to tell customers that they were closing, which can be cathartic for patrons and business owners alike, according to Brothers. “The question of giving people time to come and pay their respects to grieve is really important,” she told CHUM News.

Brothers sees a cocktail of factors making business operations tougher than they were a few years ago. Behavioral and cultural changes since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, have contributed to record-low rates of alcohol consumption, which have positive health implications, but can negatively affect business owners’ revenue. And the rising use of delivery apps may have contributed to decreased in-person patronage. Confronting those two variables is just part of the battle, Brothers implied. “There’s this systemic issue: All these costs are going up — cost of goods, cost of operating, rent — and margins get slimmer and slimmer until it's just unsustainable,” she said. Leases often run out at the end of the calendar year, and January and February are perennially slow months, typically leading to an above-average wave of closures before January 1, she added.

It’s a vicious cycle, Brothers explained: Consumers are dealing with rising costs, leading them to go out less. That means many restaurants and bars are increasing their prices, further disincentivising potential customers from visiting them. Businesses are dealing with rising costs of their own, from rent, to utilities, to insurance, to labor — as their own workers struggle to afford living in or near the city.

This confluence of forces is eroding our “connective tissue,” Brothers noted. Convivial spaces owned by people, rather than large corporations, are closing, depriving us of spaces where several generations can congregate. [Though we might add: Private-equity firms are also shuttering well-regarded national chains like Joann Fabrics by recklessly saddling them with long-term debt, forcing their eventual bankruptcy.] These spaces’ gradual disappearance is further coinciding with the decline of union labor, and the thinning out of fora like bowling alleys and some religious institutions, complicating our ability to share space across ages and backgrounds, and organize together to tackle multivariable crises.

Business closures are more of a symptom, less a cause, of major forces at play: sprouting from the atrophying of welfare systems, the effects of market speculation on real-estate and insurance costs, and a litany of Covid-induced shifts that exacerbate consumers’ and workers’ struggles. Closures can certainly fuel a feedback loop of change on their own, too, turning neighborhoods into ghost towns, or making way for uninspiring, hypercorporatized simulacra of community.

So many variables and timely needs prevent us, understandably, from keeping tabs on every business we have ever frequented; the news of a closure brings another crucial and limited resource, attention, back to businesses in their final days.

Sometimes, that attention can rally community members to save a beloved institution, or encourage a once-shuttered venue to return. There are “bright spots,” Brothers said: Bush Garden is reopening, and Scarecrow Video just announced a successful fundraising campaign. Since our interview, another neighborhood spot, Baker’s, a cocktail bar a klick west of the Waterwheel, announced that it wasn’t going to close after all. But attention isn’t a “silver bullet,” Brothers hedged.