A guiding star in South L.A.
After more than a quarter-century of struggle to nurture small businesses in the challenging environment of South Los Angeles, Marva Smith Battle-Bey received national recognition for her efforts Monday when the Small Business Administration honored her as its 2007 National Minority Small Business Champion.
Battle-Bey, president and chief executive of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit she has headed since 1981, credited her organization’s track record for the award.
“I think it’s the staying power of the work that we’ve done, and the results,” Battle-Bey said.
Her first big project, the Vermont Slauson Shopping Center, opened in 1981. It was the first major retail investment in the community since the 1965 Watts riots, she said, and today it remains fully leased.
The executive also fostered the first business incubator in South L.A., built two affordable housing projects and launched many business development and technical assistance initiatives.
But perhaps her biggest success has been leveraging the neighborhood’s changing demographics to persuade the Gigante grocery store chain, Mexico’s third largest, to open a store in 2003.
Gigante now anchors the 60,000-square-foot Vermont Slauson Retail Center, developed by Battle-Bey’s group at Vermont and Slauson avenues.
The widely heralded achievement was a long time coming, typical of the sometimes painfully slow pace of commercial economic development projects. Battle-Bey’s organization bought the four-acre parcel from Safeway Inc.’s Vons supermarket chain in 1998.
This year, a Starbucks coffee shop and a Yoshinoya fast-food outlet will open in the remaining retail space at the center, where the nonprofit has its offices. But efforts to attract a sit-down restaurant failed and a proposed Burger King was unable to obtain financing.
Today, 15 years after the civil unrest of 1992 and the flurry of post-riot investment promises by businesses and government, attracting new businesses continues to be a tough sell. Aside from Gigante, the area still lacks grocery stores.
Battle-Bey has fought to bring new businesses and to encourage local entrepreneurs in an effort to fill the gaps in services and jobs.
“The more people and jobs there are, the more businesses there are, the more commerce, leading to better housing, better education. So it’s all kind of tied together,” said Battle-Bey, a Detroit native who earned her master’s degree in urban planning at USC.
Battle-Bey, who is recuperating from her second knee surgery, is beginning to think about passing the baton to a new generation of community leaders. She would like to move on in a few years, possibly teaching, writing or public speaking, she said. Battle-Bey recently talked about her work in an interview.
Has interest in South Los Angeles waned since the 1992 unrest?
There’s been some. But for every new development in our neighborhood, you know that whoever the developer is, they had to work hard to get those tenants to come to their development. It wasn’t easy. The shopping center that was built adjacent to our neighborhood, many people see that and say, Wow! That’s great. But the developer had to pull teeth to get the tenants to sign up because of the perception. The perception is still there that people cannot make money in our neighborhood, of the violence and of the increased cost to do business in South L.A.
How available is the money you need to do your work?
I would say it is way down. When I came into this work in the ‘80s during the Reagan administration, everything was being slashed -- the FDA, HUD, the Department of Commerce, every place you could think of where there was money coming into underserved communities. I’m used to working with less money. But there is even less money now and you have more groups fighting for the same pot of money. It’s more competitive. There are more regulations. And it’s more difficult to access those avenues than ever. So it’s a struggle.
Is the area still a tough sell to developers?
It’s not easy to convince people to come. It hasn’t gotten any easier. But people now know what the issues are, so it’s not like you are talking to people who, 25 years ago, were uninformed. Today at least people know that if they are interested in our community, they can get better marketing statistics to help them see what the numbers are. In the past, people just didn’t believe there was an opportunity.
Your last big project was done in 2003, and half of your board has retired but not been replaced. Is the corporation in a lull?
We are just constantly working. We have lots of programs that we operate even when we don’t do projects. We don’t operate like the private sector where they have all these projects on line right after the other, because they have a private means of funding those projects and we don’t. So it’s very time-consuming to do commercial projects and that’s why you don’t see a lot of nonprofits doing them. You have to raise a lot of money to do commercial projects. It just takes longer to pull together all the resources you need.
Everything we do is almost like five years apart. All of our small projects are, of course, debt-free, as is our first shopping center. So it takes a while to put that kind of package together.
What’s next?
I’ve wanted to do a kitchen incubator for at least 15 years. I got derailed after the 1992 unrest when a group of folks said they wanted to do something similar. That facility never came about.
We’re doing the feasibility study with a grant from Washington Mutual. We’ll build a facility and use it for training food service workers. We’ll also rent space to a lot of the small businesses that right now cook from their homes.
What focus have you taken that helped your group succeed?
I think we really calculate our risks, so we haven’t had any failures, which is a good thing. We haven’t lost money on our projects, so that has been huge for us as a nonprofit because real estate in itself is very much a risky business.
What business disappointments have you had?
Every grant we apply for, we don’t always get. So there can be disappointments there. I’ve had a lot of disappointments, but I see them all as a learning experience for whatever the next project is.
I consider those disappointments to not be obstacles that are not surmountable. You get over that stuff because you have to. So [if] someone else gets the funds, you figure out how to do a better job and be more competitive next time. We don’t let that stand in the way of our trying to continue to do our work.
Any work you wanted to accomplish that you haven’t?
Oh no, I’ve done more than I even thought was possible. There hasn’t been anything I wanted to do that we haven’t been able to accomplish. I can say this: There are a few times when I have not competed for something because I felt another organization would have been a better competitor, and then they didn’t compete and I wasn’t happy about that.
But everything we really thought we should do, we’ve gone on and done it. We plan to do more, of course.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Community leader
Name: Marva Smith Battle-Bey
Title: President and chief executive
Company: Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp.
Employees: 8
Annual budget: $1.5 million
Accomplishments: Developed the Vermont Slauson Shopping Center (1981); an industrial small-business incubator (1986); two 20-unit housing projects (1992 and 1995); the Business Enterprise Center (2000); the Vermont Slauson Retail Center (2003)
What’s next: A commercial kitchen/food-service business incubator
Source: Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp.
