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The Urban Conservancy launches StayLocal.org — A Community Database of Locally-Owned and Operated Businesses.

Just as many of New Orleans’ locally owned businesses are handed down from generation to generation, so too are business recommendations passed along, word-of-mouth, from mother to daughter, father to son, friend to friend. In most US cities, shopping is an impersonal experience and transactions are purely financial. Not so in New Orleans, where your haircut comes with a history lesson, your contractor is a font of culinary wisdom, and the cab driver giving you a lift today may be the musician you go out to see tonight.

Today we celebrate our local economy. We celebrate the local businesses that stayed with us this past year — when the corporate chains abandoned us. We celebrate the local businesses that are still working day after day to reopen — because we know you are going to make it one day soon and we look forward to sharing the victory with you.

In 2003, The Urban Conservancy launched a new initiative called Stay Local! that encouraged people to spend their dollars at locally-owned and operated businesses. While the arguments may have seemed a bit academic back then, the events of the past year have convinced almost everyone of the importance of our local businesses.

As the New York Times recently recognized:

“New Orleans’s little restaurants, independent stores and small manufacturers do not just add flavor to the economy; in a city that lacks a big corporate base, they are the economy.”

“The city estimates that 95 percent of the 22,000 businesses here before Hurricane Katrina employed fewer than 100 workers (fewer than 25, in most cases). These included not just shops, but also the artists and manufacturers and wholesalers that supplied them, and the accountants and lawyers and cleaning companies that served them.”

With so many words being written about the past year, we thought it was a good time to look forward — forward to an economy teeming with locally-owned and operated businesses supporting a vibrant culture and a healthy environment.

The new and improved staylocal.org is provided as a free service to the community. The website is an ongoing effort and will be evolving over the coming months. Take it for a test drive! You can search for a particular business by using its name (Domilise). You can search for all the businesses in a given category (clothing, nurseries, sno-balls) or you can perform more complicated searches such as looking for a hardware store in zip code 70116 (hardware AND 70116).

Let us know what works and what can be improved — we don’t claim to have worked out all the bugs!

Don’t see your favorite local business? Let us know and we’ll add it. Don’t see your business? Fill out the on-line form and we’ll get it up as soon as possible. And yes, artists and musicians count as businesses! So put your name out there and let the rest of us know what you got.

Many people collaborated on this project and we want to thank them for their generous assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development provided funding support through their Universities Rebuilding America Partnership. Our friends Jake Wagner, Michael Frisch, and Vince Gautier at the University of Missouri - Kansas City shared their knowledge and passion. And our web developer, Ben Gauslin, performed miracles with $50 worth of software and a determination to build something of lasting value to the community.

Finally, we would like to dedicate the launch of staylocal.org to our friend Cassie Melendez — because today is your birthday. And because a year ago today you lost your home and your city. Maybe this is one small step on your road home.

Filed under: Editorials | Projects | Rebuilding New Orleans | Stay Local