Keeping the Bodegas, Banyas and Barbershops: A Toolkit For Creating, Growing, and Sustaining a Legacy Business Program to Preserve Cultural and Community Continuity

Abstract

This framework document introduces the concept of legacy businesses and how to preserve them. Legacy businesses are the longstanding small businesses that help define, retain, and sustain their communities' cultural heritage. These businesses play an essential role in shaping neighborhood character, sense of place, and cultural continuity, especially in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), ethnic, and immigrant communities. Additionally, when these legacy businesses are displaced, the impacts are intensified, weakening community cohesion and harming residents' well-being. This makes them worthy targets for preservation.

This document challenges the idea that market forces alone should determine whether these businesses continue. It outlines how speculative development, gentrification, limited access to capital, and barriers to business services or succession planning create structural pressures that disproportionately threaten legacy business owners and the communities they support.

This framework document serves as the foundation for an online, freely accessible legacy business program toolkit. The toolkit is designed primarily for community organizers and nonprofits, with municipal governments and historic preservation professionals as a secondary audience. Drawing on first-hand experience, primary research, case studies, best practices, academic theory, and interdisciplinary resources, the toolkit provides a straightforward process and set of policy options for creating, building, and sustaining legacy business programs.

This document also details the theories and current conversations in preservation practice that shaped the toolkit’s development. It positions the toolkit as a conduit for advancing more equitable, inclusive, and community-centered preservation approaches. Finally, the project argues that legacy business programs offer a means to expand preservation beyond the built environment, support more democratic practice, and sustain cultural continuity in communities.