Monday, November 2, 2009

Crepes Come to Flint

The Eating Flint blog has a great post on what it takes to successfully open a new business in Flint. It's not easy:
It turns out that the City of Flint has an ordinance which prohibits any carts like the crepe cart from doing business in the downtown area. (This explains why the Hot Dog Cart mysteriously disappeared from Saginaw Street). They made inquiries, of course, and tried to resolve the issue so they could run their business and not fear being shut down only days after getting started. They learned “informally” that if they stayed on private property, nobody would bother them. Thus, the Chamber of Commerce parking lot.

Days after getting started, Tim and Robb received a couple of visitors. A Flint police officer and a representative from the City Clerk’s Office notified the new business owners that they were in violation of the city ordinance and “to the extent that the cart was on private property that we were in violation of certain land use restrictions.” Uh oh. According to Tim, the officer and the representative didn’t actually say they were going to do anything about the “violations.” They were just there to notify.

The new business owners were beginning to realize that there were "certain business interests which were not happy about us being there."
Read the whole story here.



2 comments:

  1. Randall Gearhart commented on your note "Crepes Come to Flint":

    "Crepey story, Gordon. ;^)"

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.