Last Saturday’s opening of the New Stelling View Mall was an unquestionable triumph for the small business sector. Sixty-six new businesses, many owned by forward-looking entrepreneurs who come from a tradition of roadside vending now boast more attractive enterprises. Some of these are transformed rather than new businesses.
What is now Stelling View was once known as Donkey City, a huge expanse of property south of the Stabroek Market, overlooking the Demerara River. Trading has been taking place here for years.
In its thoroughly transformed state, however, the area has come to resemble a genuine shopping mall with its shuttered stalls and concreted walkways. The new enterprises comprise an attractive mix of traders offering everything from ground provisions, sold from an attractive roundhouse, to cellular phones. The shop signs are attractively painted courtesy of Alabama Trading, a downtown enterprise. In return, Alabama advertising signs sit alongside the painted signs. Clerk of Markets Schulder Griffith cites the gesture by Alabama as an example of the kind of collaboration between the established urban business community and the vending sub-sector that has helped to make Stelling View possible.
Griffith is keen to promote Stelling View as a City Hall project. The costs associated with the evident renovation and restoration work may have been borne by the new stallholders, but the municipality is laying claim to the project itself, citing it as part of City Hall’s ongoing effort to arrest the problem of pavement vending while recognizing that small businesses must be facilitated rather than reined in.
The new stallholders are caught between the sense of accomplishment which their attractive premises now engender and the inevitable interregnum of waiting for Stelling View to catch on. The opening of the new facility provides no automatic assurance of commercial success. Downtown Georgetown trading is a complex affair, an ongoing and often aggressive rivalry between the established traders and the pavement vendors who possess the advantage of being closer to the shoppers. It will take time for the New Stelling View Mall to catch on. It was the same with the Water Street Arcade, opened a few years earlier. Some of the businesses there are still complaining about the illegal competition from the street vendors who refuse to go away.
It is a complicated affair, the result of, among other things, the persistent failure on the part of City Hall to suppress the practice of street vending. It is not an issue which the Clerk of Markets is keen to discuss. He is caught between the clamour of the vendors who insist that they too must make a living and the insistence of the small enterprises in the Water Street Arcade and, more recently, Stelling View that if the vendors continue to have immediate access to shoppers the established arcades are unlikely to thrive. They make the point that their considerable investments entitle them to greater market access.
Since earlier this year more vendors appear to occupy the streets and pavements in the vicinity of the Stabroek Market. If the municipality is evasive on the issue the vendors are more talkative. They are, it seems, determined not to be closed down and, it appears, their persistence is facilitated by the pockets of corruption that inform the relationships between themselves and the City Police.
Now that Stelling View is officially open for business, the Clerk of Markets appears to be coming under increasing pressure on the issue of removing the vendors from the streets and pavements close to the Stabroek Market. It is a problem which the Clerk of Markets acknowledges though there appears to be no ready solution. The sheer numbers of roadside vendors now in evidence near the market suggest that it would take a major operation to remove them. And it is not clear that City Hall has the political will to undertake such an exercise.
Some of the Stelling View stallholders have emulated the practice employed earlier by their counterparts in the Water street Arcade. They have retained their street vending operations, simultaneously running their businesses from Stelling View while trading illegally on the roadside. In the mornings they move goods from their Stelling View stalls to the roadside. At the end of the trading day they return the unsold goods to the stalls. Otherwise, they say, it would be hard to make a living.
Stelling View may offer a greater sense of ownership and prestige but the money is on the streets and pavements. Griffith fears that a point may be reached where some of the Stelling View stalls may be used for little more than storage and he is keen to see the problem addressed.
Earlier this week people were finding their way into the New Stelling View Mall though there were few signs of vigorous waiting. Many of them appear to be hoping that what they believe is the barrier to aggressive Christmas shopping created by the impending general elections will come and go quickly. They worry about missing out on the major trading season of the year in circumstances where debts incurred to invest in their new businesses have to be repaid.
Griffith, meanwhile, is optimistic that a sense of order can be brought to the streets of the city in circumstances that take account of the need to regularize urban trading. He says that the process of identifying areas in the capital where more shopping malls can be built to accommodate the continually growing army of street vendors is a work in progress. Two such sites close to the Bourda Market are under consideration. Whether there will ever be enough space in the already crowded capital to accommodate new business enterprises is unclear though Griffith sees the advent of the New Stelling View Mall as an indication that enterprise is alive and well in the capital.
