The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Businesses struggle to rise from ashes
Lack of adequate insurance often hinders looting victims.
KENOSHA, WIS. — It’s a prominent refrain these days from activists in the aftermath of arson and looting — businesses have insurance. Buildings can be repaired. Broken glass is a small price to pay in a movement for justice.
One new book, “In Defense of Looting,” argued that looting is an essential tactic against a racist capitalist society, and a largely victimless crime — again, because stores will be made whole through insurance. The top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer resigned amid outcry for publishing the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
“‘People over property’ is great as a rhetorical slogan,” the paper’s architecture critic, Inga Saffron, wrote in that piece. “But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities.”
On the burned-out blocks hit by unrest since the killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis in late spring, the reality is complicated. Floyd’s death was the start of months of protests for racial justice led by the Black Lives Matter movement that have left long-term economic damage, especially in lower-income business districts.
While large chains like Walmart and Best Buy have excellent insurance, many small businesses that have been burned down since the riots lack similar coverage.
And for them, there is no easy way to replace all that they lost.
In Kenosha, more than 35 small businesses were destroyed, and around 80 have been damaged, according to the city’s business association. Almost all are locally owned and many are underinsured or struggling to manage.
“It’s a common problem, businesses being underinsured, and the consequences can be devastating,” said Peter Kochenburger, executive director of the Insurance Law LLM Program and a University of Connecticut law professor.
“We can’t call corporate,” said Ricardo Tagliapietra, who owns three restaurants in Kenosha. “There’s no backup.”
When people started burning down buildings in Kenosha after the police shooting of Jacob Blake on Aug. 23, Tony Farhan prayed that his electronics shop would be left alone.
The Farhans have struggled economically in recent years. Farhan, his wife and their four sons moved in with his parents while their savings went to one son’s health care. Farhan’s ambition for a better life was tied up in the shop. So were many of his family’s belongings. They couldn’t fit all the clothes and toys for their boys in the crowded house they shared with his parents, so they tucked things away in the shop storage room.
“Half my house was in there,” said Farhan, 36, who grew up in Kenosha.
The shop, which sells cellphones, charging cords, headphones and speakers, was looted on the night Blake was shot and burned the next. So was his brother’s shoe and clothing shop next door. The apartment units upstairs burned with them, as did many other buildings in the working-class neighborhood of Uptown Kenosha, a historic and bustling multicultural neighborhood. Weeks later, it remained a scene of char and rubble.
They have insurance, though they say it is not enough, and now they are tangling to get the money. But personal items they stored in the shops were not insured, they said. Farhan does not know how he will pay to replace his children’s winter clothes that were in a storage room.
“I have no job, and I’m using credit cards,” said Farhan, who is of Palestinian descent. “I’m going into debt, and I just got out of debt.”
Farhan’s brother Vinnie, 40, who had the shoe and clothing shop next door, said the logistics of wrestling the insurance companies and restarting his life were overwhelming. “People don’t see behind the scenes. I put everything into starting this business.”
In the units above the Farhans’ shops, all the tenants made it out alive, but several family pets died in the fires, the brothers said. One upstairs resident started an online fundraiser the brothers highlighted: “My mom and I lost everything and our 2 cats and now my mom is homeless and I would like to try to raise money to help her with getting a place,” the tenant’s daughter, Ashley Powell, wrote on the GoFundMe page.
Farhan, hoping some of the insurance and redevelopment grants will come his way soon, said he recently borrowed $20,000 to buy a new storefront nearby to start again.
It is unclear if the looters and rioters in this town — or the ones that tore through the commercial districts of Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Chicago — were genuinely committed to the Black Lives Matter movement or just taking advantage of a chaotic situation after the police shooting of Blake, which is now being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice.
But the topic is a difficult one to broach even for the riots’ victims: Many on the left decry anyone who criticizes looting, arguing that it is a justifiable expression of rage, widely quoting (out of context) Martin Luther King Jr. that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”
At a recent antifa gathering in Portland, Oregon, protesters shared literature arguing for the righteousness of property destruction with titles like “Why Break Windows.”
In a media critique earlier this year published on the website Refinery29, Britni de la Cretaz wrote: “Putting the focus on stealing objects from a store (during a pandemic, no less!) rather than on the injustice behind the looting, the horrific loss of life and racial violence that Black folks live with every day, is sending the message that property matters more than people. It just demonstrates the way that white supremacy sees more value in a TV set than in the life of a Black man.”
And Preston Mitchum, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and the co-chair of Collective Action for Safe Spaces DC, said in an interview: “Businesses will be OK. You can revive a business. You can’t bring back people who are killed by the cops.”
Within the argument that looting is a minor issue is the assumption that property owners can easily replace what was lost. But many of the small businesses in Kenosha’s lower- and middle-income Uptown neighborhood will not receive enough in insurance proceeds to fully replace destroyed property. And many business owners across Kenosha describe the losses in more personal ways.
“We lived here, basically,” said Scott Carpenter, the owner of office furniture supply shop B&L Furniture, whose family has run the shop for 40 years just a few blocks from the Farhans’ stores. “It was our home away from home.”
It is now burned out, a couple of walls still standing around the melted core. The office furniture is gone, of course. So is the play area in the corner with games and old NASCAR memorabilia he and his father built for local kids. His family owned the building and has insurance, and he estimates the cost to rebuild will be around $1.5 million. He plans on reopening in a rented location four miles away in a neighborhood he thinks is safer.
One pattern that emerged in the aftermath of the riots in Kenosha: Many whiteowned businesses like Carpenter’s had better, more comprehensive insurance and records than those owned by people of color, according to several leaders in the business community.
Still, the pain was broadly felt. At the local used tire shop, the owner, Linda Tolliver, who is white, is waiting for new windows to replace those broken in the riots (her landlord’s insurance is covering it). In the meantime, she estimated she was paying about $800 extra each month to heat the shop, which now lacks proper windows, and she is working all day behind plywood without natural light.
Tolliver said she was making do with less — cutting back on employee hours and forgoing the new winter uniforms her workers need.