Neighboring business owners who work along Fifth Avenue told NBC 7 that the departure is causing concern.
“What am I hoping for? What am I doing here? What’s next for me?,” Luigi Vera, owner of the Luigi Vera Boutique in Hillcrest, said. “If the big corporations are leaving, what am I going to do? I’m a small business.”“I cannot go home peaceful and I cannot rest because, you know, I’ve been thinking all the time, what’s going to happen today?” Vera said.
“Even people from town that haven’t been in for a while are blown away, that ‘it’s more like downtown,’ is what people will say,” Kris Nelson, owner of Bluestocking Books, said. “We basically work in a team now and that’s part of why,” Nelson said. “We’ve adapted to back each other up. We just try to stay defensive.”“I mean, people in Hillcrest used to complain that there wasn’t anywhere to park. There’s still nowhere to park, but they don’t complain about it anymore, they complain about the homeless and that’s pretty much it,” Nicholls said.