The Miller Village Shopping Center wasn’t the kind of commercial hub that beckoned you from the street. A modest strip mall built in the early 1990s, it housed a bar, a nail salon, a Chinese restaurant, a GNC and a small dance studio. A Storage Center anchored one side of it, a Rite Aid the other.
If you don’t live in the neighborhood and you happened to pass it while approaching the intersection of Old Hammond Highway and Millerville Road, you probably wouldn’t have looked twice, unless you needed something at Rite Aid. It lacked the charm of the Antiques District in Denham Springs or the retro chic appeal of Government Street in Mid City.
But as Business Report details in its new cover story, “Washed Away,” the small businesses that were located in Miller Village meant the world to people who call that part of Baton Rouge home. Until Target and Chili’s opened down the street in the late 2000s, little else was around.
For more than 20 years, Hong Kong restaurant was the go-to place for Chinese food, and its bustling take-out business saved many working parents the trouble of cooking dinner on a busy weeknight. Exotica Nails was a popular salon, with cheap quality pedicures and killer foot massages. Big Heads was the neighborhood watering hole, where a clientele of mostly middle-aged guys hung out, drank beer and watched sports on big screen TVs.
Then there was Dance by Trudie, something of an institution in that part of town. Its proprietress, “Miss” Trudie Osterberger, began teaching little Baton Rouge girls to dance in 1967. She’d owned her own studio in Miller Village since 1992. In just a few months, she would have celebrated her 50th anniversary of teaching dance.
“I thought we’d make it to 50 years and then I’d step down and retire,” Osterberger says. “We didn’t make it.”
When the waters began rising in the Capital Region during last month’s historic flood, Dance by Trudie was inundated with more than three feet of water. So were the other tenants at Miller Village. Their businesses were ruined, and none of them will be coming back—at least not at Miller Village. A few days after the disaster, the shopping center’s owner terminated their leases and began moving forward with plans to redevelop the property.
What will they do now? Where will they go?
“We don’t know what we will do,” says Vy Nguyen, who ran Exotica Nails, supporting her mother and four siblings with the revenues it generated. “How can we reopen somewhere else? We lost the business, we lost the house and we lost the cars, so there’s no money now.”
The story of Miller Village is one that’s playing out all over the greater Baton Rouge area, where an estimated 12,000 businesses—roughly 35% of all businesses in the Capital Region—were located in areas affected by flooding. The majority of them are small businesses, and many have been completely wiped out. Fewer than 20% had flood insurance and, like the Miller Village tenants, some are now finding out that on top of losing their livelihoods they’ll have to rebuild somewhere else, if they’re able to rebuild at all.
The situation is one of many keeping property and business owners up at night. They’re calling their lawyers with questions about the legal, technical and financial issues related to the redevelopment of flooded commercial properties.
Important questions are also being raised about what these losses mean for the future of neighborhoods in the Capital Region. What happens when entire developments of small businesses disappear? What is the cost to the community when its mom-and-pop shops go under?
The answer can’t be calculated on a spreadsheet because when a neighborhood loses its locally owned establishments it loses more than a convenient place to get a pedicure or a beer. It loses its sense of community, and the connective tissue that holds people together and binds them to the place they call home.
Read the complete Business Report cover story, as well as sidebar stories about how one popular Denham Springs bar and grill is planning to make a comeback after the flood, and how a creative partnership is keeping the spirit of Naylor’s Hardware and Garden Center alive.
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