Recent Press
Houston Chronicle
ARTICLE:
Turkey Leg Hut Fest gives new businesses needed exposure, by Robert Downen (Houston Chronicle)
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A block away, 39-year-old Steve Stephens bounced back and forth between the home he owns across from the Turkey Leg Hut and the [360 photo booth] 3D camera that he’d set up to draw interest from festival attendees.
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In August 2020, he opened a new business, Houston Party House, that rents out space for parties and events in the Third Ward.
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It was one of the nearly 4.4 million new businesses that were launched across the country that year, a 24 percent increase that the National Bureau of Economic Research found was particularly pronounced in Black communities.
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The Third Ward, where half of the residents are Black, was no exception: They jumped by more than one-quarter that year. Other predominantly Black parts of Houston saw similar increases, including in the East Little York/Homestead and South Park areas, where new business registrations tripled in 2020.
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Experts have noted that the rise in Black-owned businesses corresponds with the arrival of COVID-19 stimulus checks and that protests over the murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans brought in much-needed support for small, minority-owned businesses.
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SOURCE:
robert.downen@chron.com