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The Minority Majority
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Business New Haven
1/24/2000
By: BNH
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While we weren't looking (shame on us), the entire composition of New Haven's business community shifted.
Gideon Ghebreyesus is one example. In 1992, the Eritrean (that's the Horn of Africa, for the geography-challenged) native and his two brothers founded Caffé Adulis on College Street. Today the eatery is doing well enough to spawn a Manhattan offspring - and earn the Ghebreyesuses Business New Haven's Minority Business of the Year honors.
But they are only one example. During the 1990s the ranks of Elm City entrepreneurs swelled with Africans, Koreans, Pakistanis and South Americans. They put up hard-won capital to found jewelry stores, clothing boutiques, convenience stores, restaurants, laundromats and hundreds of other enterprises large and small.
Their owners may not be the faces you see at Business After Hours. But they are the faces of the future.
The demography of America is inexorably shifting, and New Haven is a microcosm of the whole. Ethnicities once regarded as "minority" by the rest of us are soon to become the majority. Our state capital has the lowest percentage of Caucasian residents of any large city east of the Mississippi.
This can be very good news for business. Two "urban" weekly newspapers and a host of Spanish-language radio stations compete for center-city advertising dollars. Bootstrap retailers fill downtown storefronts which otherwise would be dark. They pay taxes, generate traffic, contribute to the economic vitality of the city.
One of the reasons this publication cites a minority-owned business for excellence is in recognition of this trend. We salute the Ghebreyesus brothers and the dozens of others like them who have gambled on New Haven as a place to do business - and won.
New Haven and the New Economy
The "un-whitening" of New Haven business may be a little-noticed trend. Two other honorees celebrated in these pages - CuraGen and DSL.net - are exemplars of a revolution that is impossible to overlook.
CuraGen - whose founder and CEO, Jonathan Rothberg, has been named BNH's Businessperson of the Year - is a genomics-based drug-discovery and -development company that hopes to unlock the secrets of complex disorders such as cancer. DSL.net hopes to bring high-speed connectivity to smaller businesses in smaller cities throughout the U.S.
Both companies are offsprings of the technology revolution - and both are headquartered in New Haven.
As city and state economic-development officials labor to attract new businesses to Connecticut cities, the question regarding these two high-profile companies (both of which, coincidentally, call th Long Wharf Maritime Center home) is: Why here, and why now?
The surface answers are simple enough. In CuraGen's case, founder Rothberg is a native New Havener whose family made its fortune with Laticrete International. DSL.net found itself here after fleeing the high-priced Fairfield County commercial real-estate market.
But there is a deeper reason. Both DSL.net and CuraGen rely on very highly educated and -trained workforces to make their magic. And both see their New Haven location - with its wealth of amenities, culture, recreation and relatively low living costs - as a key drawing card. And the fact that both companies are succeeding in a hyper-competitive marketplace attests to the fact that their employees must agree with that assessment.
That's a lesson the rest of us would do well to keep in mind. New Haven or Wallingford? You be the judge. BNH
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