Green Bay Latino-owned businesses were left behind by PPP funds. It's nothing new.
In the final Protecting Who? installment, a historical look at Green Bay’s largest minority population reveals a disconnect between the community and business growth
Protecting Who? is a four-part series The NEWcomer is producing to delve into how the federal Paycheck Protection Program has affected underrepresented communities in the Greater Green Bay area. This is the fourth and final story in the series.
Catch up with our other stories about how PPP loans did little for Black-owned businesses in Green Bay, the logistical hurdles and application fatigue a small, minority-owned business has experienced in the past year, and a breakdown of the data explaining how bulk Green Bay PPP loans were concentrated in suburbs.
This story was completed with information from Reveal’s Reporting Networks and Big Local News. Thank you for reading.
In 2014, Javier Gomez noticed members of Green Bay’s Latino community weren’t able to receive financing for expensive cell-phone payment plans from large national retailers. He opened Gomez Phone Accessories Plus on University Avenue to fill the need.
“I noticed that and I wanted to do something for our communities and pre-paid as the solution for most of our people,” said Gomez.
Language barriers and a lack of Social Security cards often prevent Latinos in America from getting cell phone plans and financing. Gomez said that small, Latino-owned businesses run into the exact same obstacles when they're looking for assistance.
Seven years later, not a lot has changed.
In the past year, while the COVID-19 pandemic raged throughout Northeast Wisconsin and cut businesses off at the knees across the nation, the federal government stepped in and issued assistance to small businesses through its Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. A lack of language-appropriate information and knowledge has widened an already growing gap for businesses owned and operated by immigrants in Green Bay.
Data provided by Reveal’s Reporting Networks and Big Local News shows there were 2,652 PPP loans distributed in the Greater Green Bay Region in its first year.
Reporters with Reveal spent months doing heavy-data-lifting to develop a tool to approximate a total number of eligible businesses that could have received PPP loans this past year. This approximation combines a count of business addresses from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Postal Service and a count of self-employed workers from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
The region’s densest, majority-White census tract had an estimated 54 eligible businesses, and 100 percent of them received PPP loans. The loans totaled $4.6 million.
In comparison, Green Bay’s majority-Latino census tract had an estimated 70 businesses that would have been eligible to receive a loan. Of the 2,652 loans distributed in the area, only 18 businesses in Green Bay’s majority-Latino census tract received PPP loans, which totaled $1.8 million.
The first round of PPP loans locked out business owners who didn’t have Social Security numbers, even though the loan program was designed to support small businesses in the U.S.— and immigrants make up a larger percentage of new business owners than non-immigrants according to a 2018 National Immigration Forum report.
Gomez said he did not apply for a PPP loan or other assistance in the past year.
Support our work. Subscribe to The NEWcomer. The Biden-Harris administration announced changes to the PPP loan program in February in an effort to increase equitable lending, but the program’s faults have already widened economic gaps that further endanger the future of minority-owned businesses, and the changes are slow-moving.
A 2020 survey from Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice nonprofit organization, found that over 50 percent of Black and Latino small business owners surveyed filed for temporary funding of less than $20,000 from the federal government. Roughly 1 out of every 10 applicants received any funding at all.
Gomez—who also owns and operates Consumidor Hispano, a print and digital business advertising directory found on numerous Green Bay Latino-owned business’ magazine racks—said he heard from business owners he works with that they weren’t applying for assistance because they didn’t have Social Security number, an initial requirement for PPP loan applications that has since been partially rescinded.
“I know some people were not aware of that (change), and I don't know if they had the chance to apply,” said Gomez.
“A golden opportunity”
On an interactive digital map created by Reveal and Geocodio, a commercial geocoding service, Green Bay’s majority-Latino census tract sticks out like a sore thumb. The tract is a light shade of red—an identifier for Latino businesses—and is boxed in by I-43 to the north, Elizabeth Street to the east, University Avenue to the south, and the Fox River to the west.
In person, the City’s Northeast side is dense with taquerias, flower shops, bakeries, Catholic parishes, furniture stores, hole-in-the-wall bars, and single-dwelling homes.
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor of urban and regional studies Marcelo Cruz, an expert in the city’s ethnic populations and their histories, said less than three decades ago, this urban pocket had only a handful of Latino-owned businesses and to him, the boom of new residents is a crucial part of the region's economic history.
In the 1990’s, the area’s meat and food processing and packing plants, a major Green Bay major industry and National Football League namesake, began a massive restructuring push. Cruz said the businesses had two options: close completely—which would have decimated the local economy—or look for cheaper labor.
“(Packing companies) went out and aggressively recruited Mexican labor out in the West coast, California, Washington and Oregon in the 1990’s to come and work in the packing industry as the food processing industry was going through major economic restructuring in this country,” said Cruz.
The next logical step was for new workers and their families to locate around main job sites, such as the plants currently known as American Foods Group and JBS Green Bay.
“The usual network of helping them find housing from the initial group consolidated into a growing Latino population in the 1990s and into the early of the first decades,” said Cruz.
Gomez’s own story follows many of the same patterns Cruz describes. Sixteen years ago he moved from California to be closer to family who had moved to the Green Bay region to find work. While the packing industry has been a large driver for the growth of the Latino population in Green Bay—which is estimated to be 16 percent of the overall population, making it the City’s largest minority group—the growing region allowed for incoming residents to set up shops to support the neighborhood, such as Gomez Phone Accessories Plus.
Now, as Gomez continues to work and expand his business, he has taken his son under his wing, an example of the generational growth and potential Professor Cruz sees as a missed investment opportunity for Green Bay’s community.
“Now we have people who were born in the 90s and are coming of age in the 2020s, who are opening up their own businesses, or who are taking over their parents' business,” said Cruz.
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Throughout the entire Protecting Who? series, The NEWcomer has highlighted disparities found in PPP loans granted in the greater Green Bay area. Since we began this reporting, one new initiative has launched in the region to attempt to close the gap for minority-owned businesses.
The Blueprint Green Bay is a joint initiative by the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce (GBCC), NEW North, and Milwaukee founding company Young Enterprising Society (YES) to mentor and fund minority-, women-, and veteran-owned companies in the greater Green Bay and the surrounding region.
The initiative only accepts applications from businesses in industries such as software as a service (SaaS), mobile tech, health tech, smart manufacturing, and financial technology.
Throughout Green Bay’s majority-Latino census tract and majority-Black census tracts, though, it's harder to find high-tech-focused businesses.
Cruz said while ongoing initiatives to bolster minority-owned businesses and majority non-white communities in the region are well-intentioned, they don't align with the developmental needs of minority communities, which lack the resources to foster businesses that fit the mold of what is trending in investment circles.
“The city is missing a golden opportunity to first of all, acknowledge the population,” said Cruz.
Cruz referred to the dense 54302 zip-code as an enclave economy—businesses that develop to fit the needs of a specific ethnic group in a specific geographic location.
The UWGB professor suggested the creation of a formalized “Mexican District” inside of Green Bay—similar to Chinatowns found in New York City or San Francisco—to celebrate and grow the business corridor.
“You would not only acknowledge them but see how important they are to the economy,” said Cruz. “They may not like us, but they like the dollar.”
Navigating funding
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) gave New North a $150,000 grant to fund The Blueprint Green Bay.
Kelly Armstong, GBCC vice president of economic development, said the chamber anticipates 8 to 12 businesses in each of the first two cohorts.
“This program has been offered and perfected over the previous 6 cohorts and we are using the guidelines and requirements the Blueprint team has spent time vetting,” said Armstrong.
Participants are not guaranteed funding for their startups. Armstrong said there is not a set amount that a company will receive, as funding for the program comes from grants and the dollars provided will be based on the stage the company is in, among other factors.
Businesses that complete the program will receive a slice of that $150,000 funding. Armstrong could not provide details regarding other funding made available to the program through public or private donors. The program is accepting applications through July 19.
At the state level, WEDC and the Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR) have launched grant programs like the WEDC’s Ethnic Minority Emergency Grant and DOR’s Wisconsin Tomorrow Small Business Recovery Grant in the past year. Both programs aim to support minority-owned and small businesses with funding that comes with no strings or interest attached, but smaller funding amounts ($2,000) than an average PPP loan. Green Bay’s average first-round PPP loan amount was $155,000 and certain businesses still qualify for loan forgiveness.
Navigating recovery programs can be confusing and time-consuming. Gomez said he heard from multiple business owners who attempted to apply for the DOR’s Wisconsin Tomorrow Small Business Recovery Grant, but were met with problems due to their tax-ID numbers.
The DOR grant outlines that applicants should’ve applied for funding using their owner’s name and Social Security number if they were sole proprietorships, which many startups are.
A DOR spokesperson said as of July 2, over 45,000 grant approvals have gone out and businesses who haven't gotten a response from the agency regarding their application or problems with their application should be notified soon.
Businesses could also apply for WEDC’s one-time, $2,000 Ethnic Minority Emergency Grant if they had five or fewer full-time-equivalent employees and did not qualify for or receive PPP funding.
Additionally, it’s impossible to understand PPP loans without talking about financial institutions.
In Green Bay, two banks distributed the most loans in the entire region: Nicolet National Bank and Associated Bank. Reveal’s Reporting Networks and Big Local News data shows of the 2,652 PPP loans distributed in the Greater Green Bay Region, Nicolet Bank facilitated 565 loans, and Associated Bank facilitated 432.
In Green Bay, Nicolet Bank facilitated six loans awarded within the majority-Latino census tract, and Associated Bank facilitated three.
A spokesperson for Nicolet Bank declined to comment for this story, as did an Associated Bank spokesperson.
A need for (and lack of) information
Gomez Phone Accessories Plus is located just over the line of the city’s majority-Latino census tract, a few blocks east of the University Avenue and Elizabeth Street intersection, directly across from the American Foods Group behemoth.
Despite the numerous businesses operating in this area, Gomez said not a lot of them know of the resources and business assistance available to them.
“There's a lot of need for information that needs to be given to our community,” said Gomez.
When he opened Gomez Phone Accessories Plus, Gomez said he didn’t know of local resources that help businesses get started in the region. With some business years under his belt, he said he feels more comfortable navigating the fine details of running a business compared to newer businesses starting out, but still isn’t familiar with resources available to him.
“Even myself I probably don't know a lot of places to go for loans or for information about even the chambers of commerce,” said Gomez.
Gomez said he feels there is a lack of local information provided in Spanish for Spanish-speaking people and business owners as well as explicit guidelines for non-traditional business owners. An example of this type of business owner is someone who operates without a personal Social Security number, but still has a registered business with a tax identification number.
Gomez said what he knows now is valuable, but when he first started he had only three things: a location, some cash, and time to Google his questions.
“I just had to find it out myself,” said Gomez.
Editor’s note at 10:00 am CST July 6, 2021: A previous version of this story did not have an image of a map outlining Green Bay’s majority-Latino census tract due to an error with our content management system. This has been updated and provided above.
Wait! Thank you for reading the final story in our Protecting Who? series. This work takes time, effort, and care and frankly can’t happen without your financial support. Consider becoming a paying subscriber today.
Protecting Who? is a four-part series The NEWcomer is producing to delve into how the federal Paycheck Protection Program has affected underrepresented communities in the Greater Green Bay area. This is the fourth and final story in the series.
Catch up with our other stories about how PPP loans did little for Black-owned businesses in Green Bay, the logistical hurdles and application fatigue a small, minority-owned business has experienced in the past year, and a breakdown of the data explaining how bulk Green Bay PPP loans were concentrated in suburbs.
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