Hanging by a thread | Dobie Mall
November, 2017
Until recently, Dobie Center, located at the corner of 21st and Guadalupe Street was a hub for West Campus residents, mainly UT Austin students, to patronize several local small businesses in one place; mostly family-owned restaurants, beauty salons, and a popular independent video game store. With the anticipation of the new Target opening at Dobie Center on Nov. 12, tenants at Dobie say that property management has been forcing these smaller stores out of the mall to make room for the commercial superstore.
For 16 years, Dobie Center was home to Troy Arn and his small video game store; Resurrected Games. A few months ago Arn said he was subject to intimidation tactics by Trinity Property, the new property management company, until they were forced to leave. “The new Target is coming in,” Arn said. “They evicted a lot of the stores and they wouldn't renew anybody's contracts.”
Arn said that when Red Tail management put Trinity in charge of Dobie Mall and its tenants, the worst that the small business owners expected was increased rent but the result was far more destructive. One of the first signs of trouble was that the new management removed all signs of the small businesses inside from the building’s exterior. “They took down all the actual signs for the place,” Arn said.
“For almost an entire year people did not know we were in there at all.”
Arn said that the new management company also charged him to remove decals on their storefront. “They charged us $250 to scrape off a decal, which takes like 30 seconds, and to throw up their own decals.” Alongside enforcing new advertisement rules that were slowing traffic coming into Dobie, Arn said the new management was effectively evicting small business owners from the first floor and creating difficult building conditions so the owners would decidedly leave without forced expulsion.
For Arn the tipping point was when Resurrected Games was charged a fee of $6500 in lieu of “missing property payments” for the previous year without proper explanation or a sufficient amount of time to pay. “We tried going through the contract to see how legal this was, and we saw that this was a loophole for them, but there was also a loophole for us because it was an agreement we had made beforehand,” Arn said. “But they weren't budging on the matter, so we said okay, we'll get the money for you and then they said: ‘well, you have till Monday to do that.’ They told us that on Friday afternoon at 4.”
In order to make the $6500, Resurrected Games had a blowout sale over the weekend, and when they finally made the money, Arn said it still wasn’t enough to save the store. “I went up there to pay, and she said "y'all can pay us, it’s not a problem, but you know you're probably just buying yourself until the end of the month, and then we're gonna evict you’” Arn said. “So we used the money for moving instead.”
Resurrected Games is not the only small business affected by the accommodations Dobie is making for Target. Since summer, all but one store at the bottom floor of Dobie mall has closed down, the one store remaining on the bottom floor is Austin Market, formerly known as ‘Dobie Market.’ Todd Engle, cashier and store employee at Austin Market, said despite intimidation and attempts to drive their store out of the mall, Austin Market intends to stay at Dobie indefinitely. “We still have three years left on the lease,” Engle said. “I'm surprised they've let us stay this long.”
Engle said whether intentionally or not, the new management has made several attempts to make operating conditions difficult for the small market. From the removal of their store sign outside for “remolding purposes” to forcing the market to change their name to ‘Austin Market’ after over a decade of being known in the area as Dobie Market, Engle said these are only a few examples of everyday hassles at the hand of new building management. “They cut our electricity off, our ice cream melted, they said they couldn't find a maintenance guy to come fix it. $800 worth of Blue Bell, melted.” Engle said.
Like Arn, Engle said that the new management has come to the store with obscure bills with no solid reasoning, except for the fact that they are at risk of eviction if they don’t comply with managements terms and pay the fees. Two weeks ago, Engle said that management came into the store and handed him a bill for $5,000. At the time, Engle said that the store owner was working with lawyers to relieve the fee. “We got a bill for 5 grand for something...The lawyers are handling it. I don't know what it was for, but out of the blue, they handed it to me,” Engle said. When recently followed up about the bill, Engle said that the fee was doubled to $10,000 and they were forced to pay. “We thought it was $5,000, but then it turned out it was $10,000 and we weren’t the only ones, I talked to Burrito Factory upstairs, and they had to pay $10,000 too.”
With less than a month remaining until the completion of the Target, remaining small business owners at Dobie are waiting to see what the fate of their stores will be. According to Arn; “everybody’s hanging on by a thread.”