After Kent Kramp sold his Dinkytown business in the spring, the Dinkytown Business Alliance (DBA) that he ran for over five years immediately collapsed in his absence under the corporatizing Dinkytown business landscape.

Kramp, the former president of the DBA, said there was nothing left of the organization to pass along after he sold the Dinkytown Raising Cane’s location he operated, now only owning the Test Kitchen in Stadium Village.

“I don’t want it to die, I just had nobody to hand it off to,” Kramp said.

Founded in 1948, DBA stood for the Dinkytown Business Association until it changed its name in 2014, according to co-owner of The Book House and former DBA Vice President Matt Hawbaker. The association was funded by the city and had paid staff, similar to the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association. 

However, not all hope is lost for an association of Dinkytown businesses.

Jackie Barabash, director of sales for web design company E. L. Lewis Enterprises Inc., is trying to revive the organization.

After seeing Dinkytown businesses negatively affected by construction in the downtown area over the summer, Barabash launched the Dinkytown Minneapolis website as a one-stop shop for information about and promotion of businesses for Dinkytown visitors and residents.

“When we got that going, we looked at it like, ‘Hey this is kind of looking like a business association,’” Barabash said. “And how we can connect to the community but really connect to the business community and try and create a place for businesses to kind of get together.”

Kramp said he would be happy to pass along the documentation and information on the DBA he still has, plus the $121 sitting in the DBA’s bank account, to anyone interested in starting it up again.

“(If) there’s people in Dinkytown that are interested in working together, they’re interested in getting it started and going again, yeah I’m 100% on board with sharing the information getting the ownership transferred over,” Kramp said. 

A corporate casualty

With declining engagement and financial resources, the DBA became a victim of the ever-changing Dinkytown Business scene which had become more corporate over the last decade, Kramp said.

Kramp and Hawbaker attribute increased rent prices driving out smaller, family-owned businesses as well as the growing presence of chain restaurants in the neighborhood for Dinkytown’s dramatic change since the 2010s.

Small business owners like Irv Hershkovitz, who ran Dinkytown Wine and Spirits until it closed in 2020, have more stake in the community than those who run chain businesses, Kramp added.

“As soon as those people no longer operate the business and it’s just a manager or it’s just a franchise group, they’re much more reactive,” Kramp said. “They’re like that’s not the most important thing to me, I don’t have a long-term plan for this neighborhood I just have to operate my restaurant or my business.’”

Tony Nicklow, owner of Tony’s Diner, said he was a member of the DBA until the demands of being a small business owner made it difficult to routinely participate in the organization.

“It was a great organization,” Nicklow said. “Just nice to try to get everyone together and try to keep us abreast of things happening in the city and this and that, and what things can be done, but as of lately I think it’s been kind of dead.”

Hawbaker said the DBA’s intended goal was to promote Dinkytown businesses and provide the public with information about the business community, but the organization failed to make those goals a reality.

“I realized this is basically like a group project in school where no one wants to, you know, poor Kent kind of got railroaded into being president,” Hawbaker said.

Hawbaker added that the fast turnover of chains made it hard to form lasting relationships within the business community.

“You could fill a meeting if you had the police there to talk about crime, but those really just kind of turned into venting sessions about unhoused people or tip jars getting stolen, just stuff like that,” Hawbaker said.

After Kramp, to his protest, was elected DBA president at the first meeting he attended in 2018, he decided to stop collecting dues when he realized the DBA was not delivering on the resources it promised its members.

“I reviewed those (and) I was like we’re not doing any of these things, why are we charging people money so they can vote just to barely kind of skate by and stay alive but we’re not providing any of these resources?” Kramp said.

Despite abandoning member dues, Hawbaker said the DBA still could not establish the loyalty it needed to be a productive organization.

“If you wanted to attend the meetings, you did not need to pay dues,” Hawbaker said. “That may have been a mistake, I don’t know, but we just wanted engagement so we could kind of figure out what kind of coalition we could build, what size and what we could do for people first.”

Moving forward

Barabash said seeing confusion from Dinkytown business owners about the purpose of the University of Minnesota Police Department’s Off-Campus Safety Center further encouraged her to reopen the lines of communication between businesses.

“We, even more, solidified the idea of reigniting the (DBA) to make sure that the business community was not just informed of what was really going on but that their voices were heard and we could start taking some action,” Barabash said. “Even if it is teaming up with the Safety Center and saying ‘Hey as a business community we’d really like to have your support.’”

Dinkytown business owners will meet on Friday to discuss whether they are interested in reviving the DBA’s activity, according to Barabash.

While she is aware of apprehension from business owners about bringing back the DBA because of the organization’s previous ineffectiveness, Barabash said she is interested in what the community can do with its remnants.

“We’re slowly looking at this because we want to make sure that if there is a want and a need for it, we are very happy to step up and say let’s do this and let’s all come together,” Barabash said.