Long Beach bookstore Casita, struggling with debt, will move to a new space

During a phone conversation this week, Antonette Franceschi-Chavez, owner of the Long Beach bookstore, Casita, handles a child’s requests, a blaring security alarm and a journalist’s questions with unwavering calm.

Because there are even more pressing issues for the bookstore located on Long Beach’s Fourth Street, which Franceschi-Chavez revealed on a social media post and GoFundMe campaign: The store can no longer afford to remain in its current location and plans to move to a new one a mile or so away.

“These last 6 months have been really hard for us,” says Franceschi-Chavez. “We canceled a lot of events when the ICE raids started happening and getting really heavy.”

“We’ve slowly been playing catch-up,” she says, estimating that sales were down nearly 20% in 2025. “I’ve maxed out my credit cards, and this month I had to finally start pulling up a small business loan just to cover paying my employees, paying my rent. We got to the point where I had to make the decision: If people are no longer coming into our bookstore, is it sustainable? Can I keep digging myself into more debt, or is it time to shut it down?”

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There’s an answer, she hopes, that will allow her to continue. Her husband, Alex Chavez, offered to split the space he uses for his Long Beach barbershop, Service and Supply, and they hope to reopen the bookstore there in mid-February. 

“We’re going to move into that space to cut back on our rent and our expenses since we’ll be sharing with him. Hopefully, that’ll help us dig out of the hole a little bit,” she says.

“Right now, we’re working on that: Painting it, and getting it ready to be able to move our furniture over,” she says, while acknowledging one more unexpected challenge to the move. 

“It was a barbershop, so you can imagine the amount of hair and clean-up that needs to be done,” she laughs.

Franceschi-Chavez describes the bookstore, which opened in December 2022, as a warm, cozy place where her two children have grown up, a space full of books representing the Long Beach community. 

“We try to make sure that most of the books that we house are either written for or written by marginalized groups,” she says. “In our current social climate, I think there’s a lot of silencing and book banning, and so these stories need to be out and visible to the world.”

Despite the perception that running a bookstore must be a dream come true, she says it’s been a challenge.

“We have this idea of the cute bookshop owner who gets to sit back behind the register and read books, but it’s very far from that,” she says. “There’s a lot of collaboration that needs to be done amongst the community, and that’s something that I feel gets lost if you lose the independent bookstores in your neighborhood.”

Still, she cites fellow booksellers as being especially helpful to her. “The bookstore owner community is amazing,” she says, mentioning Jhoanna Belfer at Bel Canto Books (who will be scaling down her presence at the store’s KUBO location) and Nikki High from Octavia’s Bookshelf among those who’ve been in touch. “They’re very supportive. I’ve gotten so many messages of encouragement.

“Small businesses just across the board are struggling. I mean, life is getting more expensive. You really have to choose where you’re gonna spend your money,” she says, saying that she finds it amazing that other storeowners still find ways to reach out.

So what can people do to support the store? 

“Right now, we’re just asking people to support us if they can. Come buy a book. We do have a GoFundMe going,” she says. “I don’t really have a backup aside from hopefully moving and saving money on our monthly costs, and so I just hope to not be in the same position a year from now.”

Acknowledging the community support, she’s aiming to be optimistic about what’s to come.

“We’ve had some luck with the GoFundMe, and we’ve had a giant influx of support in sales in the last week,” she says. “It’s great because it’s helping us kind of pull through the rest of this month.

“We actually get amazing support from our community,” she says.