Queens Eagle
Mom-and-pop shops throughout Queens are closing at alarming rates, and small business advocates say one decades-old piece of legislation could stem the tide of evictions and closures. The City Council just has to act on it.
The Small Business Jobs Survival Act has undergone many iterations since it was first introduced in the Council in 1986. The city has changed significantly over that time period, and small business owners and employees now face their greatest challenges to staying open and employed.
The SBJSA would prevent landlords from gouging their commercial tenants with steep rent hikes and pricing the businesses out of their locations. The bill would require commercial landlords to offer commercial tenants 10-year lease renewals and give the tenants right of first refusal.
"[SBJSA] has been kicking around in one form or another since 1986," said Kirsten Theodos, the co-founder of the small business advocacy coalition TakeBackNYC. "This is the eighth time that
[SBJSA] has been introduced in the City Council and it just had its eighth hearing, which was this past October and yet the City Council will not commit it to the floor for reaching a vote."
The city defines small businesses as companies that employ fewer than 100 people. “Very small” businesses employ fewer than 20 people. The inaugural “Small Business First” report published by the city in 2015 found that 98 percent of NYC’s 220,000 businesses had fewer than 100 employees, while 89 percent had fewer than 20.
These businesses are especially vulnerable to eviction or getting priced out of their locations and there is little they can do about it, Theodos said.
"If you are a rent-regulated tenant you have a right to renewal, commercial rent tenants have nothing like that," said Theodos. "As a result we have landlords dictating all the terms and what we are seeing are exorbitant rent increases. Landlords are denying lease renewals and those are the reasons we are seeing good businesses getting pushed out."
At first the closure of small businesses was a Manhattan problem, she continued. But in recent years, more and more outer-borough businesses are getting priced out, Theodos said.
It’s easy to observe the dissolution of these businesses in the number of vacant storefronts on bustling streets. But it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many storefronts are vacant, as City Lab reported last year.
A 2018 New York Times article estimated that 20 percent of Manhattan storefronts were vacant. The City Council responded that it’s more like 4 percent.
Exact answers are even harder to find in Queens, where shuttered shops have received less attention. Residents sense it, though.
"If you ask anyone, regardless of the borough they live, they can attest to the vacant storefronts in their neighborhood," said Theodos. "'If you ask them, ‘Did the businesses get kicked out because they were bad businesses?' the answer is going to be 'No, because they were either rent-hiked or denied a lease renewal.’"
5 comments:
For years now I've asked very smart people why landlords kick out businesses that have been there for decades, only to leave store fronts vacant for years-now-going on-a-decade. How is zero rent better than some rent? I have yet to hear a coherent answer, but the only answer has to be that somehow it is better, right?
Small business hates regulation because all small business was set up precisely to sociopathically circumvent regulation. Feudal casuists perpetuate the canard of the mom and pop farm/deli/dega. Tocqueville 1848 ii.ii,19 debunks the notion of the hereditary family farm. Milton Friedman J Eco Lit v 30 n 9 p 2129-32 shows success of small business is indeterminate because of survivor bias. McKinsey's Manyika WP Feb 7 2010 B2 shows large firms produce jobs more quickly. Even the Economist says (small-business canard, Oct 5th 2010) only a small fraction of smaller enterprises are capable of generating sustained growth of very many jobs. Right Wing Investment commentators try to con gullible right wingers into doing the opposite of their interest in order to make money for the commentators. The way one makes money is if you get someone to do the opposite of what you are doing, to be your gullible counterparty, to buy when stocks are at the top or sell at the bottom, because the smart investor buys low and sells high. Then they mollify the fool with conspiracy theories.
Exactly! That's why we have WalMart. Can't understand why they don't move into that vacant location. Looks like a winner to me.
What about the PathMark Giuliani got into 125 & Lex, never to be replaced?
Landlords leave the retail units vacant b/c they claim a tax loss. That's the reason why you see so many vacancies b/c the landlords rather have the tax loss.
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