The City Council, which pays lip service to “small businesses” while taxing and regulating them to death, has struck its latest blow on behalf of suffering, rent-gouged store owners.
A “storefront tracker bill,” to take effect in six months, requires landlords who own ground- and second-floor retail spaces to file regular data on the storefronts to the Department of Finance. To wit: whether they are occupied or vacant, how long they are leased for, median and average rents and the like.
The “registration statements,” to be posted online by the DOF, are meant to help the city “make informed policy decisions” regarding storefront use, Council Speaker Corey Johnson said. Translation: Defend yourselves, landlords — we are gunning for you. Commercial rent controls and a “vacancy fee” are just around the corner.
The Real Estate Board of New York, a landlords advocacy group, oddly says it is OK with the bill. It believes that having actual “data, and not anecdotes” on retail vacancies will make it easier to fend off a proposed “Small Business Jobs Survival Act” — an insidious form of commercial rent regulation that would screw up the free market and lead to even more empty stores than exist today.
The database might help shoot down the persistent false claim that landlords get tax breaks for vacant storefronts. But it won’t faze legislators for whom facts are mere speed bumps on the road to ever more “woke” diktats.
Sure, some landlords ask for unaffordable rents. But most empty stores are vacant for the same reason as all over America: online shopping. Also, for a reason unique to the Big Apple: Manhattan retail square footage has grown by 20% since 2004 because of new development.
In other words, there are tons more store locations at the same time that people shop less in stores than they used to.
Even so, the city’s overall retail climate is more resilient than certain small chunks of it make it look. The council is butting in, with unpredictable consequences, just as things show signs of improvement. Rents are falling — not by government order, but as a natural consequence of supply and demand.
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Although Broadway in the 50s and some Bleecker Street blocks have depressingly many “For Rent” signs, the city as a whole might have more stores than it did in 2004. Could anyone a dozen years ago have imagined Diane von Furstenberg in the Meatpacking District or Victoria’s Secret on West 125th Street?
It is understandable that neighborhood residents wail in dismay when their favorite old barber and bagel shops go dark. But while the council and Mayor Bill de Blasio are quick to blame rent gouging, the worst culprits can be found in their mirrors.
Ballooning property taxes, which are the city’s largest revenue source, force landlords to pass on part of the hikes to tenants. It happened to the owners of the Whisk cooking supply boutiques, who had to close their Flatiron shop when their share of property tax skyrocketed to over $54,000 last year, from $10,000 in 2012, as Patch.com reported.
Or take de Blasio’s paid-vacation mandate, which will cost the husband-and-wife owners of One Girl Cookies an extra $57,000 a year, as they described in Crain’s. “The mayor’s argument that business owners can absorb these additional costs and are just pretending that they cannot is outright insulting,” owner Dawn Casale wrote.
City agencies milk small businesses for their last dimes. Stores and restaurants are fined by the Departments of Buildings, Health and Transportation over “violations” too petty to believe. Mom-and-pop shops such as those along Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens — exactly the kind that council members say they want to protect — were docked $6,000 apiece over “illegal” signs that had hung without a problem for 10 years.
Yes, retail vacancy’s a real issue — but the worst vacancy is the empty space inside council members’ heads.
scuozzo@nypost.com
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