Governing - In New York City, and especially in Manhattan, 2015 may be remembered as the year the neighborhood store suffered a mass extinction.
Small retail businesses have been closing their doors in New York this year at a rate that longtime students of the city’s commercial life say has no precedent in their memory. At the beginning of the year, in a much publicized departure, Café Edison, a Times Square institution, gave up after 34 years at the same spot. Since then, every few days has seemed to bring news of another small business closing -- a shoe store, a diner or a hole-in-the-wall cheese shop. Multiply those closings by a few hundred, and you’ll have an idea of what is happening these days on the New York commercial front.
It seems curious, at first glance, that a majority of the retail extinctions seem to be taking place in fashionable or increasingly popular parts of the city, such as Tribeca and the East Village in Lower Manhattan, and Williamsburg and Park Slope in Brooklyn. It seems curious, but it’s merely ironic. The attractiveness of New York’s gentrified neighborhoods has lifted commercial rents to the point where many small-scale tenants -- even those operating at a profit -- can no longer afford to pay them. Prosperous residents who were drawn to these neighborhoods in part because of the quaint mom-and-pop stores are finding that their own presence helps drive the stores away. In recent months, says Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, “the mom-and-pop crisis has intensified with a fury.”
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