Posted Jul 14, 2021, 3:55 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 9,785
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Chain stores might have made Manhattan more vulnerable to downturn
In my anecdotal observation, commercial real estate in Brooklyn seems to have been much less affected by the pandemic than in Manhattan. The reason for that may be due to Brooklyn being more oriented towards small business owners, and less dependent on retail chains than Manhattan:
Quote:
Why SoHo Struggles and Indie Shops in Brooklyn Are Doing Fine
Retail chains have failed all over New York City. Is it a surprise that smaller stores can finally breathe?
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When the pandemic struck late last winter, it devastated a retail sector that had been battered for at least a decade. Vacancy mounted upon vacancy, bankruptcy upon bankruptcy. By May, with hundreds of thousands of people living in pajamas, staffing at clothing stores was down by 40 percent from the previous year. Between February and October, nearly 30,000 retail jobs vanished in New York City alone. You hardly needed any kind of statistical analysis if you walked around Hudson Yards or SoHo or Madison Avenue, where everything has felt bleak, enervating: Karma was having its way with Big Real Estate.
By contrast, a chicly homey stretch of stores along well-traveled Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn has maintained the vitality of an alternate world. These shops are an unlikely bright spot in a devastating year, when as many as one-third of all businesses in New York City have failed or been severely constrained. Any inquiry into how this has come to pass must begin with the fact that many of the stores belong to the individual people who created them.
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When you walk into one of these stores, you are likely to find the owner behind the counter. Often she — and it’s usually a woman — is also the person making what she sells: lamps, pillows, pottery, dresses, body oils. Michele Varian moved her interior design store from SoHo to Atlantic Avenue in January 2020 because the community she had first encountered when she opened 19 years earlier was long gone. “If I were in SoHo now, I’d be dead in the water, owing lots of money,” she told me recently. Her rent had become untenable at the same time that the sort of person who really appreciated what she carried no longer lived nearby.
Artists had left SoHo years earlier, but she noticed a second-wave exodus after Hurricane Sandy, when people traded in lofts they bought years earlier for whole buildings in Brooklyn. “I think this is an underrecognized, pivotal turning point in the history of Lower Manhattan,’’ Ms. Varian said.
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Chain stores have proliferated in New York City on the belief held by landlords and banks that they are more or less invulnerable to economic downturns. The pandemic has offered a profound challenge to that idea. In December, the Center for an Urban Future, a policy organization, issued its 13th annual study of national retailers in New York City. It found by far the biggest overall decline in the number of chain stores; more than 1,000 of them, or approximately one out of seven, had disappeared during the preceding 12 months.
The lessons would seem obvious — that neighborhoods do best when they evolve organically in sync with the people who live in them. They cannot be manufactured as if real life were Minecraft. In the micro sense there are hopeful signs — landlords tying rents to percent of sales, banks slowly becoming more flexible in their financing. But the way we think about commerce and communities needs a radical re-evaluation.
“Retail has to be integrated into people’s lives,” Ms. Varian remarked. “Where are people walking their dogs? Where are they taking their kids to school?” Those businesses then need to be supported. And in the end, the vultures need to be kept away.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/n...yn-retail.html
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