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Retail Report Part 2: The Stats
[UPDATE: I wrote this post on Friday evening. Since then I have gotten reports that two longtime storefronts will close.]
The Department of City Planning released a report on the health of the city’s commercial retail corridors, after hiring a vendor to develop a digital data source for tracking storefront occupancy. The company Live XYZ catalogued and mapped storefront spaces across the city, tracking the businesses in each one and tallying the vacancies. And Downtown did not fare well relative to the rest of the city: Our four neighborhoods ranked in the top three spots for highest vacancy rates.
There’s some analysis in the post here, which sort of states the obvious: we have lost businesses now that folks don’t commute here as much. But!! it also shows the impressive list of new businesses we have acquired in the past two years. But — the number of vacancies had been creeping up since 2015 only to peak in 2023, or let’s hope.
Until now, the city only had data from 2019 — and sadly it was 2018 that the TC did its last Retail Vacancy Report. Now there’s a map that targets every storefront on every block in — almost — real time.
Going back seven years, the number of storefront vacancies was on the rise:
100 in 2015
127 in 2016
134 in 2017
152 in 2018
Keep in mind that the city’s numbers reflect a total of 1137 storefronts (there may have been fewer storefronts overall in 2017) and include a greater area than the TC counted in past years, but they still reflect the creep, though this year was better than last:
193 in 2020 Q1
256 in 2023 Q3
240 in 2024 Q3
The report was based on the Neighborhood Tabulation Areas associated with the census tracts: Tribeca is grouped with the Civic Center east of Broadway to Columbus Park and north of the Brooklyn Bridge; Fidi is lumped with Battery Park City and the Civic Center south of the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the Seaport; Chinatown is counted with Two Bridges.
See the appendix in the last pages of the report if you want the minutiae on other neighborhoods.
NUMBER OF STOREFRONTS: 1137
occupied: 897
vacant: 240
chronically vacant: 85 (35 percent of the vacancies)
STOREFRONT BREAKDOWN BY CATEGORY
317 food & bev (35 percent)
225 services (25 percent)
214 retail (23 percent)
139 community facilities (15 percent)
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Out of curiosity, how/why do the “chronically vacant” stay unoccupied? I can easily think of a few storefronts in Tribeca which have been vacant for maybe more than five years (Tribeca Pediatrics’ old space btwn Church and W Bway, for one)
If the landlord rents out a space at a lower rent than used in the financial projections (pro forma) to obtain a mortgage they can technically violate their loan covenants, so incentivized to keep vacant until they can achieve the modeled rent.
The one that has amazed me: the commercial condo at the Mohawk building, the former Bouley at Duane and Hudson. There have been restaurant applicants for that space, but the upstairs neighbors have fought them off.
The commercial owner should sue them for his lost rent.
Restaurant tenants who hope to rent in a commercial co-op or condo face this issue all the time in Tribeca. Residents–who see no rent benefit–seem to be able to delay or otherwise put pressure on the CB or SLA not to issue or otherwise restrict liquor licenses particularly in spaces proposed to be converted to restaurants from dry use.
The stores on Canal Street west of Broadway will either remain vacant or underutilized as long as NYC tolerates the illegal street vendors.