City has big butt problem

‘Oversaturated’ with 9,000 cig sellers

NEW YORK IS choking on smoke from a glut of tobacco sellers.

There are nearly 9,000 stores peddling tobacco in the city, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, which says the city is “oversaturated” with cigarette retailers.

The 8,992 stores licensed to sell tobacco citywide include 2,725 in Brooklyn, 2,196 in Manhattan, 2,117 in Queens, 1,542 in the Bronx, and 412 on Staten Island.

“There is simply too much tobacco in New York City,” said Michael Davoli, the group’s director of government relations. “In far too many neighborhoods, tobacco retailers can be found on nearly every corner and every block. And widespread availability of tobacco in our communities dangerously normalizes tobacco use.”

The heaviest concentration of tobacco sellers is in Midtown Manhattan, where there are 62 for every 10,000 people, followed by the Financial District, where there are 25. That compares to a citywide average of 10 stores for every 10,000 people.

Outside Manhattan, the highest rates are in lower-income neighborhoods in the South Bronx and north and central Brooklyn, the report found — the same neighborhoods likely to have higher smoking rates.

Hunts Point in the Bronx has 17 stores for every 10,000 people, and Mott Haven and Belmont in the Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn each have 16.

While hard-core smokers will go out of their way to get their fix, advocates say reducing the number of stores selling cigarettes will discourage smoking because the vast majority of city smokers — almost 80% — are either light daily smokers, meaning they light up less than 10 times a day, or don’t smoke every day.

“If you make it a little bit harder for them to access tobacco, more people are not going to make that effort,” Davoli said. “Reducing the saturation in the number of licensed tobacco retail outlets will save lives.”

Citywide, there’s an average of one tobacco outlet every five blocks or 1,312 feet, a distance that shrinks to 679 feet in Manhattan, the Cancer Action Network found.

There are 31/2 times as many tobacco stores in the city as pizzerias or schools, and 29 times as many as Starbucks.

The vast majority of the stores, 93%, are within 1,000 feet of another tobacco seller, the report found. There are 6,778 within 1,000 feet of a school, and 342 within 200 feet of a school.

A bill was introduced in the City Council earlier this month to set a cap on the number of tobacco sellers in each neighborhood at half the number now existing, and bar issuing any new licenses until the number of stores has fallen below the cap.

The Cancer Action Network is pushing to put a cap on sellers of smokes, and bar new licenses within 1,000 feet of another tobacco merchant or of a school or house of worship.

They also want to ban pharmacies from selling tobacco.

An estimated 14.3% of adult New Yorkers were smokers in the 2016 fiscal year, a slight jump from 13.9% the year before. The number has gone up and down in the past few years but is down from 18.3% in 2003 — the year of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s smoking ban in bars and restaurants.

Smoking kills about 12,000 people a year in the city, making it the top preventable cause of death.