The road to Hell’s Kitchen
Empty storefront backstory
HIGH rents aren’t to blame for empty storefronts — but just about everything else is, according to the Real Estate Board of New York.
A new survey by the lobbying organization compared two popular Manhattan shopping and eating dis- tricts. It found that the West Village vacancy rate is more than twice as high as in Hell’s Kitchen even though Village rents are little more than one percent higher.
Retail vacancy is 11.3 percent in three prime West Village corridors comprising 284 storefronts, versus a mere 5 percent on Hell’s Kitchen’s main drag of Ninth Avenue with 262 total stores, according to REBNY.
Yet the number crunchers say rents in the two areas are roughly comparable — $139 per square foot on Ninth Avenue between West 42nd and 59th streets, and $150-155 per square foot on Seventh Avenue South and Hudson Street, two of the three West Village corridors covered in the survey.
Douglas Elliman’s Faith
Hope Consolo cited somewhat higher “asks” but her two sets of figures, like REBNY’s, were in the same ballpark relative to each other — $170-190 per square foot on Ninth Avenue and $175-225 on the West Village streets.
Property owners are on edge because City Council recently revived a 32-yearold proposal to replace free market negotiations between landlords and store tenants with guaranteed lease renewals with prices subject only to “arbitration.”
The rent-control measure sponsored by Council member Ydanis Rod
riguez, misleadingly named the “Small Business Jobs Survival Act,” was first introduced in 1986. The effort never went anywhere, but it’s back thanks to the scourge of empty storefronts — even though the surge in online shopping has devastated the retail business across the country.
Among many howls over the bill, the Council off New York Cooperatives & Condominiums warned recently it would cripple the city’s 1,525 co-op apartment buildings that rely on market-rate rent in- come from 6.5 million square feet of stores in the buildings, Crain’s New York Business reported.
Even if the REBNY spin doctors cherry-pick data to go easy on landlords, the new findings suggest how complicated it can be.
Organization head John H. Banks told us, “A lot of different issues go into whether or not someone occupies retail space. One reason why retail leasing might not be doing well in a particular neighborhood is simply how many people are there.” In his view, one reason why business increasingly prefer Hell’s Kitchen to the West Village is sheer demographics. Surprisingly, Hell’s Kitchen has more customers. Thanks to new construction, its population soared 9 percent from 2000 to 2016, when it reached 29,157 households, according to the US Census.
The West Village lost 9.7 percent of its households over the same period (down to 20,213 in 2016), according to the Census. How did that happen?
Thank, in part, the area’s historic-district status. While some brownstones that once housed multiple families were being converted into single-family residences, landmarks rules make new construction near-impossible.
What’s more, according to REBNY, Community Board 2 shoots down more than 25 percent of liquor license applications in the East Village, while CB 4 rejects only 4 percent in Hell’s Kitchen.