MIDTOWN’S A ME$$
Vacant offices killing biz
All those office workers sitting at home in their pajamas aren’t going on noontime shopping sprees, power lunches or for after-work drinks — and it shows.
Midtown is suffering worse than any other neighborhood in the city when it comes to vacant storefronts, according to a new real-estate industry report.
Nearly 30 percent of storefronts in New York’s prime business district are empty. A “devastating” lack of office workers means there’s not enough customers to keep retailers up and running, according to the Real Estate Board of New York.
Those vacancies far outpace empty storefronts in more residential neighborhoods where there’s still a critical mass of people retailers and restaurants count on.
In Midtown, according to the REBNY report, only about 25 percent to 30 percent of the normal number of workers are coming into the office — meaning about 60,000 people on the streets for lunches, haircuts, shopping or shoeshines compared with 180,000 before the pandemic lockdowns.
Such a dearth of people has led to the spike in storefront vacancies — even on key corners and on ritzy Madison Avenue, according to the REBNY report. Some entire blocks are full of empty storefronts, including restaurants and retailers.
Schnipper’s, a burger and sandwich joint, had three Manhattan locations before the pandemic, but only two remain at Lexington Avenue and East 51st Street and Eighth Avenue and West 41st Street. Co-owner Andrew Schnipper said the stores are bringing in between 40 percent and 50 percent of their pre-March 2020 sales.
“We rely on office workers, and they just haven’t come back yet,” he said. The areas near Grand Central Terminal and in the Midtown East neighborhood have storefront vacancies of 29.9 percent, according to the report. In 2018, storefronts around Grand Central were only 10.9 percent vacant and Midtown East 15.3 percent.
Those figures jibe with other statistics that show small businesses and retailers, including restaurants and bars, have been among the hardest hit in the Big Apple.
“REBNY’s findings confirm the crippling effect that the pandemic has had — and continues to have — on the retail sector in Midtown Manhattan,” Fred Cerullo, president and CEO of the Grand Central Partnership, said in a statement. “For these businesses to thrive, they need the kind of foot traffic generated by tourists and office workers.”
Labor Day was supposed to kick off the return to offices, but the Delta variant pushed back many companies’ plans.
About two-thirds of companies delayed their returns to the office to as far back as early 2022, according to a Gartner study in August, while a recent report from The Partnership for New York found that city employers had expected only 41 percent of office workers to have returned by Sept. 30 — down from a previous estimate of 60 percent.