As New York City begins to emerge from the coronavirus shutdown, thousands of its small businesses — many already struggling before the pandemic hit — will face a near-impossible road to recovery
“It’s the kind of thing that rhetorically brings right and left together, but it hasn’t converted into effective political power or leverage.”
“While we continue to hope that much of that need be met by the federal government … hope isn’t a plan," said Council Member Daniel Dromm at the same hearing. Now, as the pandemic plunges many local stores into even worse straits, enacting a workable solution has only become more difficult. Even before the pandemic, small businesses were a fractured political bloc. Residential tenant groups organized for years around a series of changes to rent laws, enough to make their concerns a central issue in elections to the state Senate that turned the body from Republican to Democrat. Within months, the new tenant-friendly legislators overturned decades of laws that had favored landlords.
“Even though there’s a moratorium for eviction proceedings, the rent bill is really accumulating,” said Randy Peers, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. “This is going to be the big challenge, because even if you open your doors in the next few weeks, that’s three months worth of rent, that in itself can put businesses out of business.”
Lander, whose Park Slope district is overflowing with indie coffee shops and artisanal boutiques, said the majority of small businesses he’s spoken to haven’t been able to strike deals with their landlords, leaving them vulnerable to permanent closure and potentially sparking a surge in commercial vacancies.
But there hasn’t been a groundswell of support behind any one proposal that would accomplish this, and different groups have been pushing different priorities.
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