Walk Greenpoint or Williamsburg and you can read the last ten years in the empty storefronts: the sweet shop priced out, the corner business that did not survive its lease renewal. There is finally a bill to stop the bleeding. Almost nobody has signed onto it.
State Senator Julia Salazar and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, who represent the neighborhoods, introduced the Small Business Survival Act, which would cap commercial rent increases through a nine-member commercial rent guidelines board and give small-business tenants a right to renew their leases. Gallagher frames it as capping rent, guaranteeing leases, and keeping local commerce alive.
The local loss is specific, not abstract. North Brooklyn coverage points to a graveyard of loved but lost neighborhood places and to Greenpoint’s Stodycze Wedel, a longtime sweet shop that closed in 2015 after a steep rent increase when its lease ran out. The bill is named for exactly that pattern, a neighborhood hollowing out one renewal at a time.
The scale the sponsors cite is grim: by their numbers, 8,400 small businesses closed in a single recent quarter and 12 to 20 percent of storefronts sit empty depending on the borough. This is not a fringe complaint; it is the texture of the commercial strips people actually live on.
And yet the bill is nearly alone. In the Senate, fellow democratic socialist Kristen Gonzalez was described as the only other co-sponsor, an old version of the measure having lost support over the years. Small-property-owner advocates oppose it as blanket price control; Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York, called it “a complex issue that can’t be solved with a magic pill, in this case a poison pill, of blanket price controls.” So the most direct answer anyone has offered to a decade of storefront loss is sitting in Albany with a sponsor, a co-sponsor, and a wall of organized landlords.
That gap, between how visible the problem is and how thin the political support is, is the story. If the empty storefronts on your block bother you, the Small Business Survival Act (S8319) and its sponsors are public on the State Senate’s site, and the coalition organizing behind it, Small Business United, is where to push, because right now the bill’s biggest shortage is not a good argument but co-sponsors.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
