neighborhood rents, commerce, chains and all that
My enduring mantra has been, “We don’t need another bar, we need something for the local community,” I don’t care if it’s a grocery, a shoe repair place, a coffee shop, a sandwich shop, a dry cleaner, a hardware store. There’s an awful lot of vacant real estate on Manhattan Ave. these days, and what’s coming in isn’t any of those things. We’re getting Duane Reade and Sleepy’s and another bank (WaMu in the old Xtra space).
This thread on Eater (of all places), combined with a CB1 report I read at the board meeting the other night, brought home a difficult truth: all of these little local enterprises can’t AFFORD the space on Manhattan Ave. any more. Landlords are jacking up the prices sky high, which is giving us multiple empty shop fronts. When they open, it’s not something local, it’s something national.
Walking up Norman today, I noticed that those lovely old weathered garage doors between Lorimer & Manhattan had a DOB permit on them: CONVERSION OF EXISTING GARAGE SPACES TO RETAIL. It’s a great location, but who’s going to rent them? I think we’re getting to the point that we need the parking spaces more than the retail spaces these days.
