Despite the closures and the changed nature of the city — despite everything — it costs about as much to rent a store in most neighborhoods as ever
On the Upper West Side, retial rents held steady during the pandemic. Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images After months of hearing about how the pandemic had laid waste to New York’s retail landscape, leaving shuttered storefronts and desperate landlords, Marvis Burns thought that he’d have no trouble finding a larger space on 125th Street.
Short-term deals and flexible lease terms that many landlords started offering during the pandemic have allowed some small businesses to move into neighborhoods or retail spaces they wouldn’t have been able to afford before. But the areas where rents came down the most are still out of reach for most small businesses: Fifth Avenue, for example, had asking rents of $3,000 per square foot this spring — meaning that a modest store of 1,000 square feet would be in for up to $3 million a year.
There was, brokers say, a very brief period during the government-mandated shutdown when retail rents did plunge in neighborhood corridors. “I saw rents as cheap as $50 to $75 per square foot on the Lower East Side,” said Frank Gonzalez, the founder of Loisaida Realty; before the pandemic, rents in the neighborhood were $150 to $175 per square foot. “But there was always a contingency of one to two years,” he adds, and they bounced nearly all the way back as soon as vaccination began.
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