The Other Affordability Crisis: How New York Is Losing Its Soul One Storefront at a Time

By Shivani Dhir

Walk Broadway in Astoria and count the empty storefronts. Not the ones with new leases, not the ones mid-renovation. The dark ones. The ones with broker numbers taped to the inside of windows, or old signage still up from businesses that closed months ago, or nothing at all: a gate, a padlock, and the faint outline of what used to be there.

I have lived in this neighborhood for over a decade. I know what was in those spaces. Diners, bodegas, bars, local restaurants, the deli where someone knew your order. Dozens of long-standing businesses have closed across Astoria in recent years. Restaurants that had been on the same block for over a decade. A neighborhood pizzeria. A produce market. A supermarket. Businesses that had been part of the neighborhood long enough to become part of how people described it. Gone.

This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is passive. What is happening on Broadway, and on Junction Boulevard in Jackson Heights, and on Main Street in Flushing, and on commercial corridors across all five boroughs, is a policy failure that has been visible for years and addressed at the margins. The disappearance of mom-and-pop businesses is not inevitable. It is the predictable result of a policy environment that was never designed with them in mind.

Who we are actually talking about

More than 183,000 small businesses operate in New York City, representing about 94 percent of all city businesses and employing close to one million New Yorkers. But the operations most at risk are smaller than that: under ten employees, often under five. The food truck operator who has been on the same Queens corner for fifteen years. The tailor working out of a ground-floor storefront. The single-chair barbershop.

Nearly half of New York City’s small businesses are immigrant-owned. According to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, immigrants contribute an estimated $244 billion to the city’s economy. In Queens, the most ethnically diverse urban county in the world, these businesses are not a peripheral feature of the local economy. They are its foundation. They are also its character: the places that make a neighborhood feel like somewhere specific rather than anywhere generic.

About one in four New York City small businesses tracked by the city’s own data is now a single-person operation. That is sometimes reported as evidence of entrepreneurial energy. It is more accurately a sign of what consolidation and displacement look like at ground level.

The squeeze

Ask a small business owner what is breaking them and they will not give you one answer. They will give you five. That is the point.

New York has had no commercial rent protections since 1963. Residential tenants have rights that have been litigated and defended for decades. Commercial tenants have none of that. Standard leases are structured as triple-net agreements, meaning the tenant pays base rent plus property taxes, maintenance, and insurance. Total occupancy costs routinely run thirty to fifty percent above the advertised number. A national chain negotiates these terms with real estate teams and lawyers. A family restaurant signs a personal guarantee, which means if the business fails, so does everything else the owner has.

Utilities compound the problem. New York City commercial electricity rates run roughly fifty percent above the national average. A restaurant’s monthly electric bill can easily reach three to five thousand dollars, and the programs designed to offset those costs explicitly exclude restaurants and retail stores.

Capital access is where the pressure turns predatory. Traditional banks have largely exited small business lending for operators without significant assets and multi-year financials. What fills that gap is the merchant cash advance industry: products carrying effective annual interest rates averaging around ninety percent, not classified as loans under current law, extracting fixed daily payments regardless of whether it was a good week or a slow one. The New York Attorney General secured a $1.065 billion judgment against one of these lenders in January 2025, with $534 million in debt cancellation for eighteen thousand businesses. That is not a marginal problem.

None of these pressures is an act of God. Each is either a policy choice or a policy failure. No single one closes a business. It is the combination, the unrelenting stack of them, that does.

The asymmetry

The playing field is not level, and any policy written as if it were, ends up protecting the powerful and punishing the vulnerable.

A venture-backed concept can operate at a deliberate loss for three years. A bodega cannot survive one bad quarter. New York City has more than 6,000 rules and regulations governing business, roughly 250 required licenses and permits, and more than fifteen city agencies that some businesses must navigate just to open. The cost of regulatory compliance is largely fixed: it takes roughly the same time and money whether you are running a two-person operation or a two-hundred-seat restaurant. That means these costs fall proportionally far harder on small operators.

What exists and why it is not enough

There are organizations doing real work. The Queens Economic Development Corporation has served more than 25,000 clients since its founding, runs a commercial kitchen incubator that has supported more than 820 food entrepreneurs, and awards $100,000 annually to early-stage Queens businesses through its Tech and Innovation Challenge. The city recently launched the $80 million NYC Future Fund, offering loans at 7.5 percent interest with no minimum credit score. These programs are real. Some are genuinely useful.

But the reach does not match the need. QEDC operates on a budget of roughly $3.5 million a year to serve a borough of 2.3 million people. It cannot make loans directly. Broadway in Astoria has no Business Improvement District and no dedicated economic development programming, despite being one of the most commercially active corridors in Western Queens. Community Development Financial Institutions, the lenders best positioned to serve immigrant and minority business owners, account for just 0.4 percent of all small business lending in New York City.

A program you cannot find, cannot access in your language, and cannot navigate without a financial advisor is not a solution. It is a talking point.

What precision policy looks like

The solutions are not novel. They exist. The question is whether there is the will to use them.

Commercial tenant protections are the most urgent. State lawmakers have introduced legislation to create a Commercial Rent Guidelines Board, the first real protection for commercial tenants in six decades. Long-term tenants should also have lease transparency requirements and a right of first refusal before a landlord re-leases to a new tenant.

Capital needs to reach people where they are: CDFIs embedded in neighborhoods like Astoria, Jackson Heights, and Flushing, with multilingual navigators who can walk a business owner through an application. Merchant cash advances should be regulated as what they functionally are, loans, subject to usury law.

Compliance burdens should be proportional to the size of the operator. Mayor Mamdani has signed an executive order directing agencies to inventory and cut fines for small businesses. That is a step. The fundamental structure of 6,000 rules and 15 agencies is still intact.

And we should treat AI as an equalizer, not a luxury. Singapore pre-approved hundreds of subsidized AI tools for small businesses and saw adoption rates triple in a single year. The SBA found that the main barrier among businesses with fewer than five employees is not cost of these tools; it is the belief that AI does not apply to them. That is an education problem. QEDC, with its new leadership and existing infrastructure, is the right vehicle to solve it in Queens. Give it the resources and a clear mandate.

What we lose when they go

Return to Broadway. Count the empty storefronts again.

What a neighborhood loses when it loses its small businesses is not convenience. It is the people who stayed and invested when staying was not profitable, who extended credit to a customer going through a hard time, who knew which families had kids and which elders needed checking on. That kind of presence cannot be reproduced by a franchise agreement. It does not come back when a new lease is signed by someone who has never lived in the neighborhood.

Some of those storefronts on Broadway are still empty. That means the window has not closed.

What happens next is a policy choice. Commissioner Kenny Minaya, the son of immigrant parents who have run a bakery in Inwood for 42 years, who built his career defending immigrant tenants against predatory landlords, took over at Small Business Services on March 2nd. He has the biography for this job. He has the mandate. The question now is whether the resources, the political will, and the urgency follow. Astoria is waiting.