The Storefront Vacancy Crisis (Part I of II): Superstar Cities and Their Ghost Towns
If you live in one of America’s booming superstar cities, you might have noticed a lot more empty storefronts along prime shopping streets and wondered, what gives?
How, you might ask, can the vacancy rate have reached levels like 28% on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue? Eighteen percent on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road? Thirty-six percent on San Francisco’s Powell Street?
Answering these questions is not merely an academic exercise, as cities large and small consider a storefront vacancy tax, which I’ll cover in my next blog. Indeed, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city’s governing body, has put forth such a measure on its March 3rd ballot, called Proposition D. If passed, it will take effect in 2021.
If you’re a political progressive, you could view high vacancy through the lens of gentrification. That is, you might consider the news stories about those beloved mom-and-pops that lost their leases because they could not afford exorbitant rent increases and decide that it must be caused by greedy landlords.