WestView

AN OPEN LETTER TO: Chris Quinn

February 2010

From WestView publisher George Capsis

Good morning Chris,

In this issue of WestView we have yet another article about a friendly neighborhood restaurant succumbing to high rent.

In this case, Neil Bender, the inheritor of the considerable collection of small neglected buildings nearly all replete with rent-regulated and even rent-controlled tenants appears to be insistent that Baby Buddha on Washington and Bethune Sts. vacate by January 31.

For the aging Westbeth community Baby Buddha has been “their” restaurant. A place to call on an icy winter night for Shrimp Lo Mein and Sweet and Sour Chicken—New Yorker soul food.

The thought of its closing has made them, the Westbethians, rally together to sign a petition and ask the local press to record and support their fight to save it.

But, of course, legally Mr. Bender is within his rights and can, as he has, tell the owners to go.

In the West Village two factors drive up commercial rents:

1. It has become a hot location for the fashion chains that pay triple and quadruple rents just to advertise their brand to the increasing stream of tourists and fashion shoppers.

2. Landlords—good ones and bad ones—have buildings with rent-regulated apartments with rents one half to one third of the market rate. They, the landlords, are also subject to tax hikes (17-1/2 %—from the Bloomberg administration) and breathtaking fuel bills, so the only way to get even is to ask as much as the market will bear for their commercial space—I mean, it makes sense.

One independent Bleecker St. building owner was so outraged at the paperwork needed to “de-regulate” his apartments he refused to do it and now he has two rent-controlled tenants who pay a little over $100 for a $2,500 apartment, but he reportedly gets $75,000 a month for the store below (one of the $100-a-month tenants has a little place in Southampton).

When stores do rent—and we are seeing an increasing number—the owners pass on the high rents in high prices—no surprise.

You can buy an order of Lo Mein from the pushcart on Hester and Elizabeth Sts. for $1.25, and in the Village it’s $6.75

This means that the old shops like the Bleecker St. spice store Aphrodisia, that for decades has given the Village that unique “Village”— are disappearing, and streets like Bleecker are beginning to look like a suburban shopping mall.

There is no way in hell that the city will ever impose commercial rent control and even less chance that it will end apartment rent regulations in the next half-century or even more.

When the Archive building offered its hundreds of apartments twenty years ago I, as a landlord with just three small apartments, had trouble getting the rent I had been getting and had to come down. (It is impossible to accept if you are one of the lucky people to have a rent-regulated apartment, but rent regulations keep West Village rents outrageously high.)

What do you think would happen if the million or more shabby, poorly maintained rent-regulated apartments were de-regulated and dumped on the market? It might just give that nice couple just out of college a chance to enjoy the West Village the way we did when we were very young and very poor.

But, as I say, they, you and the other City Council members will never pass commercial rent regulations or end apartment rent regulations. (I would safely guess nearly all City Council members enjoy rent-regulated or subsidized apartments.)

But there is a solution that is only available to the West Village— but it takes courage and I am hoping, Chris, that you have that courage.

In this issue we are also running a photo of Bleecker St. lined with pushcarts and indeed I can remember shopping at the last pushcart some 40 years ago—but, where did all those pushcarts go?

When Mayor La Guardia was elected, the Lower East Side was encrusted with them—no parked cars, only pushcarts. With the demolition of the slum tenements to build the Eleanor Roosevelt housing, La Guardia also built market buildings along Second Ave. in which the pushcarts, for a small fee, could operate in all weather. (They are still there. Go down and take a look. It’s called the Essex St. Market.)

So does the West Village have a indoor concrete shed that will take Greenmarket pushcarts and yes, some of the small family restaurants and businesses that are being pushed out by high rents?

Sure, it is called Pier 40.

The massive 15-acre, three-tiered pier at W. Houston St. is just sitting there waiting for a Greenmarket to open this spring.

No need for a Request for Proposals for developers to spend $150 million to fix the roof and repair the piles. Just as in Union Square, local farmers can be invited to drive their trucks into the pier and surround the perpetually spring green Astroturf field to create what every town in history has had—a town market—a place to shop, a place to meet, a place to enjoy the crowds, a place to sit at a bench with a cup of fresh coffee and gaze at the great river and think pleasant thoughts.

But, as I said, it takes courage.

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