If you live in Manhattan, you’ve heard it a million times by now: Someone sees a vacant storefront and says, in a tone of dripping irony, “Oh, how I hope a bank will go in there! Because that’s what we need — another bank.”
Seven years ago, you’d have heard the same complaint about Starbucks, which had spent a decade gobbling up corner storefronts all over the city before deciding to save the money (corners are costlier) and go midblock.
Then, as now, the complaint would usually be followed by exclamations of regret at the loss of a business once located there, invariably remembered with regret as “that cute little place.”
The general notion is that the “cute little place” is an endangered species in New York and therefore requires protection and defense from extinction by The People Who Know Best.
And so the city’s Planning Department is drawing up a proposal to rezone the Upper West Side to prevent the takeover of the “cute little places” by big mean stores.
The plan would limit banks to 25 feet of storefront along Broadway and Amsterdam and Columbus avenues and all other businesses to 40 feet (thus also ending the proliferation of drugstores with lots of window space).
What exactly is the logic behind such a blatant intrusion into the private sector and property rights generally? Well, for many of those eager for rezoning, no logic is needed — they believe government should be able to do almost anything and so have no compunction about intervening in the private deals of landlords and lessees.
New York’s zoning practices have historically been heavy-handed, and have often put the thumb on the scale for small businesses. The so-called big-box stores were effectively banned from the city for decades by zoning rules to protect merchants from competition.
Nice, except that the “competition” from which they were being protected was often competition on pricing, with smaller stores charging more to sell their goods than a large retailer would. Good for them, bad for consumers.
Today, of course, there is no protection from lower prices, thanks to Internet shopping.
There’s a, yes, cute toy store on the Upper West Side that sells its carefully chosen wares at a huge markup. Many of its customers stop shopping there once they discover they can buy the same products for 30 to 40 percent less on Amazon.
That toy store is one of the businesses whose existence the new zoning is meant to shelter — cute and small and quirky, all darling qualities deemed to require careful husbandry if they’re not to be crushed by the behemoths of raw capitalism.
Yet New York City is big enough so that businesses can gravitate to other places where small and cute and quirky can thrive. That is the story, for example, with the Brooklyn restaurant boom — which really took off in the late ’90s along Smith Street in Boerum Hill when young chefs and entrepreneurs found a cheap strip to ply their innovative wares and helped change the neighborhood and the reputation of the borough itself.
Indeed, there are even now plenty of small, quirky, cute businesses along side streets on the Upper West Side, in basements and the like, where you can buy beads and antiques and reptiles and get a Chinese massage. But, apparently, those don’t count, because they’re not visible enough.
Sorry. What the zoning proposal is really out to protect is not the small merchant but the Upper West Side shopper — who apparently demands the right to more fun shops in which to browse.
The preposterousness of this notion suggests the degree to which Upper West Side liberalism has become a parody of itself. No political philosopher in history would argue that you have an inalienable right to a funky boutique on your way to the subway.
As the example of Starbucks suggests and as the slowdown in the number of banks renting space proves, such market takeovers are temporary and self-correcting. They don’t require a new regulatory regime — unless you live in a city where, alas, imposing regulations and restrictions and absurd rules is back with a vengeance.
Could there be a worse possible time to make New York an even more wretched place to do business?