He’s squeezing by.
A merchant named Bala has been doing business for 20 years on a triangle of land in Greenwich Village barely bigger than a bedsheet — the smallest occupied private lot in the Big Apple.
“If I have money, I’d have a bigger store. But I can’t afford high rent right now,” the Senegalese native said of his cramped 25-square-foot stall at 169 W. 10th St., where he hawks African clothes and sunglasses.
The city Department of Finance puts a market value on the lot at $46,000, or about $1,840 a square foot.
That’s not a bad investment for Dr. Abdul Awan, who said he bought the lot for $30,000 in 1983 as a favor to a relative in need of space for a newsstand.
“I thought it was bigger than it was,” he recalled. “Then I saw part of it was cut off. It was a triangle.”
Because the lot sits in a landmark district, Awan was limited in what he could do with it. The stall was the most he could build given the city’s strict rules.
He rents the triangle for about $950 a month, but lets payments slide if the merchant’s business is slow.
“He pays me whatever he likes, when he likes,” Awan said, noting the cash goes to pay a roughly $3,000 annual tax bill on the land.
“You always don’t make a profit. As long as you don’t lose, that’s good enough,” said Awan, who runs a family medical practice in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and said he has no intention to sell.
Many tiny lots are unoccupied, according to the Department of Finance, which said the smallest of the small are seven vacant 1-square-foot lots scattered across all boroughs except Staten Island. Each is privately owned.
Donald Fitzpatrick bought his 1 square foot of Manhattan a decade ago at a city auction for $400.
“I was born about 10 blocks away,” said Fitzpatrick, 65. “I bought it to own real property in New York City, but also as an investment.”
If the right offer comes along, Fitzpatrick said he might be willing to part with the land, which sits on Fort Washington Avenue just off Broadway.
“Quite naturally, I’m not going to settle for $400,” he said.
Farther south, Tery Fugate-Wilcox owns a 2-square-foot lot.
“We bought this as a place to put art,” said Fugate-Wilcox, who shelled out $100 at a city auction in 1984 for the notch on Seventh Avenue near Perry Street, for which he receives a $7 annual tax bill.
“The space is larger than the deed,” he boasted.
The most valuable occupied small lot is a 475-square-foot residence on Waverly Place near Bank Street in Greenwich Village, whose market value is $4.3 million — or $9,157 a square foot.
“We moved here from a huge loft in Soho,” said the Waverly homeowner, who noted that the home looks bigger from the street. “This was quite a change.”
The unoccupied lot worth the most is a 2-square-foot property on West 116th Street in Manhattan valued at $19,000, or $8,000 a square foot, according to the city, which said the value is a calculation of a host of factors, including the plot’s commercial viability.
But the city doesn’t necessarily take into consideration how functional or practical lots are when it values them, noted Jonathan Miller, who owns a real-estate appraisal firm.
“Everyone wants to own land . . . but you want to own land that has some inherent value,” he said.
And that can leave owners in a bind.
Real-estate maven Bernard Posner knows this property purgatory all too well as the not-so-proud owner of a 6-inch-by-71-foot sliver in Brooklyn on Ocean Avenue that he bought on a lark for $50 years ago — because he used to live across the street from it.
He has been trying to dump it for years, especially after discovering a new building swallowed up most of his lot.
He said he received “a few thousand” dollars thanks to the title-insurance policy he owned to guard against this kind of infringement.
“I can’t sell it. I can’t give it away. And no one wants it,” Posner said.
He has stopped paying the $36 annual taxes, hoping for a foreclosure, and now owes $500.26.
“These properties can be difficult to sell,” said a Department of Finance spokesman. “They only have value to the contiguous property. If they don’t want them, they have minimal value.”
Posner also owns a property at Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street in the Village, which includes the famous Hess Triangle, a 3.5-square-foot triangle at one time considered the smallest piece of private land in the city.
In 1910, the city moved to condemn David Hess’ five-story apartment building along with hundreds of others to make way for subway lines. Hess had to give up the property, and all that remained was the tiny triangle — which the city then wanted him to give up as part of the public sidewalk.
He refused and instead, in 1922, had it covered with mosaic tiles to read: “Property of the Hess Estate Which Has Never Been Dedicated For Public Purposes.”