Lawmakers push a bill to protect small businesses from the same displacement forces gutting residential neighborhoods, arguing commercial gentrification is destroying cultural and economic fabric in communities of color
The Other Displacement Crisis: Small Businesses on the Brink
When people talk about gentrification in New York City, they almost always talk about residential displacement — the families pushed out of apartments, the longtime renters priced out of neighborhoods they built. But there is a parallel crisis unfolding on the commercial strips of every gentrifying neighborhood in the five boroughs: the systematic displacement of small businesses by landlords who raise commercial rents to levels that only national chains or well-capitalized new entrants can afford. The result is visible on virtually every corridor in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx that has experienced residential gentrification in the past decade: the Jamaican restaurant that fed the neighborhood for thirty years, gone. The Dominican barbershop, gone. The West African grocery, the Puerto Rican bakery, the Black-owned bookstore — replaced by a juice bar, a dog grooming salon, or more likely a vacant storefront whose landlord is holding out for a tenant who will pay three times the 2018 rate. A legislative push now moving through Albany and City Hall aims to change this. And the fight over commercial rent stabilization may be one of the defining policy battles of the Mamdani era.
What Commercial Rent Stabilization Would Do
Unlike residential rent stabilization, which has protected roughly one million New York City apartments for decades, commercial tenants in New York have virtually no legal protection against rent increases when their leases expire. A landlord can demand any rent they choose at renewal. A business that has operated for twenty years in the same location, built a loyal customer base, trained employees, and invested in improvements has no right to remain if the landlord decides to triple the rent. Commercial rent stabilization legislation — versions of which have circulated in Albany under the banner of the Small Business Jobs Survival Act for years — would change this by requiring landlords to negotiate renewal leases in good faith, limiting the pace of rent increases, and giving long-term commercial tenants the right to renew at regulated rates. Supporters argue this is the only way to preserve the small business ecosystem that defines neighborhood character and provides employment for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Opponents, primarily the real estate industry and its allies, argue the legislation would unconstitutionally impair property rights and reduce incentives for landlords to invest in commercial properties. The Small Business Jobs Survival Act Alliance has been the primary advocacy coalition pushing for commercial rent stabilization in New York for more than a decade, documenting the legislative history, economic arguments, and small business testimonials behind the campaign.
The Human Cost on the Commercial Strip
Behind every vacant storefront is a story. City Limits documented the bodega owner in East New York whose landlord raised rent $400 a month to $2,200, with a trajectory toward $2,800 over the next decade. The businesses that serve as cultural anchors for immigrant communities — halal butchers, Caribbean bakeries, West African braiding salons — are not merely commercial enterprises. They are community infrastructure. They are the places where people speak their language, find familiar food, get information about jobs and legal services, and maintain connection to cultural identity that the broader city often ignores. When those businesses close, the loss is not only economic. It is social and cultural in ways that are immediately felt by the communities affected. NYC Small Business Services provides data on the city’s small business landscape, including commercial vacancy rates that have remained elevated in many formerly active neighborhood corridors even as residential rents surged — a pattern consistent with the landlord hold-out behavior that commercial rent stabilization is designed to address.
The Legislative Landscape Under Mamdani
Mayor Mamdani’s administration has expressed support for small business protection as part of its broader economic equity agenda. But the legislative path is complicated. State-level legislation must navigate a Legislature with deep real estate industry ties. City-level action is constrained by the scope of municipal authority over commercial leases under state law. The administration also manages the fiscal reality that large commercial landlords are significant contributors to the property tax base, and interventions that reduce commercial property values have downstream budget implications. None of these obstacles are insurmountable. But they explain why commercial rent stabilization has been studied, debated, and deferred for years without becoming law. What has changed is the political context: a mayor whose base is explicitly rooted in working-class and immigrant communities of color, who ran on a platform that named commercial displacement as a justice issue, and who has shown at least in his early weeks a willingness to pursue structural reforms rather than incremental adjustments. The NYC City Council small business data portal tracks commercial vacancies, lease terms, and business closure rates across neighborhoods and provides the empirical foundation for understanding where commercial displacement is most acute.
What Neighborhoods Are Saying
In Central Brooklyn neighborhoods from Crown Heights to East Flatbush, community organizers have long argued that commercial and residential displacement are two sides of the same coin. When anchor businesses leave a corridor, the neighborhood’s desirability for incoming higher-income residents actually increases — the old businesses are replaced by amenities that attract gentrifiers, which drives residential rents higher, which accelerates departure of the lower-income residents who patronized the original businesses. The feedback loop is self-reinforcing. Crown Heights tenant organizers who built the tenant union model have consistently argued that their work cannot succeed in isolation: protecting residential tenants while leaving commercial tenants unprotected creates a situation where a neighborhood’s cultural character is gutted even as some residents manage to stay. You can preserve the housing stock of a community of color while destroying the community itself if its commercial and cultural institutions are priced out. Real neighborhood preservation requires both. Brooklyn Movement Center, rooted in Central Brooklyn’s Black communities, has articulated this integrated vision of residential and commercial anti-displacement work and is among the most active grassroots organizations pressing the Mamdani administration for comprehensive action. The fight for commercial rent stabilization is, at its core, a fight about who New York City is for — and who it will remain for in the decades ahead. The small business owners on the front lines of that fight are not waiting for the Legislature to act. They are organizing, testifying, and demanding that their mayor remember the communities that put him in office.
