The above photo taken in East Harlem shows the sort of odd transition that many areas of Harlem is going through. Usually a derelict building might have one old bodega or takeout place at the lower floor but a Duane Reade in the tenement at 116th and Third Avenue kind of says it all about the chain stores arriving in Harlem. While other transitional nabes in the outer boroughs complain about not having basics such as banks and drugstores, Harlem seems to be full of these establishments in many areas. There's also a lot of chain fast food like Subways and Dunkin Donuts and that is why any new, better restaurant opening gets a lot of attention these days. On a side note, one would think if a major chain such as Duane Reade is paying rent at a particular building, the landlord would at least be able to start making some sort of repairs?
Does anyone know what "1375 CENTENNIAL" means? It's on the top of the Duane Reade building...
ReplyDeleteI think it is actually 1876 Centennial, which would be an appropriate name for a building at that street address. But... that building's address is around 2114 Third Ave. Was the avenue renumbered at some point?
ReplyDeleteThe building was BUILT in 1876 during the year of the first Centennial of the US. Landlords don't want upper story tenants as leasing laws make it difficult to sell the property for development. Best to make money off the retail space, and if someone comes along to buy the property, it's much less complicated to sell. That's why all the buildings along 125st are all sealed off on the upper levels.
ReplyDeleteBrian -- cases like this make it hard for me to avoid concluding that New York's regime of tenant law and rent regulation does more to hurt than it does help.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there would no doubt be some carnage at first with deregulation, there's quite a lot of latent supply that would come to market -- not only in the form of currently sealed-off housing stock that landlords would no longer be afraid to lease even short term, but also also as the huge existing stock of "plum deal" apartments (those now under various grandfathered statuses) gets unfrozen and starts to turn over.
@ John & Joe: I found this article that should provide some insight into the naming of tenements like these:
ReplyDeletehttp://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/east-harlems-upper-class-tenement-names/
The problem of older mixed use buildings with abandoned upper floors isn't unique to cities with rent controls, and I don't think it's fair to put the blame there. Go to older neighborhoods anywhere in the country and it's very common. I'd put more of the blame on building codes for residential units-- they've become stronger and stronger as time has gone on. Remember that it used to be very common for people to live in SROs w/ 1 bathroom per floor and no kitchen. This is now seen as being something terrible, even for the poor. As time has gone on, it's been much easier for landlords to just seal off the upper floors and continue to collect rent checks from the ground floor retail, instead of taking out loans to invest in the property and upgrade the units.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is also related to financing. Because only about 1% of the US is currently mixed use (this may seem hard to believe, but remember that the vast majority of America is "suburbia" compared to Manhattan), basically the financial institutions have financing for "residential" properties and financing for "commercial" properties. Mixed use is considered to be a weird, niche, specialty product that's "risky" because some banker in Charlotte knows strip malls and subdivisions but doesn't understand a place like Harlem. This is changing, but slowly. For a long time "urban" was a bad word and separating uses was seen as the wave of the future.
So a landlord who owns a 120 year old building which used to have a bunch of rooms couldn't get a loan to do all the work, and he might allow the upper floors to go into such disrepair that he views things as hopeless, so he goes as far as to entirely seal off the upper floors and demolish the stairwell/lobby area to increase the leasable area on the ground floor to collect more rent. This is very common.
The Philadelphia Center City District did a good study on this back in the 90s: http://www.centercityphila.org/docs/CCDlights_upstairs.pdf