The Importance of Restoring Midtown’s Retail to the City’s Recovery

This REBNY study focuses on the devastating impact of an unprecedented reduction in office occupancy on office-dependent retail. REBNY finds that nearly 30% of storefronts in office-dependent retail corridors are unoccupied as of the Summer of 2021. This includes more than 15 corner locations, several flagships and in some areas – entire blocks of vacant storefronts. This is significantly higher than the vacancy rate in the surveyed residential neighborhood in Manhattan and roughly twice as high as the vacancy rates in surveyed residential neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.