Strengthening Transit Through Community PartnershipsNeighborhoods used to be valuable because of their convenience—which, in New York, is usually measured by how close they are to public transportation, their proximity to the commercial centers of Manhattan—and their amenities. There was value in the local. But now, with apps available for pretty much anything you could want, locality is losing ground to a different form of convenience, one that means you never have to leave your house, but one that also means once you’re out of your house there’s not much there.
New York regulates hundreds of thousands of apartments to help reduce citywide rents, offers incentives to developers to include affordable housing in new buildings, and has several programs encouraging middle class homeownership. But nothing like that exists for commercial storefronts, probably because of the market-friendliness of local politicians. “These things are treated as if they’re entirely private market decisions,” CNT President Scott Bernstein said. “There are all sorts of programs for subsidizing housing but there’s not one for stores.”