Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY), said, “This is just another politics-driven, solution-less, regulatory scheme that would threaten the financial stability of small property owners who are fortunate enough to have a commercial space on the street level of their rent-stabilized apartment building. It’s bad enough that the Mamdani-controlled RGB froze rent-stabilized rents for the next two years, and that the HSTPA of 2019 makes apartment renovations financially impossible. Now the long arm of government wants to reach further. The rent from commercial space, particularly part of a small rent-stabilized property, is a benefit to residential tenants because the income helps owners operate, repair, maintain and provide safe, quality housing. The market, not a politically-controlled commercial rent guidelines body, should drive rents. Commercial rent control will harm small owners and their residential tenants. Elected officials should be considering concrete solutions, such as tax relief for both small property owners and the small businesses we rent to. That will be far less costly to the city than administering millions of commercial leases, and it will maintain investment in our neighborhoods.”

Jan Lee, who owns a small mixed-use building in Chinatown and serves on the board of Small Property Owners of New York (SPONY), said, “Before government meddles this deeply in private contracts and takes the easy path to solve this problem – blame the landlords – it should first understand why storefronts are vacant. Every block in New York City is different. On Canal Street, legitimate brick-and-mortar businesses compete with counterfeit goods sold directly outside their doors. Elsewhere, vacancies may be driven by a persistent encampment, public-safety problems, years of construction, poor transit access, or a street that floods every time it rains. This commercial rent control proposal would address none of these root causes. It treats every neighborhood, every storefront, and every landlord-tenant relationship as though the problem is exactly the same. That blanket approach is lazy, bureaucratic and unhelpful. The city should be using targeted solutions, including legacy lease incentives, to preserve the longtime businesses that communities actually value, not creating another massive regulatory system while claiming to cut red tape.”