| 01 |
Status The Comptroller gives Bedford-Stuyvesant East a 14.1% small business vacancy rate, fifth worst in Brooklyn against a borough at 12.3% and a city at 11.0%. On the level, this reads badly. |
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| 02 |
Why A vacancy rate counts how much is empty on one day. The persistence bands count how long it stays that way. Bed-Stuy is high on the first and named in none of the second, so the empty storefronts are a different set each time anyone looks. The rate is a photograph of a corridor in motion. |
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| 03 |
Trend The Comptroller counts consecutive quarters of vacancy and names the neighbourhoods that stay above its threshold. Brooklyn at three quarters is East Flatbush, Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Sunset Park. At eight it is Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Starrett City. Bedford-Stuyvesant is named in neither. The six quarter figure publishes no list at all. |
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| 04 |
Leases The lease record fails here and we say so rather than working around it. Thirty one of thirty two tracts suppress their expiry count, so there is no usable roll. The registry does carry tenure, and tenants sit 6.56 years against a Brooklyn median of 5.08, third longest of all eighteen boards. Long tenure with high vacancy means a storefront emptying here is an event. |
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| 05 |
Permits The replacement queue runs 14.4%, 67 operators permitted and waiting against 464 active, fourth heaviest of the eighteen Brooklyn boards. Coney Island, Williamsburg and Borough Park are heavier. The number that matters more is the spread: those 67 filings sit across 65 separate addresses, top five holding 10.4%, the widest distribution this series has measured. Nostrand, Bedford and Fulton carry nine, eight and eight. Nobody is rebuilding one block. |
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Zero
persistence bands Bed-Stuy is named in, carrying one of Brooklyn’s five worst rates
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| 06 |
Closings Closings baseline set today at 464 active. West Harlem lost two this week, with a third caught as an address correction, and Jackson Heights lost three on its first delta. Ground floor permits point the other way: filings here are down 61.1% against a Brooklyn down 70.4%, a spread of 9.3 points, and that is after stripping out NYCHA, HPD and the School Construction Authority, who hold 115 of the named permits. Excluding them widens it. |
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| 07 |
The opening Named owners filing ground floor work since January 2025 run 207 deep, top five at 20.4%, led by Brickstone Group at 30. Two hundred owners filing, tenants sitting six and a half years, and vacancy that never reaches the city's persistence threshold. That is not the corridor its rate describes. |
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The move |
| Do. Stop underwriting this corridor off the vacancy rate and pull the persistence band instead. High vacancy with no persistence is downtime risk, priced in months of carry, not a permanent haircut to rent. |
| Watch. Demand is landing on Nostrand, Bedford and Fulton, carrying nine, eight and eight of the 67 waiting permits. We count how many open by April 30. Six or more on Nostrand and the refill speed is real. |
| Versus the city. Williamsburg carries eight quarters of persistence and the heaviest queue in the city. Jackson Heights carries persistence with almost no queue. Bed-Stuy carries the rate and neither problem. |
| SOURCES: NYC Comptroller, "Who's Minding the Storefronts?", June 4 2026: Live XYZ ground survey, status April 15 2026, NTA geography; the six quarter figure publishes no neighbourhood list. NYC DOHMH Restaurant Inspection Results, October 21 2026, community_board field, all eighteen Brooklyn boards. NYC Dept of Finance Storefront Registration Statistics 2024; 31 of 32 tracts suppress the expiry count, so no roll is quoted. NYC DOB NOW Approved Permits, ground and cellar, systems work excluded, run twice with public agencies in and out. |