New landlord kicks Star Glass out of the location they've occupied for 92 years- since 1923.

[NBachers]

I just read today that Star Glass is getting booted out from the location they've been in at Pacific and Polk for 92 years.

From today's San Francisco Examiner:

Star Glass will cease operations later this month, following 92 years at its current location at 1616 Pacific Ave. (at Polk).

The story unfolds in all too familiar terms, as a new landlord raised the rent and changed the conditions of tenancy, then gave Star Glass owner Nick Barbarotto 30 days’ notice to vacate when they were unable to come to terms. “We had to throw away two tons
of glass,” said Barbarotto, pointing to now empty racks and shelves, all custom built to hold thousands of sheets of uncut glass, which could be custom cut and finished in the shop. Star has also had to employ a small team to move the shop out, working full time
for the past two weeks.

Barbarotto bought the business in 1999 with his business partner Jerry Shaffer. He had started working for Star Glass shortly after the earthquake in 1989, when, he acknowledges with a smile, “business was good.” He hopes to keep the business in the Polk
Gulch corridor, but acknowledges that the current real estate market in the area doesn’t favor small businesses.

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[starroute]

1. Add this one from Seattle

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/real-estate-gold-rush-has-club-by-viaduct-singing-the-blues/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_bottom

How many small businesses could absorb a $10,000-a-month rent hike? Not the Highway 99 Blues Club. It’s a juke joint in a windowless, leaky basement of a hundred-year-old brick building hard up against the Alaskan Way Viaduct. There’s beauty in being that close to what Sarkowsky calls “the beast” — if it meant some of the lower rents in town.

“Nobody wanted to be down here,” says Sarkowsky, a drummer and blues fanatic who launched the club in 2004. “When I found this place it had been sitting empty for three years. Before that it was a Godfather’s Pizza.”

It has also meant blues heaven. At a time when live music clubs are disappearing, this Chicago-style house features blues bands four or five nights a week, year-round. It was named the best blues bar in the state eight out of the last 10 years by the Washington Blues Society.

But last year the building at 1414 Alaskan Way sold — for $12.4 million. Then last month the club co-owners got a letter they thought must be a misprint. They knew their rent of $4,600 per month was likely to go up on the 7,000-square-foot space. The new rent was listed at $14,959 — an increase of 225 percent, or $10,359 more per month.

[Jesus Malverde]

2. Just in my neighborhood in the last couple weeks

We've lost our laundromat and a great car repair shop. The car repair shop originally housed carriages and then auto service for some 90 years as well.

Cole valley

[mrdmk]

3. An article from the May 24 issue of The New Yorker

Why Are There So Many Shuttered Storefronts in the West Village?

At the end of this month, the House of Cards & Curiosities, on Eighth Avenue, just south of Jane Street, in the West Village, will close its doors after more than twenty years in business. It was, admittedly, not a store whose economic logic was readily apparent. Along with artistic greeting cards, it sold things like small animal skeletons, stuffed piranhas (which were hanging from the ceiling), and tiny ceramic skulls. Nonetheless, it did good business for many years, or so its owner, James Waits, told me. Its closing leaves four shuttered storefronts on just one block. With their papered-up windows and fading paint, the failed businesses are a depressing sight in an otherwise vibrant neighborhood. Each represents a broken dream of one kind or another.

The fate of the House of Cards & Curiosities is just one example of something odd that’s happening in some of New York’s richest and best-known neighborhoods—a surge in closings and shuttered shops. Consider, in particular, the West Village, the place that Jane Jacobs once described as a model for a healthy neighborhood, in her classic book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” The average per-capita income there is now more than a hundred and ten thousand dollars per year, and it retains its jazz clubs and fancy restaurants. It is both rich and vibrant, yet also now blighted with shuttered stores in various states of decay.

Abandoned storefronts have long been a hallmark of economic depression and high crime rates, but the West Village doesn’t have either of those. Instead, what it has are extremely high commercial rents, which cause an effect that is not dissimilar. “High-rent blight” happens when rising property values, usually understood as a sign of prosperity, start to inflict damage on the city economics that Jane Jacobs wrote about.

In the West Village, rent spikes are nearly universally reported as the reason so many storefronts have closed over the past few years. Cafe Angelique reportedly closed when its sixteen-thousand-dollar rent increased to forty-two thousand dollars. A Gray’s Papaya on Eighth Street closed after its owner reported a rent increase of twenty thousand dollars per month. “We are witnessing our destruction,” Nicky Perry, the outspoken owner of the neighborhood restaurant Tea & Sympathy, said. She called the situation “insane.”

link: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-there-so-many-shuttered-storefronts-in-the-west-village


Being a commercial property owner went from an investor to speculator, that is all there is to this problem.

In the OP's article, the 'financing', would not allow such a low rent. Well, how about a tax write off, will that work?

As I stated before, if a commercial rental unit stays vacant for X period of time, then there needs to be an added tax instead of a break. That will fill these units...