NYC Restaurants Relocating Due to Raise in

RentBy Ray Glattman

Union Square Café is being forced to close its doors after

thirty years of dedicated service to their

neighborhood. When the café first moved in, the

location was a home to drug users.

Now, thirty years later, due largely to the café’s focus on

employing local produce grown and provided by a

farmer’s market half a block away, the neighborhood is thriving as the home of the largest farmer’s market in

the city.

However, even with this amazing community

outreach and improvement, the café has been forced to

move on due to an unreasonable raise in rent

rates, according to an article recently completed by The

New York Times.

At the end of next year, the café will forfeit its lease and

be forced to relocate to a location that has yet to be

determined.

The article mentions that the Union Square Café is not the

first to be forced out of a home they recreated as a

result of an increase in rent rates. Several restaurants

are mentioned, which moved into a decaying

neighborhood and managed to breathe new life into the

area.

Several years down the road, the neighborhood has

become a thriving environment with increasing

real estate values; before the restaurant knows it, they have priced themselves out of the neighborhood they

helped recreate.

Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill restaurant is mentioned, as he was forced to close the very first establishment he

opened—the restaurant that helped put him and the

Flatiron district on the map—due to a doubling of the

rent.

On the subject, Flay argues that the exchange isn’t fair; restaurants do all the hard

work of bringing an old neighborhood back to life, only to be exiled at a later

date.

In general, rent rates in Manhattan are steadily

increasing, eliminating the conception of the area as a

place for deals—a place where an aspiring chef could

attempt to follow their dreams. This, to Flay,

indicates that, one day, realtors will drive away all

people and places that make New York City

interesting.