Revival Ideas For Montague Street Could Help All Neighborhood Retail
Revitalizing Brooklyn Heights’ Retail Corridor
Montague Street isn’t what it used to be. When I was growing up, Montague was the center of our community — where neighbors could spend time at, not one but two, bookstores, pick up deliciously prepared meals at Only the Best, and get the best rugelach at Sinclair’s Bakery. Of course, concentrations of vacant storefronts are an epidemic across our district, Brooklyn, and New York City, but conditions on Montague Street are especially dire. Today we have about 20 vacancies on just two blocks. COVID has accelerated these problems, but we all know that Montague was struggling long before the pandemic struck. It’s time for us to tackle these issues and once again make Montague Street a central hub of our community. If I am elected to be the local City Council Member, bringing Montague Street back will be a top neighborhood priority for me in Brooklyn Heights.
Local small businesses connect neighbors, provide jobs, and allow us to invest in our neighborhoods rather than in Amazon. The Brooklyn Heights Association recently conducted a survey among 1,381 neighbors and the responses couldn’t be more clear. We don’t want empty storefronts to be filled with corporate chains — we want an independent bookstore like Books are Magic in Carroll Gardens, a delicious restaurant or cafe like Rucola in Boerum Hill, a bakery like Baked in Red Hook, a fishmonger like Fish Tales in Cobble Hill, and any decent butcher since Heights Prime Meats closed. A Montague Street that brings our kitchen tables and bookshelves to life and creates the connective tissue that makes a neighborhood a home. Brooklyn Heights has the buying power to support quality local small businesses and a community that is committed to helping them thrive. As Council Member, I want to be our district’s best cheerleader – helping to lead aggressive business attraction efforts, and pounding the pavement in partnership with the BHA, the Montague Street Business Improvement District, and neighbors to identify the businesses we love and persuade them to come to Montague Street.
This isn’t just a Brooklyn Heights problem. We need to develop new policy tools, a mixture of carrots and sticks, to fully activate our vacant storefronts citywide. We should create a new small business loan fund through the City’s Economic Development Corporation, specifically to uplift entrepreneurs who are women and people of color to lease empty storefronts. As someone who has worked for a decade in New York City government, I know that it is both feasible and critical for government to respond to the COVID shutdown by streamlining the application, approval, and permitting processes to help small businesses swiftly open their doors — and to guide new entrepreneurs through the process. If elected, I want my office to host workshops and serve as an education and resource hub to help small businesses quickly and easily navigate the city’s bureaucracy. On the state level, we need a short-term property tax incentive to enable business owners to keep their lights on and to give entrepreneurs with limited capital access to more affordable leases. We also need to hold bad actors accountable, like the landlord of the old Starbucks next to Lassen and Hennigs that has been vacant for over eight years, by increasing taxes for longstanding vacant properties.
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.