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The empty storefront crisis and the end of the American dream

NEW YORK — Sam Il-Rumi came to the United States with his parents and brothers in 1980, fleeing the occupied West Bank and settling in New York, where his father opened a pet-food store in the East Village.

The empty storefront crisis and the end of the American dream

Sam was a young man when he arrived, and within nine years he had acquired and sold two delis in the West Village and opened his own pet-supply store on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, where he has remained — the hardiest plant in the most unforgiving weather.

Montague Street, once the prime shopping artery of an affluent neighborhood, has few of the sort of independent stores that people who live near it actually want.

Like so many other commercial stretches of the city, it has storefronts that have been vacant for months and even years.

When Sam first established himself in Brooklyn Heights, Yemeni immigrants owned many of the businesses.

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The narrative that followed featured the predictable story arc: Rents went up and up and up; Amazon and FreshDirect colonized our shopping habits; cellphone stores and urgent-care facilities descended.

Although a few years ago he had to let workers go, Sam has persevered. At any given point in his seven-day workweek, he can be found in his store alone, or outside greeting people, familiar with everyone and everything — every cocker spaniel and Maltese, husband and wife, wet-food preference, dry-food preference.

Not long ago, he introduced a customer who was widowed to another regular; the two decided to marry. Over the decades that Sam developed this devoted following, he became a homeowner and raised five children — one of them works in marketing, another is in dental school.

The likelihood of a scenario like that unfolding today seems fairly slim. For the millions of immigrants who came to this country during the 20th century, entry into the merchant class was a viable and important path to prosperity.

A new exhibit at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side — “Immigrants Mean Business: An Enduring History of Entrepreneurship” — reminds us of the outfits that began in pushcarts, grew to institutions and spanned generations. Today, there are 83,000 businesses in New York owned by people who came to the city from another country.

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For those who seek to open stores now and build livelihoods around them, the challenges are forbidding if not insurmountable.

Three months ago, the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development, an advocacy group, released a report based on lengthy interviews with 90 immigrant small-business owners in four neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx — owners of shops and restaurants — and found that 77% were overburdened by rent, 40% reported instances of landlord harassment and more than a quarter of employers were forced to lay people off. Those workers themselves are typically immigrants as well.

We often talk about the empty-storefront problem as a crisis of urban planning and inadequate regulation, a threat to a beloved and intimate style of consumerism. But what is at stake is much greater than that — a blockage in a pipeline to social mobility when so many other opportunities have been foreclosed.

If you were to tour the upper West 20s in Manhattan’s Chelsea, you would find the vestiges of a thriving fur industry that advanced the fortunes of Greek immigrants who came in peak numbers from the 1950s to the 1970s, escaping the decimation of civil war. Many arrived from Kastoria, near the Albanian border, where the fur trade dates to the Middle Ages, when the city supplied the ermine pelts that lined the robes of Byzantine courtiers.

Recently, I took a walk around the neighborhood with Nick Pologeorgis, a second-generation furrier who operates a showroom and factory on West 29th Street, a business his father started in the 1960s more than a decade after arriving in New York from Crete.

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The family made the eastward trek of the ambitious — moving from Brooklyn to Woodside, Queens, and ultimately to suburban Long Island and wide lawns. Nick took over the business in 1990, and some of the workers, who cut and sew pelts, remain from his father’s era. The men and women in the production room are largely Greek and Dominican. One, John Hilas, made a good enough living to send three children to college — a lawyer, an engineer and a teacher — and buy two houses in Queens, one of them as an investment.

The first real contraction of the fur industry came in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as the recession forced a shift in tastes away from excess and the feeling that animals ought not to be worn gained momentum. By the early 2000s, Nick told me, rents doubled as tech companies moved into the fur district. Then the rents just got higher.

Competition from more cheaply made furs in China made things harder. A number of the empty stores in the area once sold skins. The barbershops and diners that serviced the fur industry — owned by Greeks and Italians — vanished. Furriers who sold wholesale and retail coats and accessories paired up in single shops to save on rents.

There may no longer be any justification — if there was ever one to begin with — for killing animals in the service of creating a product that no one needs and most people cannot afford. But if the proposal to ban the sale of fur in New York, legislation put forth by the City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, does materialize, it will deliver the fatal sedative to an industry that has moved people forward for so long. The human cost is not negligible — more than 1,000 jobs would be affected.

Johnson has maintained that the ban would not have to happen abruptly, that workers could be retrained and placed in new careers in the fashion industry. But that might not be so easy, given that the average age of the worker in the fur industry is 49. In one shop’s backroom, I met a sewer who was 76, still very eager to keep going so that he could help his grown children and grandchildren. The business owners themselves would be forced to shut down.

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“We need to do this humanely for both animals and workers,” Johnson told me. “Hopefully we can alleviate suffering in the world without creating more suffering.”

Few may mourn the fur industry when and if it does disappear. But what will come instead? What will happen when all the Greek diners and Yemeni convenience stores and Middle Eastern pet shops can no longer sustain themselves? Who will be inspired to come here and take their place?

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