Chair Thomas-Henry questions Khan on SBS commercial lease assistance program services
Thomas-Henry asks what services the commercial lease assistance program provides. Khan describes pre-litigation services including lease review, up to 40 hours of pro bono legal support, and notes the program has served 3,700 unique businesses with 11,000 services since launch, including 1,850 in FY26.
Going to intro 90.
So with SBS current commercial lease assistance program, if I'm a small business and I come to inquire about this program, what type of services are provided?
Thank you, Councilmember.
The services we provide are pre-litigation services from starting a lease, renewing a lease, to landlord-tenant disputes that don't rise to litigation.
And we're proud that this service has served thousands of businesses already across the city.
Since the launch of the program, we've provided 11,000 services.
That is over 3,700 unique businesses across all of the five boroughs.
And it includes things like lease review, support and understanding what lease termination could look like.
Understanding liabilities, understanding how you would go about lease renewals.
It's up to 40 hours of pro bono legal support, which is more generally sufficient.
And we're really, really proud of that program.
And under Mayor Mamdani,
His leadership, the mayor has invested additional dollars to support an expansion of this program.
In a couple months, we will share, or a couple weeks, depending on how contract negotiations and the details land, we'll be really, really excited to share with all
of you an expansion of this program that would deepen the quality and the impact that we already see and are really proud of.
Okay.
Are there any, the 3,700 unique businesses, 11,000, are those for this year or since?
What's our time for it?
Those are programs since program launch.
We have numbers, full fiscal year numbers from FY26, which in that year we served 1,850 unique businesses in all five boroughs.
And any preliminary findings for this year as of yet?
We don't have that, and it does require some data deduping because we have a sufficient number of unique.
So the numbers here, when we say 1,800, it does not reflect that those are the only types of– that is the number of services because a lot of the businesses that once they learn about the service, they benefit from the service.
If they're opening up a new business or working with another on a partnership, they will then often reach out to us.
That number is only reflecting of unique businesses.
So in last fiscal year,
We've served over, we've provided over 1,850 unique services.
Got it.