Council Member Maloney questions Khan on best tools to help legacy businesses at risk of displacement
Maloney asks what tools would best help longstanding small businesses facing displacement. Khan discusses challenges including succession planning, describes the worker cooperative business transition option, and provides the owner-to-owner transition hotline number for businesses looking to sell to their workers.
What do you believe are the best tools to add a
help these longstanding small businesses, particularly with the displacement risk that we see.
Thank you, Councilmember.
On the risks of displacement, we were concerned about the closures of any small business in the city, whether it's a business that just started a year ago or has been in business for 20 years.
Obviously, there's larger impacts on the community if a business has been around, has had stable workforce, has employed New Yorkers, and then after 20 years has had to shut down.
These challenges are so varied for some businesses.
It's simply sometimes it's just a challenge of succession when business owners, I forget the name of this pizza shop on 86th Street in southern Brooklyn, but it's a business that was around.
Sorry?
Pizza Wagon.
No, they've been around.
But there's another one in Bensonhurst that recently shut down.
It was in that movie that everybody knows.
Anyways, this is going to be so annoying to me, and I'm going to remember it three hours later.
But this business was around there, a staple of the community for three decades.
Everybody knows this pizza shop except me.
Everybody buys from that pizza shop.
And then they shut down.
And when I spoke to the business owners there since I was around there and was trying to understand if there was anything we could do, any lease assistance we could do, and it was just the business owner wanting to move to Florida.
There's nothing else you could do if the business owner wants to move to Florida.
But one thing we're really interested in exploring and connecting New Yorkers to, something that exists already, but we want to make sure it's Lenny's Pizzeria.
Lenny's 76 feet.
One thing we're interested in is connecting New Yorkers of that nature, New Yorkers who love their business.
They're really proud of the business.
They just can't find somebody in their family or somebody else to buy the business off of them to consider selling their business, transferring ownership to the workers of that business so that business and the workers can remain in the community and continue to serve New Yorkers for generations.
New Yorkers can do that.
Those businesses can do that by accessing our worker cooperative business development institute and the services there.
One of them is the owner-to-owner.
Owners business transition hotline and it's 646-363-6592 or owners to owners dot owner to owners dot NYC which gets people connected to that service.
So if we when we're promoting the service when we're promoting our work and we hear that a business is at this juncture where they're selling the business and we know it's not something
that could be managed any other way, they just want to sell the business, then that's something that we've offered for business owners.
I do.