Bedford Avenue May Be Hot — But Not for Everyone

Apple and Whole Foods are only adding to the strain on local merchants on Brooklyn’s hottest commercial strip

There are few places more attractive for retailers in New York City than Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. In one week alone in July both Apple and Whole Foods opened new locations on Bedford Avenue, joining the high end boutiques, the hip restaurants — as well as the local places that are ever more caught between the squeeze of rising rents and the hopeful prospect of new customers.

Bedford Avenue is the most expensive retail location in Brooklyn — DNA Info ranked it fifth among the country’s most expensive retail streets, citing a 2016 report by CPEX Real Estate. In fact, the Real Estate Board of New York reported earlier this year that Bedford between Grand Street and North 12th Street, had the highest average per square foot asking rent for ground floor retail spaces in the borough — at $373 per square foot, an increase of 7 percent over the past year. And that will surely go up, says Michael Slattery, the real estate board’s senior vice president for research.

“We expect rents to continue to rise, especially with new residential development and population growth,” he said.

But what does all this mean for Bedford’s merchants?

It depends on what they sell, and to whom?

Elan Orr works at Court Shop Boutique, a clothing store that opened on Bedford Avenue in 2014. The opening of bigger stores, she says, has helped her shop. Business did not even slow down in the winter months.

“There is a different crowd of shoppers now,” she says. “It’s just becoming people who would live in Manhattan but live here now.”

It’s much the same next door at Pinkyotto, the clothing store where Itzi Calle has been working for a year. She isn’t sure if there is a direct correlation with the opening of bigger stores in the neighborhood, but Pinkyotto has seen more traffic on the weekends.

“Traffic,” she says, “is very good.”

Brian Kilmas, the real estate board’s chief economist, has seen the same trend: More pedestrians come to Bedford to shop, especially since the Whole Foods and Apple store opened.

“Similar to SoHo, when tourists and outsiders come to Bedford Avenue, it’s for entertainment and shopping,” he says.

Whole Foods, in fact, has been a lure even for local merchants. Even at the expense of their long time neighbors.

“We’re all working here so we can go to Whole Foods after work” says Calle. “It is true that sometimes I go there for coffee rather than Fabiano’s” — a local cafe located across the street from the boutique.

But some business owners are concerned that the new stores are hurting their businesses.

Lori Abran owns Soap Cherie, which has been selling bath products on Bedford Avenue for three years. She is concerned about the changes taking place. She cited direct competition from the Sabon shop, which is part of a chain. In fact, she added, local residents put off by the influx of chain outlets have stopped coming to Bedford.

“It’s like a ticking bomb,” she said. “They have changed the community. Locals fled away. Everybody is saying Sabon. We’re local. We make everything in Brooklyn.”

The impact of the new stores has been felt especially acutely by food truck vendors, who complain of a surge in ticketing since the summer.

He had just received a violation from the police when his boss, another vendor on the street, came by. They began speaking in Arabic about what they were going to do.

“Whole Foods over there complains about us over here and the police come and make a favor for them,” says Wael El Deab, who owns a Halal food cart. “He can’t tell me to move, give me a ticket and go. It is about respect.”

While it is difficult to determine whether there has been such a surge, by way of comparison, from 1999 to early 2016, only one violation was issued by the police with regards to the location of the food truck vendor. That was in 2015. This data was collected by filtering the ‘OATH ECB Hearings Case Status’ for violations issued on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg by the police department. Since 1999, 19 violation cases related to vendors have been recorded. Eleven of these were a violation of the Administrative Code 20.453, ‘Unlicensed General Vendor’ and 2 were under the 17–307 A, ‘Unlicensed Food Vendor’. Among the 19 recorded violations, one listed was with regards to the location of the vendor: ‘Vending on a side walk less than 12 ft. wide,’ issued in 2015.

Since July, however, the Ninja Juice cart alone has been issued three summons for such violations as “vending less than 12 feet from the curb.”

This angers one of the cart’s vendors, Khalid Hibaoui who has to appear in court next month.

“I’m legal there,” he says, of the spot where he parked his cart, directly across from the Apple store. “I took pictures of where I put the pushcart to show them to the judge.”

Neither Apple nor Whole Foods responded to direct questions about the vendors’ complaints.

While some vendors are feeling the squeeze, others are benefitting from Bedford’s new stores and the customers they bring.

Cool Haus Ice Cream, which has 10 trucks nationwide and boasts of “architecturally inspired ice cream,” parks in the same spot where Hibaoui was ticketed.

“I mean, clearly we are not worried about Whole Foods,” says the truck operator who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “because we sell in Whole Foods.”

The impact of the new stores extends beyond rising rents, says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, a national non-profit organization that offers assistance for local community development. Those existing businesses, she explains, were the ones that created the shopping districts and made them popular and attractive to shoppers and, now, competitors.

And, she adds, “They’re the ones being displaced.”