The cooking supply store Whisk will shutter their Williamsburg, Brooklyn location at the end of April, owner Natasha Amott has told Gothamist. During lease renewal discussions, Amott says Whisk's landlords asked for $26,500—a staggering 44% hike from the $18,452 they already paid monthly.
Her decision to shut down the store is not for a lack of business, she says, claiming that Whisk's Williamsburg location is consistently bustling, and has been able to contend with steady rent increases since they first opened in 2008, at the corner of North 4th Street and Bedford Avenue. "The thing is, we could sustain that high rent," Amott wrote in a "love letter" that they've been handing to customers at the store. "We are a great, busy store and online retailers have not cut into our sales enough to hurt us."
Amott says that ahead of her 10-year lease renewal, her longtime landlords told her not to worry about the "crazy rents being asked for on Bedford Avenue." But in the summer of 2018, she tells Gothamist, they "clearly indicated that there was a certain number under which they could not go under," which was $26,500 a month. "I realized I would probably be facing the change of my business model, where I’d be increasing prices for customers and I’d be looking at possibly depressing staff wages," Amott adds.
Amott looked for other retail spaces in the area, and in Greenpoint as well, but has opted to instead work on small business advocacy projects (Whisk has two other locations, one in the Flatiron District, and another in Downtown Brooklyn).
Gothamist wasn't able to reach Whisk's landlords for comment.
Whisk's Williamsburg outpost, benefiting from ample foot traffic on Bedford Avenue, has long catered to locals, tourists, and restaurateurs alike. The high-earning store was able to weather rent increases from $8,625 a month to $18,452 a month, and even expanded to add a bakeware section in 2012.
For Amott, the staggering rent hike is indicative of a larger trend: Chains using retail storefronts not as a commercial space for the community, but more as advertisements. One example is Space NK, the London-based beauty chain that replaced the Bedford Cheese Shop's location on 229 Bedford Avenue. In 2016, The Real Deal reported that the locale had rented a space for a record-shattering $400 per square foot, the highest in Brooklyn.
"It would surprise me greatly if [Space NK] were actually making enough money to pay that rent, but they’re a hedge-fund supported business... And so that is part of this displacement story," Amott says. "So many of these multinational brands want Williamsburg. They think Williamsburg is the place to sell their brand to, so they’re willing to treat the high rent as an advertising dollar."
Williamsburg—particularly along Bedford Avenue—has often been cited as a striking example of how far (and how alarmingly quickly) gentrification can expand its many sinewy tentacles throughout a neighborhood. In recent years, Williamsburg's fading reputation as a DIY cultural destination has been all but erased, as Starbucks, J. Crew, Whole Foods, and bank branches proliferate, and developers buy and build on properties for astronomical figures.
That has not only had an outsized effect in pricing out longtime residents and small businesses, but Williamsburg has also become shorthand for a certain upscale lifestyle fantasy: Consider the fact that Paris has a "Beford Bistro", and let's never forget that Williamsburg boutique selling $288 mosquito netting. Things have changed since [you lived in Williamsburg].
A version of Whisk's letter to customers is on its windows, ahead of the store's closure. (Courtesy of Lindsey Smith)
Last week, the Real Estate Board of New York released a report analyzing shifts in ground-floor retail space prices in Brooklyn. While many asking prices dropped for commercial spaces around the borough, and in certain pockets of Williamsburg, there was a notable exception. The median asking rent for the corridor of North 4th Street between Driggs and Kent Avenue (down the block from Whisk) shot up from $122 per square foot to $196. That's a 61% increase in a single year, from the winter of 2018 to the winter of 2019.
In the report, REBNY also notes that some "prime spaces" in the neighborhood have been taken up by the likes of makeup giant Sephora and banks; on the block where Whisk resides, there's a Capital One, a Citibank, and an HSBC. It seems as though the commercial desirability of Williamsburg has persisted in spite of the MTA's waffling on L train shutdown plans... which has had a disastrous effect on some local businesses that left Williamsburg ahead of the repairs. On her end, Amott says that the L train shutdown had been a point of discussion "but wasn’t the make or break aspect for me or for my landlords."
It's unclear whether Whisk's neighbors are facing similarly exponential rent hikes as of late. If you're a business owner on or around Bedford Avenue and would like to tell us more about your experience, drop us a line.
