Zohran Mamdanis disdain for NYC business is showing painfully

On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani trumpeted in a tweet that New York City’s storefront vacancies had hit a post-pandemic low.Turns out he popped the champagne cork too soon.City Comptroller Mark Levine released a report on Thursday that put the numbers in context — and showed the city lagging the nation.Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the local retail vacancy rate stood at 10.5%.As of April, it was 11% — about 15,700 empty storefronts.The national vacancy rate was 4.08% in 2024, below the 2019 rate of 4.37%.In other words, New York’s storefronts still haven’t recovered since COVID, while the rest of the country bounced back years ago.Worse, in many city neighborhoods at least 60% of storefronts vacant in early 2026 had already been empty for at least nine months — a sign of sluggish growth.The city’s labor market is also hurting, having added only about 13,000 private-sector jobs in 2025, down from 95,000 in 2024.The city’s unemployment rate was 5.6% in April, up by 0.7% in a year — higher than the state’s 4.6% unemployment and the nation’s 4.3%.Darkened storefronts represent wasted opportunities for those who could be reaching for the American Dream.Yet Mamdani still doesn’t have a comprehensive economic development strategy.In April, he appointed a new “Mom-and-Pop Czar” to help small businesses start, stay open and grow.The instinct is right, but hiring a bureaucrat to fight the bureaucracy is the wrong approach.Meanwhile, nearly half a year into his term Mamdani still hasn’t named a head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the city’s vehicle for attracting private investment and creating jobs.Past mayors had little trouble filling the role, because its mandate was simple: grow the economy by getting businesses to locate here and expand.It’s far more complicated for Mamdani, whose leftist base has long decried EDC for being too pro-industry, especially when it offers tax incentives to lure businesses ...