The city is historically under-retailed , on a per capita basis, and mom-and-pops face many of the same structural forces buffeting chain stores. | Getty Could retail implosion create an opening for mom-and-pops?

When Angelica Kitchen, the East Village mainstay that had served virtuously vegan brown rice and seaweed bowls for more than 40 years, closed in April, the story had a familiar ring. Like innumerable other mom-and-pop enterprises, the Kitchen’s owner said rising rents were key factor to its demise — a seemingly routine story in gentrifying New York City, where homogeneity has come to predominate, as idiosyncrasy withers.

Yet thanks in large part to online shopping, chain retail stores — particularly in the non-food sector — are languishing. And that's given observers some hope that mom-and-pops may be able to stage a comeback.


“I see there being a lot greater opportunity for people with intelligent businesses to enter the market, because we are going to have a significantly greater amount of available retail space,” said David LaPierre, vice chairman of global retail services at CBRE.

On top the existing retail vacancies, there’s lots of new retail space coming online in places like Hudson Yards, he noted, and the national chains, who have traditionally outgunned independent retailers, “aren’t growing as aggressively as they have grown.”

That's a nice way to put it.

In recent months, dire headlines have dominated real estate news. In January, Macy’s announced it is closing 68 stores. JCPenny is closing 138 . Payless is closing 400.

How much that will impact New York City remains to be seen. The city is historically under-retailed , on a per capita basis, and mom-and-pops face many of the same structural forces buffeting chain stores.

But with asking rents falling in the Flatiron, Midtown, Times Square, Herald Square, Soho, the Meatpacking District, and on the Upper West Side, and retail vacancies rising, a dour mood reigns among folks who have a stake in high retail rents that independent sellers can't typically afford.

“This is the most challenging [environment] that we’ve seen in two decades,” retail broker Faith Hope Consolo told the New York Post recently. “Even more than post-Lehman.”

“I think retail is fucked, plain and simple,” said developer Billy Macklowe during a real estate summit last Friday.

“There's something like 20 vacancies on Broadway in Soho,” said Susan Kurland, a top retail broker at Savills Studley, during a recent panel at New York Law School. “So we sort of feel that you need to redesign Soho and take sections out of it.”

Kurland works with millennials, and “they’ll never go to a department store,” she said. Nor, for that matter, will they go to a mall.

To Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, that suggests “building owners will turn to independent retailers more than they have in recent years."

"For well over a decade, we’ve just heard about the demise of the independent retailer," he said. "As chains moved in left and right, retail rents just rose through the roof, pushed out independent retailers. Now that we’re seeing a pullback in national chains, it could be a golden opportunity for independent retailers. I’m not saying it’s going to be the great comeback, but it could be a comeback."

Seth Pinsky, an executive vice president at RXR, offered a slightly more hesitant assessment.

For some retailers, "especially mom and pops offering something unique that online retailers don’t offer or that online retailers, at least today, can’t offer, like food or entertainment—the problems of the sector and declining rents may present an opening,” he said.

For the record, he thinks that would be a good thing.

“The dominance of chain stores in recent years has made too much of New York City feel like a generic anywhere," he said.