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Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

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Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#141
post #117
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Study Finds Most Restaurants Fail Within First Year Of It Becoming Illegal To Go To Them Even without these laws, personal decisions would have decimated the business regardless. Even in places didn't shut down, patronage plummeted.

Don't eat the onion.

I know it's the onion, I'm responding to the commentary that it's making. Many of its articles have depth to them.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#142
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, they were very difficult to get. Especially for smaller businesses without bank relationships.

How do you have a business of any size without a banking relationship?

Rather than “bank relationship,” a clearer phrase would be “existing bank loan.” https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020/05/where-... examines this:

> For this reason, we turn to testing the hypothesis that variation in the share of small businesses with existing bank financing explains the variation of PPP loans approved across states. The top panel of the figure below shows the share of small businesses with bank financing in 2019, while the bottom panel shows the share of firms receiving PPP loans.

> We can see that there is strong similarity in shading between the top and bottom panels, consistent with the lenders’ preference explanation. This relationship is further confirmed in unreported regressions. Our interpretation is that banks’ preference for their own customers causes the PPP to favor firms with existing lending relationships.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#143
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning real estate is an investment, not a right. It's no different than any other investment. If I have a loss on leveraged stock investments should the government bail me out?

We are not talking about investment losses here. We are talking about breach of contract. A renter signs a contract promising to pay rent. The value of the building, whether it drops or increases, is the investment component of being a landlord. That is not in dispute here. If a building drops in value the landlord just has to deal with it. But until now, if someone promised to pay rent and did not do it, a landlord…

I disagree with your conclusion. If landlords think owning land is too risky, they’ll sell their properties, supply will increase, prices will drop and new buyers will come in to take advantage of the low prices before the market inevitably recovers.

Owning land is lucrative in NYC and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#144
post #73
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God no. They've been sitting on empty buildings for years. It's time for them to default on the underwater loans and let people actually put the wasted space to use. Every city in the US has a similar issue including the one near where I grew up and it's the weirdest most broken thing. I remember many times walking down streets flanked by empty buildings with homeless people sleeping outside.

If they have been sitting on empty buildings for years, why would they want renters now? I expect they would just continue to keep their buildings empty and continue to be unaffected by this pandemic.

I know a few property-owning/landlord families. They own multiple properties, both residential and commercial.

Some of those properties are profitable to rent out. Some are not. You rent out the profitable ones. You don't rent out the ones that are not profitable, you just wait until they're worth significantly more than what you paid for them. When they are, you sell them, and you buy more property. Each property leverages the subsequent properties, in terms of both the mortgage credit you have access to, and actual money gained accumulated from rent and sales.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#145

Subsidizing the restaurants without getting anything in return seems like a misallocation of capital. Allowing 'creative destruction' on a massive scale is harmful to social stability and frankly just cruel. People didn't plan for it, because it is implied in our various social contracts that they don't need to(and that may be wrong, but this is not the time to fix that). We should consider subsidizing the restaurant…

Government mandated closure is hardly a description of "creative destruction".

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#146
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nyc and other municipalities really bungled the categorization of risk. restaurants and bars shouldn't have been lumped together in the first place. most restaurants could have employed some modest measures and stayed open at 80-90% capacity (which may be below break-even for some, but probably enough to ride out the pandemic with price hikes and/or modest gov loans), as risk is isolated between tables (no, that one…

I feel like this might ignore that a good portion of restaurant sales are from the bar. Chilis, Applebees, to an extent BJs Restaurant. I feel only a few companies have adopted to the fact that you can deliver alcohol. There's no reason that those bar sales, can't be from the restaurant over postmates or uber eats.

You know the point of a bar is not the alcohol, right?

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to bail out landlords then? The money isn't going to come from nowhere.

Those seeking rents should be where the buck stops in a paused economy.

Collecting rents is not the same as "rent seeking".

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#148
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wants to blame someone - e.g. its the governments fault! In reality, its just an external force that everyone is dealing with, a plague, if you will - its not anyone's fault; it just must be faced, that during a plague, there will be suffering, and there will be casualties. It's that simple.

No, it is not that simple. There are various ways to respond to a plague, and some are better than others. Some responses result in far more casualties than others, in addition to the economic damage. We can all see that some governments responded well and others did not.

No country is coming out of this unscathed. Even the ones that kept their cases low are going to be in a world of economic hurt. And they have far few ways to weather the storm than Western countries.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting hit hard is probably why they don't see a second wave. They got the whole thing over with in one wave.

I think spring was "the wave". In Nashville they closed bars and restaurants for 6 months because .004% of the cases came from bars and restaurants. We need to give people choice. If we wait until we get a vaccine it will be Fall 2022 and many Americans won't get it. What then? No bar and gym re-openenings until X percent of the population is verified to be vaccinated? Mandatory vaccination checks on entrance? Punt a…

I wonder how much people changed their behavior in sunbelt states in July when cases were on the rise. I don't remember lots of new restrictions or lockdowns. New cases just kinda peaked.

I'm cautiously optimistic that the past week in the US is a blip from Labor day. Both peaks and troughs are improved from two weeks ago, but up from the week before.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#150
post #146
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this might ignore that a good portion of restaurant sales are from the bar. Chilis, Applebees, to an extent BJs Restaurant. I feel only a few companies have adopted to the fact that you can deliver alcohol. There's no reason that those bar sales, can't be from the restaurant over postmates or uber eats.

You know the point of a bar is not the alcohol, right?

Well, it is. But not the only point.
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