Evy Viruet started to think something was up when she kept getting phone calls from business owners on Kingsbridge Road about people coming around and taking pictures.

“We figured they were up to something,” said Viruet, a small business organizer for Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC).

Owners of Kingsbridge corridor businesses soon found ads on the real estate listing site Loopnet.com that offered 2 through 12 W. Kingsbridge Rd. and 2647 through 2659 Jerome Ave. up for sale, specifying that “existing tenants are month to month.” Many tenants in those buildings also have no commercial leases at all.

To add insult to injury, the ad offered potential buyers a five-year commercial lease.

“When you don’t have a lease, they put you out,” said Christian Ramos, owner of Tnt Nail & Beauty Supplies on Jerome Avenue, which is one of the properties for sale. “I work here for five, 10 years. I feel like I’m working for nothing.”

“My situation is I stay here now,” added Ramos, president of the Kingsbridge Road Merchants Association. “I don’t even know if I’ll be here tomorrow.”

Whether they have leases or not, commercial tenants have very few of the legal protections and regulations that are available to residential tenants—no rent stabilization and no day in housing court.

The news comes amid a new report by the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development (ANHD), which found Kingsbridge Heights merchants experience more difficulties managing their business even compared to merchants in two other business strips sampled. NWBCCC partnered with ANHD in gathering data for the report.

Of the businesses surveyed in Kingsbridge Heights, 89 percent were rent-burdened, meaning they spent 30 percent or more of their income on rent. 46 percent had a too-short lease or no lease at all, and 57 percent experienced harassment from their landlords, the report said. Those numbers compare unfavorably with Jackson Heights in Queens and the Lower East Side and Chinatown in Manhattan, the three other neighborhoods where the survey took place.

Among other problems small business owners described in the study were lack of access to business loans (difficult to secure without a commercial lease), having to lay off employees to be able to make rent, and harassment based on immigration status.

A law defining and prohibiting commercial tenant harassment was passed by the New York City Council in June 2016. Under the law, landlords cannot use force or threats of force against small business employees or customers, repeatedly shut off utilities like heat or water, or prevent employers or customers from entering the premises, among other forms of harassment.

More recently, Manhattan Councilman Mark Levine on March 11 introduced a bill to grant small business owners free legal representation if they are facing eviction. Nearly 4,000 commercial tenants have been evicted in the city since January 2017, the numbers growing steadily year after year, according to data from the New York City Department of Investigation. In the first two months of 2019, commercial evictions spiked 17 percent compared to the first two months of last year, the data shows.

As it stands, the existing commercial tenant harassment law is still not enforced, according to Viruet.

“We’ve had small businesses that have had their lights shut off, their locks changed, their gates taken down,” Viruet says, “and if they were to call the NYPD, they’d tell them, ‘we can’t help you.’”

There is no city data that tracks commercial tenant harassment, though it commonly happens when tenants lack leverage, such as a signed year-long or longer lease.

Henry Kessler, the landlord of 2 through 12 W. Kingsbridge Rd. and 2647 through 2659 Jerome Ave., said “everything I own is for sale.” When asked why the tenants were unaware the properties were for sale and had to find out through a real estate ad, he declined to answer questions, instead resorting to insulting the reporter who called.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.