Dutch Kills attracting businesses priced out of Manhattan

Dutch Kills, an industrial subsection of Long Island City, is increasingly attracting a motley mix of artists, small businesses and manufacturers.

“Many of the tenants we come across are getting kicked out of Midtown so we have a pretty eclectic menagerie of businesses and residents showing up,” Brandon Medeiros, an asset manager for Time Equities, told the Wall Street Journal.

For example, in 2013, Scott Kushner moved his 10-member media company, MediaPlace, from Chelsea into a roughly 5,000-square-foot ground floor space in the Scalamandre Silks building.

Kushner told the Journal the move cut his company’s overhead costs by more than 50 percent. Recently rents at the Silks building have climbed from $18 a square foot to $28, Medeiros said.

“I looked at Red Hook, the Navy Yard, Williamsburg. We wanted a logical path coming from Manhattan to how far people could go,” Kushner said. “Brooklyn was a little too far out of the way for our people and most of what I saw in pricing was too close to Manhattan. It didn’t seem worth the hurdles. When we went into Long Island City, we found an appreciable difference in rent that made me stop and pay attention.”

And husband-and-wife artists Benjamin Degen and Hope Gangloff recently moved their workspace to Dutch Kills “because this was the only place we could get under $24 [a square foot], where we wanted to be.” [WSJ] – Christopher Cameron