Meatpacking retail: 1 in 5 units sit empty

Nearly 1 in 5 retail units in the Meatpacking District are vacant.

About 18 percent of stores — 21 out of 118, spanning almost 139,000 square feet — in the neighborhood don’t have tenants, according to an analysis by The Real Deal of retail real estate data in Manhattan.

Using a median price per square foot of $292 for the district, as noted in brokerage Cushman & Wakefield’s first-quarter retail report for Manhattan and its submarkets, that means landlords could be sitting on nearly $40.7 million worth of space.

The largest unit available for lease is at 50 9th Avenue, a new office and retail space built last year and designed by BKSK Architects with three levels of retail space spanning more than 32,400 square feet. Tavros Holdings and Arel Capital are the developers behind the nine-story, 80,000-square-foot site, known as the Meatpacking Plaza. 

GoodSpace NYC’s Chris DeCrosta and Hank O’Donnell and Odyssey Retail Advisor’s Charlie Koniver are marketing the retail space.

DeCrosta, co-founder of GoodSpace with O’Donnell, declined to comment on the property, but said the story of retail in the neighborhood more broadly is a tale of street-level differences.

“It appears that the neighborhood might be struggling, and Washington Street — absolutely struggling. West 14th from Apple to the water — not a great situation,” DeCrosta said. “But that strip of Ninth from Chelsea Market to Gansevoort … bulletproof.”

The district’s average asking rent, among the lowest in Manhattan, fell by 5.5 percent from the year before, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s report. That’s the second-highest drop in the borough after the 8 percent plunge recorded along Fifth Avenue between 49th and 60th Streets.

“If you were to take out Gansevoort and Ninth Ave, the Meatpacking story would be terrible,” said DeCrosta, who attributed the district’s falling rent figure to expensive deals getting inked and taken out of the calculation. “There would be a mishmash of asking rents from $100 a foot on 14th Street to $400 a foot on Washington.”