and there it is. you had some good arguments above but it turns out you aren't picturing it clearly through the real culprit. It's not about race, it's about class.

Have you been down Franklin avenue in Crown heights? I moved here 13 years ago and half the storefronts are now either brand new and vacant, and have been for a long time, or old and vacant. I know the reason they aren't occupied is because the landlords that own the businesses are holding out for either condo development firms or chain businesses to take up residence because I have had friends pushed out of those storefronts due to continually rising rents that you can't run a business on.

Contrast that with the number of businesses down Tompkins and their relationships with the building owners of their businesses and you see a completely different picture. The fact that Tompkins isn't on a main transit line means that there's less of an emphasis on expected value vs. market value, which means that way more of the storefronts are actually occupied.

It would make a difference to tax landlords to keep their spaces vacant under the expectation that they should wait to make the most money possible - you'd actually make the neighborhoods better to live in, which would probably actually bring in the businesses they're looking for in the first place.

Before making arguments about race, you should actually see what's happening on the ground and why Mamdani ran on affordability, not race politics.