New York City is making permanent an outdoor dining program set up temporarily during the pandemic as a lifeline for restaurants.
Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday signed into law a City Council bill to establish what the city describes as the largest outdoor dining program in the United States. It comes as cities around the country consider similar moves to codify options permitted during the global health crisis.
Under “Dining Out NYC,” outdoor dining will be permitted year-round on sidewalks and from April to November in the roadways, Adams’ office said in a statement Wednesday. The legislation expands rules that predated the COVID-19 pandemic, when outdoor dining was permitted only on sidewalks largely inside Manhattan.
The legislation also aims to simplify the process for getting approval and makes it less expensive to apply than the city's previous sidewalk café licensing program, lawmakers said.
The New York City Hospitality Alliance, a restaurant industry lobbying group, cheered the legislation, calling it historic.
The program “will cut the red tape and reduce fees for restaurants to participate in outdoor dining when compared to the overly restrictive pre-pandemic sidewalk café licenses, which excluded so many restaurants throughout the five boroughs from even offering al fresco dining,” the alliance wrote to its members on Wednesday.
The alliance also chose to accentuate the positive in the City Council's decision to place some limits on creating dining spaces on streets: “Seasonal roadway dining from April through November ... [was] something that before the pandemic was not even a dream. We strongly believe it is better to have eight months of roadway than no roadway dining at all, even if it’s not allowed during the winter as a compromise.”
The program is expected to help the city’s more than 23,000 restaurants, New York City Department of Small Business Services Commissioner Kevin Kim said in a statement from the mayor’s office. “Outdoor dining saved thousands of jobs and small businesses during the pandemic and fundamentally changed how New Yorkers view their city streets.”
The move comes as New York’s retail leasing market has seen continued signs of improvement from the damages of the pandemic. For instance, the number of Manhattan’s direct ground floor availabilities tracked across Manhattan’s 16 premier shopping corridors declined for the eighth straight quarter in the second quarter, according to a study by the brokerage giant CBRE. There were 200 availabilities in Manhattan last quarter, down 2.9% from 206 in the first quarter and a drop of 17% from a year earlier. The count of available spaces was 31% below the peak of 290 spaces recorded in the second quarter of 2021, according to CBRE.