Mayor Zohran Mamdani released this week a reform package to overhaul New York City’s onerous small business regulations. The “OPEN for Small Business” initiative outlines more than 50 regulatory reforms to support Gotham’s mom-and-pop enterprises.
These reforms—the result of a series of small-business roundtables organized by Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice Julie Su—are mostly commonsense and long-overdue changes to the city’s byzantine regulatory code. But they fall short of the more comprehensive regulatory and policy relief that Big Apple businesses need.
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The plan includes both broadly applied changes and reforms targeting discrete sectors. Deputy Mayor Su will convene an OPEN Taskforce, meeting regularly to “discuss the pain points small businesses face in their interactions with government.” Other government-wide provisions include ensuring that city inspectors get trained in customer service and that more companies receive the city’s Business Owner Bill of Rights.
The administration then outlines specific reforms for small businesses such as restaurants, bodegas, childcare centers, and barbershops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the mayor’s self-professed love of food, the bulk of the proposals focus on restaurants and bodegas.
Many of the reforms are worthwhile. For instance, under current New York City rules, if a restaurant wants to establish outdoor seating on the sidewalk, it must navigate a multilayered process that may go all the way to the mayor’s office. The new reforms scrap this overly burdensome requirement.
The city also requires many duplicative permits for serving certain types of food. A restaurant that offers ice cream, for example, must not only obtain a general food-service permit but also a “manufacture of frozen dessert” permit. As the mayor’s team rightly notes, this “protects no one that the existing permit does not already protect.”
In a similar vein, bodegas must apply for a specialized “stoop line” license to display items like fruit, soft drinks, or flowers on the sidewalk outside their shops. Mamdani’s reforms would get rid of this needless license.
The reforms target licensing regimes beyond food and beverage as well. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection will extend license terms for numerous transportation-related businesses—including pedicabs, garage parking lots, and sightseeing businesses—to eliminate the need for constant license-renewal paperwork for these business owners. The Health Department will extend barber shop licenses on a three-year renewal cycle rather than annually.
As the mayor’s team outlined, childcare centers currently navigate a thicket of overlapping reviews from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Department of Buildings, and the Fire Department of New York, among other agencies. The administration has tasked the Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education with developing a “resource guide” to provide clearer guidance on how best to run this regulatory gauntlet.
These reforms are commendable, but they amount to a few grains of sand on New York City’s vast regulatory beach. As Jessica Walker, president and CEO of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, put it: “Fifty [reforms] is a strong start on a list of six thousand.”
The items not on Mamdani’s list are just as notable as those that are. For example, under city law, restaurants must always have on site a supervisor who holds a city-issued Food Protection Certificate. Obtaining the certificate requires enrolling in a city-administered course and then taking a final exam at the Riverside Health Center on the Upper West Side—located, as Mamdani’s team notes, “far from most of the businesses that need it.” He proposes expanding exam sites to “multiple locations” across the city.
But why require this New York City-specific certification in the first place? New York is one of the only major U.S. cities to operate its own food-handling certification program. Most jurisdictions accept what is known in the hospitality industry as ANAB-CFP certification, in which accredited third-party providers such as ServSafe provide food-safety training to restaurant staff. Since most national hospitality and restaurant chains operate under the ANAB-CFP regime, many businesses in New York City are functionally subject to duplicative food-safety certification requirements. And the city’s Food Protection Certificate exam is administered only in person, despite many ANAB-CFB courses allowing remote examination—another straightforward adjustment the mayor’s team could make.
The mayor’s focus on supporting bodegas also clashes with his push to establish taxpayer-funded grocery competitors in each of the city’s five boroughs. Last month, Mamdani’s budget chief revealed that the administration had failed to conduct a small-business impact study for its proposal. The government-funded groceries would be exempt from rent and property tax, giving them a notable advantage over private outlets.
The childcare reforms also fall short. These could have included revisiting zoning rules governing which floor levels infant childcare centers can operate on, or creating a credentialing and certification track for home-based childcare workers.
Ultimately, Mamdani should seek to help all city businesses tangled in red tape, not just the smallest shops. That effort could begin with broadening the definition of what constitutes a “small” business in the first place. For example, franchise outlets may operate under the banner of a larger national or regional brand, but they are often owned by local residents who are certainly not millionaires. The mayor could reform the city’s burdensome nutritional menu-labeling mandates, which impose disproportionate costs on these businesses while delivering few, if any, public health benefits.
Mayor Mamdani’s small-business deregulatory push is a welcome opening salvo in the fight against the city’s overbearing rules—but it’s only a start. A more extensive barrage is desperately needed.