WASHINGTON — Rising rent and taxes are making life hard on retailers along Wisconsin Avenue.
It is a reality Cavit Öztürk has had to deal with for the last several years in the city's Georgetown neighborhood.
Öztürk owns the Turkish restaurant, Cafe Divan, at the intersection of 34th Street and Wisconsin Avenue.
He bought the property there 2000. Öztürk said, back then, he paid roughly $8,000 annually in property taxes.
"Today, I'm paying $32,000," he said.
Rising costs have made it harder for Öztürk to keep the same profit margins.
"We cannot raise the prices every year (for customers)," he said. "This year, it's 5 dollars and next year it's 6 dollars and the following year it's 7 dollars. You cannot do that."
Öztürk says the city government is partially to blame. He believes small business owners are overtaxed.
But, property owners aren't the only ones along Wisconsin Avenue who have been forced to deal with a changing financial landscape. Rent prices for commercial real estate are going up too.
Cushman & Wakefield analyzes commercial real estate data in DC area.
In 2017, it found that the average asking rent for 1,000 square feet of office space in Georgetown was a little more than $46,000 per year. Now, the average asking rent in Georgetown, for the same amount of space, is $49,000 per year.
Jackie Blumenthal, an ANC commissioner in Glover Park, a neighborhood just north of Georgtown, says local retailers have talked to neighborhood leaders about rising rents for quite some time.
"We hear a lot of complaints from businesses that the rent is too high and the rents keep going up," Blumenthal.
Rent and high property taxes are just two of a few factors that have led to a noticeable amount of business turnover in the Glover Park neighborhood.
Allen Hengst, a Glover Park resident of three decades, says he's noticed many businesses come and go over the last several years.
"It just keeps changing and changing," he said.
Brueggers Bagels, Mad Fox Brewery, Rite-Aid, Starbucks, Heritage India, Jimmy Johns and Mason Inn are some of the businesses that have either closed or moved out of Glover Park in the last three years. The restaurant Surfside, is slated to move to Tenleytown later this year. Whole Foods has not operated its store on the 2300 block of Wisconsin due to a legal dispute.
Some of those businesses have been replaced. Some have not.
Blumenthal says Whole Foods' closure is partially to blame for commercial turnover along her neighborhood's portion of Wisconsin Avenue. She said the business use to create a considerable amount of foot traffic that benefited other businesses nearby.
But, she added that the population of Glover Park has also changed a lot over the last decade too.
The neighborhood's young professionals and college students have made room for younger families who now look to make Glover Park home. Blumenthal said the nightlife the neighborhood was once known for has now moved east from Wisconsin Avenue to places like Shaw, the U-Street corridor and the Wharf.
"This neighborhood has become, very much, a family centered neighborhood," she said.
Glover Park has been proactive, on the behalf of its businesses, in an effort to adjust to changing times. About a year ago, local residents and businesses first began to explore the possibility of participating in DC's "Main Streets" program, a public-private partnership that provides store owners technical assistance in running their business.
As Glover Park waits to see whether it will be accepted into that program, it is seeing success elsewhere.
Trader Joe's recently opened up along the southern edge of Glover Park. Blumenthal says several other businesses are slated to appear in the neighborhood soon too.
Meanwhile, in Georgetown, Öztürk says there small businesses like his are still in need of help.
On Monday, WUSA9 counted close to 20 empty storefronts along Wisconsin Avenue from 34th Street to M Street Northwest, in the heart of the neighborhood.
Öztürk believes the city government needs to step in and do something about the neighborhood's rising property taxes.
"This is not good for the neighborhood," he said. "This is not good for us."