‘My Runway Is Over’: Covid Pushes a City Block to the Brink
The pandemic hasn’t triggered a real estate meltdown on Main Street, but time is running out for one Seattle landlord and her tenants.
Some of Liz Dunn’s small-business tenants, including Yukiko Sodos, second from right, and Tony Lau, right.
Photographer: David Jaewon Oh for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe One Year, One Neighborhood series follows small businesses in the Pike/Pine corridor in Seattle, the first coronavirus hot spot in the U.S., to get a sense of what cities will look like as they reopen.
Liz Dunn spent years transforming a handful of adjacent properties in Seattle into an acclaimed urban development, with apartments, offices, and a lot of retail space. Among her tenants were restaurants, a salon, a home-goods boutique, a bicycle shop, a hardware store, and a CrossFit gym. Many were in trouble after the government passed sweeping restrictions in March to control the spread of the novel coronavirus in the U.S.’s first Covid-19 hot spot.