In Midtown, retail already faced challenges pre-COVID. “We saw rents exponentially increase, really at the end of the financial crisis, between 2010 and 2016,” said Richard Hodos, CRBE’s vice chairman with the New York Tri-State Region Retail Services Team. “Then everything paused, the bottom actually fell out, and the pandemic hit. So, we’re like in the 6th or 7th year of a bad recession of retail in New York City.”