Queens Center Mall

A Poverty Wage Center in Elmhurst

Elmhurst, Queens, is a bustling neighborhood, one of the most ethnically diverse in New York City. Throughout the day, Elmhurst is teeming with kids playing and walking to and from school, and people hanging out, talking, and shopping at the numerous stores that line the neighborhood’s main streets.

Standing above it all, at one of the busiest intersections in Queens, is the massive Queens Center Mall, situated at the intersection of Queens Boulevard and Woodhaven Boulevard. Originally built in 1973 over the ruins of a children’s amusement park called Fairyland, the mall prospered, with its growth culminating in a massive expansion between 2002 and 2004. The $275 million expansion doubled the size of the mall, resulting in a site with 961,559 gross leaseable square feet and 175 stores.

The current owner of the mall is Macerich, one of the country’s largest owners of malls. The company owns 95 malls in the U.S., and bought the mall in 1995.

The Queens Center Mall is among the most profitable malls in the entire country. In 2008, the mall had sales of $876 per square foot. The mall’s location, ample parking, and accessibility via the buses and subway trains that converge there generate foot traffic of over 26 million visitors annually.

J.C. Penney and Macy’s are the mall’s largest “anchor” stores, with both posting increasing annual profits before the economic downturn.

TAX ABATEMENTS FUEL GROWTH
The growth of Queens Center Mall and the Macerich company has been aided by property tax abatements that have cost the city of New York tens of millions of dollars. Under the Industrial & Commercial Incentive Program, which recently became the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program, the Queens Center Mall property saved over $48 million in property taxes between 2004 and 2009. It is predicted that total reductions of tax bills due to ICIP and ICAP exemptions between 2004 and 2019 at Queens Center Mall will exceed $129 million.*

These tax breaks have helped Macerich’s bottom line, with sales increasing from $623 per square foot at the time of the 1995 purchase to $876 per square foot in 2008. Whether in boom times or an economic recession, Queens Center Mall remains one of the most profi table malls per square foot in the entire country.

*Because future tax rates have yet to be determined, this estimated predicted tax savings utilizes a 15-year averaged tax rate of the class 4 tax rates from 1994/1995 through and including 2008/2009 for tax years going forward.

MASS TRANSIT
Besides tax breaks and its location at one of Queen’s busiest intersections, Queens Center Mall owes much of its success to New York City-run public transit. The mall is served by three New York City subway lines and 10 bus routes.

What has the community of Elmhurst, Queens, and New York City gotten for its millions of dollars in tax breaks? Not much, according to local residents and employees working at Queens Center Mall.

A POVERTY WAGE CENTER
While foot traffic, sales, and profits are sky high at Queens Center Mall, wages paid at the stores at the mall for working people in the community are very low, and in some past cases, were so low they violated the law. There are about 3,100 jobs at the mall. The vast majority of the jobs are for retail workers, with a smaller number of people employed as security and mall maintenance.

A survey conducted at various stores at Queens Center Mall found that there are few fulltime jobs and most jobs paid at or slightly above the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The average starting wage at the 25 Queens Center Mall stores studied was $7.72 cents per hour. One store, the Ranch 1 restaurant, was offering new hires $6.75 an hour, a violation of New York labor law. Footco USA and Yellow Rat Bastard, both of whom have or have had stores at Queens Center Mall, were revealed in the past to be paying illegal poverty wages before their workers unionized and joined the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Moreover, very few of the jobs available are full-time.

According to interviews with workers at Queens Center Mall, their pay is not enough to live on in Elmhurst, Queens. Click the pdf icon to download the full report.

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