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Back Bay Thai place closes; cites the rent being too damn high

Boston Restaurant Talk reports that Chilli Duck on Boylston Street has closed, saying it could not earn enough to pay the rent the landlord now wants.

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Comments

Told me he pays 10 grand a month for his lease after it sat vacant for two years.

Wait these schmucks out. This is why I like being 34. I'm just waiting for old people with property to pass on.

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I would have waited until it was $4000 a month.

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I would defer to him. He's got a $38 steak on the menu, so the chance for recovery is there.

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every night of the month to break even. A couple restaurants around here with similar price points were packed every night and still folded. College kids, grad students, and Russian grandmothers aren't the biggest spenders, you see.

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If only you realized the vacant property is leverage against the taxes of the owners and written off to reduce their tax liability.

Theres not many one man or small family run real estate rackets anymore. For most of these guys it pays to keep 20% of their rental property vacant. So they ask for high rents till somone pays, then they raise the price on one of their lower end properties to force people out and get the tax break. Rinse, repeat.

Sure, it should be illegal. But "big government" is a scary misnomer than an actual functioning community and laws that promote small business over wallstreet and Oligarchs.

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Corporate welfare. Maybe building owners should be drug tested too. At least, unlike piss testing civilian welfare recipients, this might actually pay for itself.

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You don't get a tax break because you didn't realize income. That's not a loss, it's just non-income.

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Neither do you.
Losses are written off against profits, true. Tax liability is based on...profits. If you ain't getting any income, you have no profits to write expenses off against. Is it a loss? Yup. Your loss.

"Sure, it should be illegal. But "big government" is a scary misnomer than an actual functioning community and laws that promote small business over wallstreet and Oligarchs."
I still have no idea what you're talking about. Talking points is not the same as making sense.
If you are a 'small property owner', then you try to maximize your profit. That's called 'capitalism' or 'making a living'. Yes, you have expenses. You can charge those expenses against your profit.
A carpenter can charge the cost of his sawblades and stuff against his earned income.
But, if you intentionally keep a premises vacant hoping for greater income down the road, that's not a 'clever tax thing'. That's 'losing money hoping to make more down the road'.

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You're going to need to cite something that says that not leasing out a place = more money for landlords.

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Earlier this year, it was Tapeo, and now it's Chilli Duck, forced out by the high rents on Newbury and Boylston. These landlords only want to rent to the chains, so that's what we'll end up with. Fortunately, we still have Asta, Piattini, Select, and a few other excellent independent operators who haven't been forced out -- but for how long?

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Prompting the vacating of your property. Every month a property sits vacant, it's effectively losing thousands of dollars in rent not being paid.

Say the rent for a space is $2,000 a month, and the current tenant is steadily covering that. The landlord decides that he/she wants to squeeze out an extra $500 a month, so they raise the rent, anticipating an extra $6,000 a year in income. However, that's just enough to push their steady reliable tenant off the edge and out of business. In order for this increase not to become an immediate loss to the property owner, they would have to replace that tenant with a new $2,500 a month tenant within 8-10 weeks. Which rarely happens with move-out/move-in of different businesses.

If it sits vacant for say 4 months during the transition, the owner has lost $8,000 in four months by running off his tenant. So you can do the math re how many of those $500-more months with a new unknown and untested tenant are going to be needed to make up for this.

Smart landlords don't do this. (Besides the ethics of driving a good tenant out of business . . )

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they do if an 8,000 loss in rent saves them 20,000 in taxes when applied against their other properties' profits.

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As per usual, the breaks benefit the wealthier, with the bigger portfolios. Smaller property owners couldn't offset like this.

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How does an $8k loss lead to a $20k tax break?

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no sense whatsoever.

You can't write off a vacant property. You can deduct property taxes, up to $10k, from your federal return, but leaving a storefront vacant doesn't magically create money.

$20k in tax savings? How on earth do you figure? Even if you could write of $8k of "non income" (news flash: you can't), you would only be able to deduct your marginal rate. Let's assume the business pays 20%, so there you get to deduct only $1.6k.

But again, you can't deduct "non income". If that was the case I'd start deducting the many millions of dollars I'm not earning and not pay a dime in taxes.

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they do if an 8,000 loss in rent saves them 20,000 in taxes when applied against their other properties' profits

Unrealized income is not a loss. Stop making stuff up

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I'm waiting for the Boston Globe article citing racism for the reason this place closed...much like La Casa de Pedro in the Seaport.

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La Casa de Pedro is still open.

Did you mean Papagayo which closed in January?

https://boston.eater.com/2018/1/4/16844858/papagayo-fort-point-closed

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*

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Closing...most definitely closing. That better?

And PS- after reading how much $ they owe, and the fact that there's less than zero chance that location will be around in a few months, I'd avoid eating there.

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Can somebody do the math on the supposed tax break for unoccupied commercial rental property? what is the law allowing the break and how is the offset greater than any commercial income?

Also, 'tax breaks' are typically the result of too much government, not too little.

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In middle of nowhere Wyoming, maybe...maybe... you could find a problem that's the result of too little government. Around here, it's a guaranteed bet that nearly every problem you find is the result of too much government. Across the border to the north...it'd be a 50/50 proposition.

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...because there is no tax break.

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of Papa David and his Rolls parked in front of the Bulkie.

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What two of those things are.

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You just blew into this town.

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On Hollywood Squares, they gave an answer after the wiseass remark.

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Paul Lynde to you, white boy?

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You're more of a Jim J. Bullock.

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My old man's store was above the Bulkie and Paul, the elderly gay man who was the host there, told me that when we flushed the toilet upstairs, it would sometimes leak on the grill.

Good times!

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Aww man, sad to see this, Chilli Duck was my go-to for Thai when I lived in the Back Bay. I suppose this was inevitable. The little guys always get chewed up, especially on a corridor like Boylston. I hope the owners find a more affordable spot in a different neighborhood, because their food was great.

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Maybe not the place you remember. They were sold about five years ago, the staff quit (rumor was, en masse during lunchtime service), and the service and food went downhill quick. I used to eat there several times a week, but it was a sad, fast decline. Honestly surprised they managed to stay open this long.

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You're probably right. The last I would've eaten there was early 2012, so I likely didn't experience the new ownership.

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