Who’s Actually Expanding in NY Metro in 2026

Every landlord I talk to wants the same thing: the list. Who is actually signing leases right now, and who is quietly handing back space? Not who has a press release. Who has a real estate committee approving deals.

Here is what the 2026 data — and my own phone — say.

The Macro: Fewer Closures, More Openings

Coresight Research projects U.S. retailers will close roughly 7,900 stores in 2026 — down 4.5% year over year and the lowest closure count in three years — while opening about 5,500 stores, up 4.4%.

That is an improving market, not a booming one. Coresight’s John Mercer called it “an incremental improvement over 2025 but not a major inflection point.” He is right. But for a landlord, “fewer closures, more openings, and no new supply” is a very good sentence.

Who Is Expanding — The Four Categories Taking My Calls

1. Value and off-price. This is the loudest category in the market and it is not close. Dollar General and Aldi top the national opening list; Aldi alone plans more than 180 U.S. stores this year. Off-price is right behind — JLL’s investor survey put TJX brands second only to Whole Foods on the list of tenants investors most want to own. Placer.ai’s data backs it up: New York discount and dollar store visits were up 1.0% year over year in June 2026, one of the few categories in the state posting positive traffic.

The catch, and landlords need to hear this: Placer found value grocers grew total visits through expansion while per-location traffic fell 2.8%. They are opening stores faster than they are winning trips. Underwrite the credit, not the hype.

2. Fitness. Fitness is the strongest traffic category in the New York metro right now, full stop. Placer’s June 2026 state data shows fitness visits up 2.8% in New York, 3.7% in New Jersey, and 4.0% in Connecticut — while grocery in New York was down 2.0% and restaurants were down 0.7%. JLL’s retail advisory president, Naveen Jaggi, put it bluntly in CNBC’s coverage: retailers are now competing for the same strip-mall square footage with expanding food-and-beverage concepts and Pilates and fitness studios. “You can pop out a GameStop and pop in a SoulCycle.”

3. Medtail. Urgent care, imaging, physical therapy, dental, vet. Post-pandemic, chains like American Family Care, CareNow, Concentra, GoHealth and WellNow pushed hard into retail. The National Association of Realtors reported in May that low retail vacancy has driven up demand — and rents — for medtail leases, and that landlords are currently in the driver’s seat on those negotiations.

Two things I have learned doing these deals: the leases are long (10 to 15 years is normal) and the credit is good, but the build-out is brutal. Gas lines, oxygen lines, specialized drainage. Expect to lose most of a year of income during construction. Price that into the deal or you will feel it later.

4. QSR, especially with a drive-thru. Restaurant traffic in New York was down 0.7% year over year in June 2026, so this is not a rising tide — it is a share fight, and the winners are value-forward and convenience-forward. If you have a pad site with a drive-thru approval in Nassau or Suffolk, you own one of the scarcest assets in retail real estate. Do not lease it cheap.

Who Is Quietly Shrinking

Drugstores. Walgreens is among the three retailers with the most planned closures in 2026, and both Walgreens and CVS shrank their footprints in 2025. If a drugstore is your second anchor, start the backfill conversation now — do not wait for the notice letter.

Specialty apparel and mall-format legacy. GameStop is shuttering hundreds of locations. Francesca’s is liquidating roughly 460 stores. Coresight’s read is that reinvented mall retailers like Abercrombie and Gap are squeezing out smaller specialty apparel players. Department stores and legacy chains continue to slim down.

Grocery experiments. Amazon announced it is closing all Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go locations, converting some into Whole Foods. The tech-grocery experiment is over. The supermarket won.

The bankruptcy tailwind is fading — which cuts both ways. 2025 saw 32 retail bankruptcies. So far in 2026 there have been two. Fewer bankruptcies means less distressed space hitting the market, which means the tenants who want to expand are fighting over a shrinking pool of boxes. As Jaggi told CNBC: “We are looking at a world of dwindling supply.”

What It Means on the Ground in NY Metro

National availability sat at 4.9% in Q1 2026, per CBRE, with asking rents up 2.4% and new construction at historic lows. Suburban availability has fallen 91 basis points since 2022 while downtown availability has risen 120. Long Island is the purest expression of that trend: no new supply, no land, entitlements that take years, and a tenant list that is growing.

Which means the leasing conversation in 2026 is not “what’s my rent.” It is “who do I want in this space for the next fifteen years, and what is that tenant worth to everything else in the center.”

Sources

• CNBC / Coresight Research — “Here are the retailers with the most store openings and closures planned for 2026”, February 2, 2026
• Placer.ai — Industry Trends: Year-Over-Year Visits by State, June 2026 data (Fitness, Grocery, Restaurants, Discount & Dollar Stores)
• Placer.ai — “Grocery in Q1 2026: Is Traditional Grocery Making a Comeback?”, May 19, 2026
• National Association of Realtors — “Prescription for Profit: How ‘Medtail’ Is Shaping the Retail Market”, May 12, 2026
• JLL — “2026 U.S. Retail Thematic Outlook and Investor Survey”, June 30, 2026
• CBRE — “Q1 2026 U.S. Retail Figures”, April 29, 2026

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