Years before the age of DoorDash and Uber Eats, before the influx of boutiques and boba into downtown Hanover, a little pizza parlor stood on Lebanon Street. C&A Pizza — owned and operated by the Georgakopolous family since 1976 — had been a late-night favorite of Dartmouth students for years, known for their unique, Greek-style pizza. Yet, over the years, business slowed down, and in 2019, a reappraisal significantly increased the value of the family’s property, hiking their taxes and giving them no choice but to close the parlor and sell their property.
Today, almost a year after the parlor’s closing, the red-and-blue storefront on Lebanon Street remains visibly empty. It’s a situation that has become all too familiar in downtown Hanover. The rents charged by commercial real estate owners in the area are so high that owners will let their properties sit vacant if potential tenants aren’t willing to pay their price. In the case of C&A Pizza, the property was bought by local real estate mogul Jolin Kish ’91, who owns properties all across the Upper Valley and has developed a reputation for jacking up rent prices.
The interests of the landlords are often not aligned with the best interests of the town. For these landlords, commercial real estate is above all an investment — because of how commercial loans work, landlords are incentivized to charge high rents to inflate the value of their properties. For the actual town, however, rising rents have eroded its liveliness and sense of community, pricing out long-established local businesses and increasingly leaving franchises and offices the only businesses that can afford to occupy real estate in the area.
To bring life back to Hanover, we need to put the town in charge of its own destiny and give it the power to implement commercial rent controls.
Caps on rent increases would force commercial real estate owners to rent their properties at prices that local businesses would be able to afford. Main Street could become a colorful, bustling hub where each property is rented at a fair price. Businesses, rather than coming and going, could be given the opportunity to establish themselves in our community. While statewide or nationwide caps would be helpful, towns have an intimate understanding of their real estate markets and are thus the best candidate to enforce policies.
There have been efforts in New Hampshire to implement rent control policies, but these efforts have been misguided. A bill was introduced in the New Hampshire legislature in 2023 which would have given towns the power to control rent increases, but it was killed out of the fear that it would disincentivize the construction of new real estate and interfere with markets. But we must not confuse the commercial and residential rent crises. The residential crisis is supply driven — in this case, the best option is to build more housing. The commercial crisis defies the laws of supply and demand. Commercial property owners have to maintain high rents just so they can renew their loans — the value of which is determined by the rents they charge — indefinitely.
Breaking out of this bubble may be painful in the short term, but it is necessary, and any rent control policy implemented in New Hampshire or elsewhere should primarily target commercial real estate.
In the meantime, the College should not simply sit idly by. With its immense wealth and power, Dartmouth has a responsibility to help the town, and it can do so by subsidizing local businesses, a strategy that has already proven successful: after Main Street Kitchens was forced out of its location on Main Street in 2020 due to high rents, the property remained vacant for years. The property was able to be reoccupied this year only after the College subsidized the new Dartmouth Authentic merchandise store at the location. For the Georgakopolous family, a subsidy from the College could have been a saving grace, helping them keep their business, with its established ties to the community, open.
As my fellow columnist Sam Leslie ’28 wrote, Hanover is Dartmouth, and Dartmouth is Hanover. Our college and community depend on a healthy town center, and it is therefore our duty to care for our town. Subsidies from the College would be helpful in the meantime, but in the long term we need a more robust solution. A well-crafted commercial rent-control policy can be that solution, helping keep not just Hanover, but many other small towns across the country, open for business.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
