Nearly 21,500 Queens businesses received PPP loans of less than $150K
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Masked residents walk through Flushing during the morning rush last month. AP Photo/Frank Franklin II
By David Brand
Nearly 21,500 Queens-based businesses received a loan of less than $150,000 through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, newly released data from the federal government shows.
The PPP loans totaled $602,995,888 and enabled those Queens businesses to retain 72,765 employees, according to the data. The loan program, designed to help small businesses continue paying employees during the COVID-19 economic slowdown, passed as part of the federal CARES Act in April.
The data is included in two massive spreadsheets released Monday by the federal Small Business Administration in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and pressure from elected officials.
One spreadsheet lists companies that received more than $150,000. Despite the intention that the PPP loans go to small businesses, some of the country’s largest corporations received funding, including McDonalds and Wendy’s franchises. The SBA named all businesses that received more than $150,000.
A second spreadsheet included companies that received less than $150,000, but the federal government did not name them. Instead, the spreadsheets include the loan amount, business zip code and the town — or in the case of most Queens businesses, the neighborhood. The spreadsheet also includes each firm’s North American Industry Classification System number, a code used to classify a company’s type of business.
The data dump shows that 21,480 companies with Queens zip codes received PPP payments of less than $150,000. They range from a South Ozone Park information services firm that received $2 to a Whitestone construction firm that took in $149,990, according to the data.
The average loan amount was about $28,072 and the median loan was $16,710, according to an analysis of the data, but some of the data may be flawed, said Tom Grech, president of the Queens Chamber of Commerce.
Extremely low loan amounts, like the $2 listed for the South Ozone Park company, may have been typos by the SBA, Grech said.
An untold number of Queens businesses were left behind by the PPP, especially at the start of the program when the SBA saw a surge in applications. Companies that lacked a chief financial officer or an accessible accountant struggled to complete the complex paperwork, he said.
“At the Queens Chamber of Commerce, the majority of businesses have 10 or fewer employees. They don’t have expert financial folks on staff,” Grech said.
“The documents they needed to submit might not have been handy. And then there’s the language barrier. Those put Queens businesses at a distinct disadvantage,” he added.
Overall, the federal government made 4.9 million PPP loans totaling $521 billion.
Businesses in some New York City neighborhoods fared better than companies in other parts of the city. Three of the ten Congressional districts with the highest number of PPP loan recipients are located in New York City, including New York’s 7th Congressional District, which covers part of Western Queens.
NY-7, represented by Rep. Nydia Velazquez, received the fourth highest number of PPP loans in the country, Fortune reported. New York’s 12th Congressional District, which is represented by Rep. Carolyn Maloney and includes parts of Long Island City and Astoria, received the fifth highest number of loans, according to the analysis.
New York’s serpentine 10th Congressional District received the highest number of PPP loans in the country. The gerrymandered district snakes along the westside of Manhattan, through the Financial District and Western Brooklyn and down into Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst and Borough Park.
An analysis of the federal loan data by the company RentHop found that Flushing had the lowest rate of PPP loans per qualifying businesses, however. Just 38.3 percent of qualifying businesses in Flushing received a PPP loan, according to the RentHop analysis.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn had the highest loan rate, at 78.2 percent of qualifying businesses.
