Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration is allocating $8.4 million in small business grants across New York City’s five boroughs, directing funds toward strengthening merchant groups, business improvement districts, and commercial corridor improvements.

The grants, announced by Mamdani and the Department of Small Business Services, will support community-based organizations serving more than 20,000 small businesses. The funding will pay for street cleaning, lighting, public art, wayfinding, marketing, and other neighborhood improvements.

‘Our administration knows it’s not enough to make it easier to open a small business, you have to make it easier to visit one too,’ Mamdani said. The grants are designed to complement the administration’s push to reduce regulatory burdens by making commercial corridors more attractive to customers.

Brooklyn will receive the largest borough share, with approximately $2.77 million across 32 grants. The Bronx will receive $1.55 million, Manhattan about $1.53 million, Queens about $1.51 million, and Staten Island $550,000. Another $500,000 will go to seven organizations providing services citywide.

In Greenpoint, the Brooklyn Alliance will receive $100,000 for merchant organizing in a neighborhood that currently has neither a BID nor a merchant association. Randy Peers, co-chair of the Five Borough Jobs Campaign, said the funding will help organize merchants and put them on a path toward developing a merchant association.

Other merchant-organizing grants will support work in Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Bay Ridge, and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn; Kingsbridge and Riverdale in the Bronx; the East Village in Manhattan; and Rosedale, Richmond Hill, and Rockaway Park in Queens.

BID development grants of $100,000 each will go to Community League of the Heights in Washington Heights, Davidson Community Center in Burnside, and Maspeth Chamber of Commerce. Friends of Bogardus Plaza in Tribeca will receive $100,000, while Carnegie Hill Neighbors, Gowanus Canal Conservancy, and Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn will each receive $75,000.

The largest individual award is $426,359 to Union Settlement for work in East Harlem. Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership in Fort Greene and Red Hook Business Alliance will each receive $200,000.

The grants are the latest piece of Mamdani’s broader small-business agenda, which last month included the ‘OPEN for Small Business’ package of more than 50 regulatory reforms. The Five Borough Jobs Campaign welcomed the package but continues pushing toward Mamdani’s campaign goal of cutting small-business fines and fees by 50 percent.

Peers said the administration was ‘off to a really good start’ but noted that rising labor, utility, rent, and insurance costs remain a challenge, with nearly every major cost category facing small businesses having increased over the past five years.

Sources: amNewYork, NYC Department of Small Business Services