I have heard that with commercial space you can take building depreciation costs and write that off as an expense so it might be not as expensive for a landlord to keep the property vacant as you would imagine. Also sometimes as I understand it is new tenant who has to clean up and bring the building up to code to open, and if there is plenty of other properties to lend they might find something with less upfront costs.

Location is everything in cities like NY, especially for businesses that rely on people traffic so few hundred feet closed to rail station might be a lot more expensive so they just wait for tenant that can utilize that.