A 'recession-proof' industry is suddenly in trouble

Buck Ennis/ Crains

After 40 years of working in Williamsburg, Keith Senko thought he’d heard and seen it all.

He grew up in the family business, Senko Funeral Home, founded in 1928 on Bedford Avenue.

He’d seen the neighborhood transform as Polish and Hispanic families gave way to rebel artists, hipster hordes and, now, creative yuppies.

Bookings for Catholic wakes went down; requests for alternative ceremonies went up.

“It had to be in Williamsburg, they said, because it had to be ‘on the cutting edge.’ That was a new one,” Senko recalled. “I told them we’ve been on the cutting edge for a hundred years.”

“I’ve done every kind of funeral under the sun: Wiccan, Apache, Blackfoot, Hindu, Buddhist—you name it,” said Senko, 58.

But a couple of years ago, he got a call that surprised him.

“They wanted to ‘check out’ our venue—I’d never heard that before,” he said.

The caller said the deceased, a lifelong Manhattan resident, had been “extremely hip,” so the funeral needed to be as well.

Funeral homes are no longer recession-proof.

If Williamsburg were to become a hot funeral destination, Senko would be a chief beneficiary: He has the neighborhood’s last funeral parlor north of the Williamsburg Bridge.

One by one, his competitors closed: Blizinzki Funeral Home on Metropolitan Avenue, Abramo’s on Humboldt Avenue, Polakas on Berry Street, Matthew Ballas on Grand Street and others since the 1990s.

A similar pattern has been playing out across the city.

Over two decades, hundreds of funeral homes have shuttered, many of them multi generation family businesses—neighborhood mainstays who could be counted on to remember old-timers’ nicknames or provide a steady presence to the grieving.

Buck Ennis/ Crains“It’s unbelievable what’s happened,” said Robert Ruggiero, executive director of the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, a local trade group. When he took office in 1990, the organization’s directory listed 841 funeral homes. Last year, his mailing list was down to 473, a 44% drop.

Ruggiero’s numbers reflect the city’s: Just 475 licensed funeral parlors were operating here in 2015, according to the state’s Department of Health.

Funeral homes are no longer recession-proof. The new challenge for funeral directors is figuring out how to serve changing customer needs and still make money.

The usual suspects

Why is death a dying business?

Observers cite the familiar and oft-blamed culprit of gentrification, which drives up real estate prices until a funeral home’s property is more valuable than its business.

Some recent examples: the 2014 sales of Michael Cos grove & Son funeral home (established 1912) in Sunset Park for $2.125 million and Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home (established 1946) in Cobble Hill for $4.55 million. Last year, Ray Smith Funeral Home in Prospect Heights sold for $2.35 million and Marion Daniels & Sons in Harlem for $3 million.

Most were sold to developers and will become new residential and retail buildings.

“Funeral homes are good for redevelopment and mixed use,” said Aaron Warkov, a real estate broker with Cushman & Wakefield who took an interest in funeral homes about three years ago.

He calls about a dozen funeral directors periodically to test the waters.

“They’re waiting to see if their nephews want to take over the business, or their grandson,” he said. He’s sold two funeral homes in Brooklyn so far.

Unlike entrepreneurs who thrive on selling their companies and starting new ones, funeral-home owners are often reluctant sellers.

Buck Ennis/ Crains“It’s a really painful decision for them,” said Melissa Drake, president and COO of American Funeral Consultants, which does business appraisals and sales of funeral homes.

“But if you’re sitting on a property worth $5 million and you’re only doing 100 funerals a year, and your kids aren’t interested in the business and you need to think about retirement ... it’s hard.”

Eye-popping price tags tell only part of the story. Funeral homes have been closing in less trendy neighborhoods too. “It’s not one thing; everything’s changing,” Ruggiero said.

The death-care industry is going through major shifts nationwide as customs evolve.

Families are more spread out, so multiday wakes are less common. Cremation, which costs half what traditional services do, is becoming more popular.

Consolidation by large conglomerates—Service Corp. International operates 36 funeral homes in the five boroughs—has further pressured independent operators.

Funeral homes are still largely family enterprises, and many of the youngest generation are choosing not to undertake the job.

“You’re basically on call 24 hours a day. People don’t die on schedule,” said business adviser David Nixon, whose firm, Nixon Consulting, specializes in funeral homes. “They saw their parents always missing family events because they got a call they had to go take care of, and they just said no to the lifestyle.”

In New York, many funeral homes have simply outlived their established customer bases.

“We handled mostly Irish and Norwegian funerals, but now the neighborhood is mostly Chinese,” said Michael Cosgrove, a third-generation mortician who sold his eponymous Brooklyn parlor after years of dwindling business. “It’s good for Chinese funeral homes, I guess.” Cosgrove said he still arranges funerals upon request.

Underlying all these pressures—the real estate boom, the rise in cremations, the changing neighborhoods—something more fundamental is buffeting the industry: New Yorkers just aren’t dying like they used to.

New York City’s death rate has plummeted over the past 25 years, even as the population has grown by 1.2 million. The 53,000 deaths recorded in the city in 2014 were down from 76,000 in 1989. That’s a 30% drop in potential customers.

The steepest drops have been in deaths from heart disease and cancer. “They’re the two biggest killers in the city, and we’ve seen nice declines,” said Gretchen Van Wye, assistant commissioner of the city’s Bureau of Vital Statistics.

Beta blockers, ste nts and sta tins have helped reduce premature deaths from heart attacks by 30% over a decade. Better cancer treatment and the city’s aggressive anti smoking measures have cut cancer deaths; HIV/AIDS dropped out of the top 10 leading causes of death in 2012.

Buck Ennis/ Crains“Thank God for medical technology,” said Joe Aievoli, owner of four funeral homes in Brooklyn. “I am the biggest supporter, believe me. A 72-year-old gets a double bypass and he’s like a new man. He picks up and sells his row house in Brooklyn or the Bronx and moves to South Carolina and lives another 25 years! It’s phenomenal. But let’s just say it’s not exactly funeral-industry-friendly.”

More often than not, the vacated property is snatched up by young professionals or a young family, creating pockets of the city where senior-citizen sightings are rare. It has affected not just funeral homes but ancillary businesses too.

“I don’t want to sound like a miserable tombstone guy, but I look around Park Slope, and the average age is, like, 36 years old,” said Michael Cassara of Supreme Memorials, a local stone-carver specializing in headstones, monuments and mausoleums. Referrals from funeral homes used to provide a significant amount of his business. “You can feel the death rate is way down,” he said.

Life expectancy in the city recently hit an all-time high of nearly 81 years of age. The gains for older city residents are especially striking, as those reaching 70 can expect to live 17 more years.

For more than a decade, industry analysts have been predicting a surge in the death rate as baby boomers start to pass away. It hasn’t happened.

“I had customers in here the other day making arrangements for a 96-year-old woman. They were her three daughters, and the youngest one was 70,” said John He yer II, co-owner of Scotto Funeral Home in Carroll Gardens. “We’re seeing more of that.”

At 33 years old, he’s part of a small cohort of young funeral directors staying in the family business, having purchased the funeral home from his father-in-law, Buddy Scotto, now 87.

Buck Ennis/ CrainsThe surge is still expected over the next 10 years. Indeed, the number of deaths in 2014—the most recent data available—was slightly higher than in 2012. But if it’s the beginning of a trend, it is too late for the many funeral directors hitting retirement age.

“I’m young enough that I’ll still be able to catch it,” Heyer said.

For most funeral homes, cremations are what’s upending their business model. In the U.S., the median price of a funeral (including the service, casket, embalming, wake, transportation and burial) is about $8,500, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).

But New York City funerals can easily surpass that, especially because burial plots and mausoleum prices have soared—much as other real estate has. 

Burial space running short

At Green-Wood Cemetery, the largest in Brooklyn at 478 acres, a single grave plot, which has room for three caskets, costs $17,000, up from $8,000 to $10,000 a decade ago.

Space is at a premium: Green-Wood management estimates it will run out of in-ground burial space in about five years.

Trinity Graveyard and Mausoleum in Washington Heights is the only Manhattan cemetery accepting new business, but it has space only in above-ground mausoleums. Prices start at $18,900 for a crypt. Crypts in the $9,000 to $12,000 range, available a decade ago, have sold out.

At Woodlawn Cemetery, a sprawling 400-acre site in the Bronx, a plot for one costs $8,000 and a plot for two costs $10,000, double the prices of a decade ago. Executive Director Davidis on says the cemetery has at least 25 to 50 years before space becomes an issue.

At the city’s largest Catholic cemetery, Calvary Cemetery in Queens, an in-ground plot with room for three burials is $4,635. With space limited, Calvary sells plots for immediate use only.

Staten Island’s largest burial site, Moravian Cemetery, likewise does not sell plots in advance. An in-ground plot for two interments costs $5,800, just 5% more than a decade ago.

Cremation, on the other hand, typically costs about $4,000. It’s easy to see why it is becoming more popular. Last year the nationwide cremation rate was about 50%, according to the NF DA, up from 25% in 1999. New York’s was 39% in 2013, up from about 20% in 1999.

Buck Ennis/ CrainsSome attribute the surge in cremations to relaxing religious mores and the fading of traditions. Families are more dispersed, so calling everyone home for a funeral is complicated, and people are reluctant to take days off. “You used to have a three-day wake with hundreds of people coming through.

Now you don’t even get a one-day wake,” Dominic Cusimano, grandson of the original proprietor, said. He sold his building but still does funeral arrangements, sharing mortuary space with other funeral directors. “We’re here to serve the remnants of families who still want to do things traditionally,” he said.

Many say the cremation trend is simply economics. People are just more cost-conscious, observed Heyer, of Scotto’s, where cremations are about 30% of the business.

One of the biggest funeral costs is the casket, which can be thousands of dollars. But funeral homes now offer rental caskets for wakes and funeral services; an interior box slides out at the crematory.

“People will tell you it’s the increase in secularization, and I hate to differ, but that’s not what I see,” Heyer said. “A family will come in and say, ‘We’re not religious, we don’t want to go to church, so that will save us money on a service and pallbearers, etc. But can a priest just come to the house and say a few words?’”

The famed Frank E. Campbell Funeral Parlor on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, part of the Service Corp. International network since 1971, is trying to make cremation services as customary and meaningful as traditional funerals and burials.

“For our families that select cremation as a final disposition, we make sure to educate them that cremation doesn’t mean they can’t have a funeral service for their loved one before or after,” said John Kuhn, general manager. “A lot of them weren’t aware you could do that.”

The parlor is known for its star-studded clientele. Founded in 1898, it has handled funerals for the likes of Lauren Bacall, Irving Berlin, Celia Cruz, Leona Helmsley, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Joan Rivers, Tennessee Williams and just about every major New York politico.

Buck Ennis/ CrainsKuhn says people increasingly prefer to celebrate the lives of the deceased rather than just mourn their deaths, leading to new business opportunities, including customizable sculptures that double as urns and provide a focal point for a service.

Sets of small urns let family members in different cities each take some of a loved one’s cremains, eliminating the tense conversation of who gets to keep Mom on their mantle.

Another growth area is memorial jewelry—lockets, rings, cylinders and other trinkets that can hold cremains or a loved one’s fingerprint.

Artisans can incorporate cremains into blown glass. “We’ve tried to come up with different items that would have meaning to the cremation family,” Kuhn said, adding that he doesn’t see the rising cremation rate as a negative. “We view it as a family decision, and we’re here to offer them options.”

Cemeteries are offering more niches for urns in benches, columns and columbaria for those who want a funeral ritual even when opting for cremation.

All this may be too much for some, though. Customer tastes and New York City’s communities will continue to evolve, but that need not spell disaster for funeral homes.

“There is a bright future for businesses who can adapt to a 21st-century way of doing business,” said Dan Is ard, president of funeral industry consultancy the Foresight Companies. “We may be able to cure cancer, but we can’t cure death.”