Two well-known D.C. restaurants, Brine and Harry’s, and a beloved bakery, Buttercream Bakeshop, announced impending closures within 24 hours of each other this week. Two of the establishments cited economic troubles related to high operating costs and increased crime as the reason for their imminent closure.

The news comes amid a month of notable closures. Last week, Crazy Aunt Helen’s, the beloved Capitol Hill restaurant known for its drag story hours, announced it would shutter. The owner Shane Mayson didn’t answer this reporter’s call, but said on Instagram that he and his team gave it their all after facing various challenges related to staffing and its old building. Trailblazing craft cocktail bar, the Gibson, also announced last month that it would close, as did Bib Gourmand-approved vegan restaurant, Fancy Radish, and mini golf bar Swingers in Navy Yard.

“There is no more pivoting for me,” says Aaron McGovern, the co-owner of Brine, an oyster and seafood restaurant with locations in H Street Corridor and Dupont Circle.

McGovern says he opened the first location on H Street NE in the summer of 2020 to keep the workers from another of his restaurants, Russia House, employed during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Russia House was too small a space to safely operate during the pandemic, per McGovern, and he later replaced it with a second Brine.) After three challenging years — made difficult by the pandemic, rising inflation, and increased crime, he says — McGovern ultimately decided to close both Brine locations after dinner service on Saturday.

Once a prominent D.C. restaurant owner, McGovern will soon have zero restaurants in the city. After the closure this summer of his popular H Street beer garden, Biergarten Haus, he tried to reopen a new spot there that featured Maryland blue crabs and golf simulators. But he couldn’t come to terms with the landlord, according to McGovern, making his latest business pivot financially untenable.

McGovern says the financial struggles started during the pandemic, with insufficient support from the local and federal government, but the crime on H Street has made recovery all but impossible. The H Street Corridor has seen a significant increase in property and violent crime over the last year, including three homicides, one of which happened inside a lounge. McGovern believes fewer people, particularly his suburban clientele, have been patronizing his H Street restaurants due to crime.

His staff has also been impacted by the crime, with one employee being violently robbed after their shift, he says. Another H Street business owner, Chef David Fritsche of Stable, was recently carjacked at gunpoint near his restaurant; neighbors have organized a GoFundMe to raise money to help him deal with the loss of his car and another (unrelated) injury from earlier this year.

McGovern says he’s became fearful of getting robbed or carjacked at work. “You can only take so many hits and say, ‘this ain’t worth it,'” McGovern tells DCist/WAMU, noting that he hasn’t taken a paycheck from his business in a year. “If you don’t have support from the landlord, local government, and the place is crime ridden, you can’t survive.”

Buttercream Bakeshop owner and pastry chef Tiffany MacIsaac alluded to similar troubles in an Instagram post about the bakery’s closure. “The ongoing staffing shortages, the rising costs of goods, and serious increase in crime throughout D.C. have only gotten worse since the pandemic began,” MacIsaac posted.

Buttercream Bakeshop opened in Shaw in 2016 with much fanfare. The bakery became a destination for baked goods, both casual morning pastries and extravagant wedding cakes. But the pandemic forever changed Buttercream Bakeshop, leading the bakery to permanently end its counter service. Overall operating costs rose by about 29% but MacIsaac only felt comfortable raising prices by about 10%, she said in posts on her own social media page and the bakery’s.

“The constant stress of all of it has taken much of the joy of operating a small business,” MacIsaac said in the post. She also said Buttercream Bakeshop would close at the end of the year.

Harry’s Bar is closing for a different reason. Hotel Harrington, where the bar is housed, is up for sale, manger Coni Otto tells DCist/WAMU. The hotel, which opened in 1914, is permanently closing on Dec. 12, as is Harry’s. The bar made headlines in 2020 for its popularity among pro-Trump groups, including the Proud Boys, who patronized the bar because of its proximity to the now-shuttered Trump International Hotel. (The owner said in an interview with DCist/WAMU at the time that the bar welcomed “all groups” since its founding and declined to speculate why Trump supporters were fond of it.)

Dozens of bars and restaurants close each year, and so it’s hard to attribute a closure to simply one thing, as David of Eat DC told DCist/WAMU during another wave of closures last year.

But that business owners are naming crime among their reasons for closing appears to be a newer phenomenon. At the same time, some local restaurants and bars feel they’re being blamed for the increase in crime activity, including those on a boisterous block near the U Street Metro where neighbors want to institute a moratorium on new liquor licenses.

Violent and property crime are up citywide, 40% and 25% respectively. Anwar Saleem of H Street Main Street says his nonprofit has spent the most money on responding to burglaries, like replacing a restaurant’s broken windows, in 2023 than any other in his 15 years as executive director. The National Restaurant Association tells the Washington Post that crime is a growing concern that they are hearing about across the country.