Some representatives of the Swedish furniture company Ikea stopped by the New York Sun’s offices yesterday to bring us up to date on their plans for a 346,000-square-foot store on 22 acres of land on the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The plans are scheduled to go before a Brooklyn community board on May 13, and will work their way through the rest of the city’s land-use review process over the next six months, a process that involves trips to the local community board, the Dept. of City Planning, the City Council, and other bodies.

The Bloomberg administration, like the Giuliani administration before it, has taken substantial strides in making the city more business-friendly. But even in a city with streamlined procedures and business-friendly politicians, a company like Ikea will end up spending four years and millions of dollars on regulatory compliance and approvals before selling a single piece of furniture.

New York has plenty of reasons to try to make things easier for companies trying to bring business here. Ikea, for example, estimates that right now, New York City customers spend about $115 million a year at its stores in New Jersey and on Long Island. Ikea estimates that the Red Hook store could recapture about $75 million a year in those revenues. That means millions of dollars a year in sales tax revenues for the city, not to mention the 600 permanent hires that Ikea plans to make for new jobs at the Brooklyn store.

Given those benefits, it is worth asking why there are already Ikea stores in New Jersey and Long Island, but not in New York City. The answer may have something to do with the myriad government obstacles that make it harder and more expensive to build here than there. Ikea is hardly whining — it’s excited about the prospect of doing business in the city, and thinks it can make a profit here even after spending $96 million on site development, a 500-page environmental impact report, lawyers, traffic experts, and other consultants. That doesn’t include the price of the 22 acres of land. But the company’s real-estate director, Patrick Smith, acknowledges that it is harder to build here than in other places.

There’s a place for government oversight of waterfront land use, particularly on projects of Ikea’s scale. But it’s worth it for the mayor and other city officials to seek ways to simplify and speed up the approval process even more. For each company like Ikea that has the capital and patience for the current set of hurdles, there are dozens of others that undoubtedly decide that setting up shop in New York City is not worth the trouble; when they take their jobs and economic benefits elsewhere, we all lose.