For the past several months, a few small-business owners next to the Neptune Theatre have become increasingly anxious that Seattle Theatre Group wants to expand their real-estate holdings and toss them out the door—but they've had trouble getting hard answers from either STG or their landlord.

STG holds a lease on the University District's Neptune Theatre—which they took over from Landmark Theatres in 2010 after the movie chain got a sudden 30-day notice to vacate—and reportedly wants to take over other spaces on that block including Trabant Coffee and Chai (which has been there for 11 years) and the Comic Stop (there for 15 years, though owner George Demonakos says he took over just three years ago).

STG spokesperson Antonio Hicks said the arts and entertainment nonprofit—one of the largest in the state—has not made a final decision about taking over those spaces. But landlord Craig Thompson, who lives in California, said he was confident that STG would be moving in "fairly soon... in months, probably."

The owners of Trabant, the Comic Stop, and Neptune Music Company—all of whom are either on month-to-month leases or expect to be as soon as their normal leases expire—are on tenterhooks.

Tatiana Becker, owner of Trabant, said she first got a hint that something was up in May of 2013 when Thompson kept making excuses to put off any discussion about renewing her three-year lease. She told him she'd spent around $100,000 on renovations and upkeep over the past decade and was about to fly out a designer for a new $25,000 kitchen remodel.

"He told me, 'We don't like long leases but we value long-term tenants—that comic book store has been there 20 years,'" Becker said. "He led me to believe we'd be able to stay... I told the landlord I was going to redo the space. I showed him the budget."

But when her three-year lease expired in April 2014—after she'd spent the $25,000 on her kitchen upgrade—Thompson put her on a month-to-month lease and said something about STG now having a right of first refusal on Trabant's space. (STG confirmed they had made a verbal, nonbinding right of first refusal agreement with Thompson but wouldn't confirm whether they would ever exercise it.)

For the past eight months, Becker has been trying to get answers out of the landlord and STG with no luck. "Right now I'm just on a 30-day notice," she said. "Never mind that we've been in the space for 11 years... The idea that they'd shoo away our customers and put our employees on the street—that doesn’t feel so good. It doesn't feel like the benevolent nonprofit they make themselves out to be."

"We haven't had a meeting or anything," the landlord said when I asked him whether his tenants knew that he planned to hand their leases over to STG. "But word seems to have gotten out."

As a nonprofit arts and entertainment organization in the music business, STG has had to compete ruthlessly with for-profit behemoths like AEG and Live Nation/Ticketmaster—and they've been very successful. According to their IRS filings, the nonprofit made $32.5 million in revenue in 2012 (up from $22.9 million in 2011) and attracted $2.2 million in donations and grants. (By way of comparison, in the same year Seattle Opera collected $19.9 million in combined income. The Seattle Rep got $8.9 million.)

The question remains: Why should an organization with such a worthy nonprofit mission—to "make diverse performing arts and education an integral part of our region’s rich cultural identity while keeping these three landmark venues alive and vibrant"—need to play hardball in its dealings with small, long-standing, non-competing neighborhood businesses?

"STG's non-profit mission is highly reliant on smart collaborations and ancillary business opportunities," spokesperson Antonio Hicks wrote in an e-mail. Their education and outreach are made possible, he explained, "because we do not restrict our capacity for innovative arts investments." (STG has a reputation for stretching its mission to suit its desires—like when it brought the Bodies: The Exhibition, the controversial anatomical road show that may or may not have used the cadavers of political prisoners executed by the Chinese government, to Seattle under the rubric of "arts education.")

People who were there when STG took over the Neptune from Landmark Theatres a few years ago say all this sounds eerily familiar.

Patrick Tennant, who worked for Landmark Theatres when STG moved in, said Landmark had been in the building for decades but also got nothing more than a 30-day notice. In the months before that happened, Tennant said, suspicious-looking people were coming into the theater, buying tickets to see movies, and then meticulously photographing the inside of the building: "And you could tell the landlord was letting in people, STG people, after hours. Lights were left on, doors were left open and unlocked... In the end, they [STG] were really aggressive. There was no handshake, no 'sorry you're leaving, we can give jobs to your employees.' That's just what you do in for-profit theaters if they take over a building, especially at the floor-staff level. But they wouldn't. It seemed crappy."

Another former Landmark employee who was there at the time of the transfer—but requested anonymity because s/he still works in local theaters—said STG were "tumultuous" people to deal with. "They were making backdoor deals with SIFF to rent out the Neptune for the Seattle International Film Festival before we even knew we were supposed to be out," the source said. "We heard through some union brothers that SIFF was lining up projectionists with STG in our building, which they hadn't signed a contract for."

The source also said STG expected Landmark to leave its projection equipment, chairs, marquee letters, and other property behind for free. "They compared it to buying a house that happened to have a hot tub out back," s/he said. " They said, 'We're not going to pay for them, but you can leave them.' Well, that's not how that works."

The source confirmed that Landmark got nothing more than 30 days' notice from the landlord: "It wasn't illegal—but it was slimy. Not in good faith."

Meanwhile, Becker of Trabant Coffee, Demonakos of the Comic Stop, and Dave Sandlund of Neptune Music Company keep waiting to find out their fates. They all say that people from STG have been coming into their shops with tape measures and laser levels to map the building, and nobody seems hopeful.

"I tried to talk about renewing my lease, but the landlord told me to wait because it was too far ahead of time," Demonakos said. "That was in September. Our lease is up in March."

"Not knowing," Becker said, "is the hardest part."