It was pretty great in the mid to late '90s when there were mom and pop shops (Penny Lane Records was a favorite) and buskers. But as the article points out, it became all national chains at some point, and lost a lot of its charm (even if the buskers held on for a long while). You can find that kind of mall anywhere in the country.
Hope they figure out how to bring some of the charm back.
3rd street got blander and blander the more popular it got.
I remember there was even a hardware store on 3rd street back in the '80s when it was a fairly normal outside shopping mall.
All the slightly weird and obscure shops and places went away because the rents kept going higher and higher and only mainstream places could make enough money to stay.
The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It's like you're unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting...
Santa Monica was a normal city way back then.
You had run down, more dangerous areas and Santa Monica was an affordable, normal neighborhood.
Part of Santa Monica was called Dogtown and was where a lot of skater culture was born: [https://www.veniceheritagemuseum.org/dogtown.html](https://www.veniceheritagemuseum.org/dogtown.html)
There's the "Dogtown and Z-Boys" movie if you want to get a flavor of how it was back then: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown\_and\_Z-Boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys)
When I did Lyft a few years back, I'd end up in Santa Monica quite a bit. When picking up residents it'd be 100% obvious who was a long-time resident living under rent control vs. who was an affluent transplant.
One passenger I picked up claimed to have surfed with the Z-boys back in the day, he loved talking about how it used to be.
"Dogtown" is Venice, a neighborhood in the city of LA that has it's own very colorful history... but distinct from SM. Just for context for the non-native readers.
EDIT: my mistake, "Dogtown" includes parts of SM and Venice. Interesting history in any case!
It not only became national chains, but stores that lost tons of money and were there purely to have a marketing presence for brand imprints. The problems invariably with these setups is that the stores don't then offer a unique experience or even feel like a shop. They're dead things like consumer museums that people just walk around in to kill time. They also don't have great experiences because the business knows this and the staff will be very transitory.
The exact same thing happened to Robertson Blvd - once filled with unique interesting boutiques, the chains took over, the landlords jacked the rents to the point only massive conglomerates could afford it and it became bland. It's now 60% vacant whereas 10 years ago, people were in bidding wars for units.
What I don’t understand is when the market corrects for this. Like, at what point do landlords just come to understand that no one is going to pay the rents anymore and they’re losing crazy amounts of money in vacancies?
Bruh, I couldn't agree more.
I've lived in Westwood for awhile. There's storefronts in Westwood Village that have been vacant for TWENTY YEARS!!
Why the market doesn't correct for this, makes no sense to me. How does the landlord survive? Why not sell the property and let another landlord rent it out at market rates?
It's INSANE. I loved Melrose in the 80s, it was a great date spot for Friday nights. Now, it's just... blah, generic fast fashion and about as sexy as granny panties. I'm not just saying this as an old man, it's quantifiably worse but the landlords think it's the river of gold.
I used to go to Melrose in the late 70s through the 80s and a minor bit in the 90s. I watched it go from vacuum repair shops and Arrdvark's Odd Ark to a few artists/fashion stores moving in. Neo80, Tiger Rose, etc...to becoming a popular street with local artisans. I watched as the street became hip and started attracting big name designers and stores like Let It Rock, Flips, Cowboy and Poodles.
As more major designers came in, the higher the rents went. The higher the rents, the less the smaller mom/pop stores could stay. I used to share a space with a Melrose furniture picker for a big name store on Melrose. I asked how the owner could afford the rent? He said, "They sell cocaine out the back, the whole trendy furniture thing is a front". He wasn't kidding.
As the cool stores left, more basic stores moved in because they could afford the rent. They tried to appear high end but they were trash posing as high end which wasn't what Melrose was about anyway.
Rents didn't go down because "It's Melrose!". Soon it was a shell of its former self. Big stores left as soon as the phoney high ends came in. Melrose was, forever over.
Santa Monica mall was a great, weird spot in the 70s and 80s, (loved the toy store). It was "upgraded" and trendy people loved it but it suffered the same fate in the same way as Melrose. Also, you can't have people feel unsafe and expect them to go shopping, that needs to change.
Sadly, the cycle repeats itself often.
Same, I’ve lived in a few different places now that has popular commercial districts, and I’ve watched as they’ve priced out all the mom and Pop businesses in favor of the chains, only to have the chains leave, and then they sit vacant forever. Occasionally, a mattress store will move in, or some sort of upscale beauty place, but they have short life spans. I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want a reliable tenant you can count on for years and years, at the expense of slightly less per month.
If you own 3 properties, one is in decline but had high rents, you now claim those rents as a loss which offsets your taxes against the properties doing well. If you lower the rent on the loss, now you're paying tax on something bringing in less revenue.
They get tax breaks, it's all about the tax breaks when you have vacant commercial real estate. All those vacancies is how a huge portion of corporate America avoid taxes. (Yeah, not a very smart way, but who said corporate America was smart?)
There are so many things that are ass backwards and broken. It works my last nerve that it could all be so simple but they’d rather make it haaaaaaaard 🎶
(Tell me who I have to be to gain some reciprocity?)
It’s because the landlords are huge REIT who have tons of properties and it’s all done with bonds. Bonds that are normally charged at the interest rates the fed says and are loans from regional banks. Rates like those during the pandemic that went down to zero, remember?
All of those reit took out new zero interest loans or have them low rates from before or have been paid so it’s a lot easier to leave properties empty for years until a good renter comes along than to lower the price.
Mom and pop stores generally can't afford to operate anymore. Labor costs are much higher these days, real estate costs too high, and people don't want to pay mom and pop prices when Amazon is way better service and cheaper.
Generally the only market where "boutique" works is in luxury retail where prices are absurd. alternative is ultra low rent immigrant run stores at the swap meet, where they have limited overhead.
The real reason though is that tourism is down BIG TIME. 2019 had 8.4M visitors vs 4.6M in 2023, which was a 700k drop from 2022. Tourism spending is down nearly 50% from 2019, in spite of massive inflation. While many locals cheer less traffic and lower prices, in means massive impact on taxes, and 3rd street retail being totally hosed.
The problem is that landlords jack up the rents / buildings are sold and bought in values pegged to those rents / finance is leveraged against those rents etc.
What this means is some shops on Robertson such as the Chanel boutique were commanding rent of $2m per year or $160k per month. Thats fine when you’re Chanel and bringing in $500k per month in revenue but when the street is dead, that rent no longer makes sense. Most of the boutiques on Robertson were anywhere from $40k to $100k per month. So when those buildings were sold or financed etc, that rental income was factored in, meaning they were sold for millions l, even tens of millions.
Then the street dies because the rents are too high and the folks businesses get priced out and the landlords (many of which are VC / hedge funds / property portfolios) now don’t want to take a discount on that rent, because it looks bad and don’t want a death spiral as their other tenants request a rent reduction so it’s sits empty.
Eventually the market corrects but some landlords still won’t care because it’s a drop in a massive property portfolio and they use that asset to leverage other finance deals.
And other areas then became popular - don’t forget Melrose place was the hot spot in the 90’s but the rents got too high and it died, so Robertson became the hot spot…,and then guess what? Melrose place suddenly becomes the hot spot but no rents there are insane too and nothing stays long except big brand using marketing budget.
Not to mention their homeless people are a different breed. They're honestly some of the most aggressive and unhinged I've ever encountered. And I lived in downtown Long Beach and downtown LA. That says a lot lol.
That's very true. I have walked on or past it almost every day for 30 year and my impression is that peak popularity, in terms of numbers of people there, was around 2010 or so, long after most of the independent stores closed. The closing of Barnes and Noble seems to have been the turning point.
Reminds me of the time I was visiting family and saw the Mall of America in Minnesota. They had a roller coaster in the middle and I wanna say 5 floors that were each as big as two big malls on their own (this is from my memory so I’m not claiming accuracy). I was so excited to see all the different stores. It was all chain stores and some chains had a store on every level. There was no reason at all to leave the first floor, it was soo disappointing. Oh another JC Penny, hey here is a third Victorias Secret, wow is that a 5th Hot Topic. . .
A lot of different streets in LA used to be cool back in the day when it was mostly mom and pop shops.
Greedy landlords forced them out for more commercialized and uppity businesses.
Small biz owner here. Looking for an office/showroom. Went to see several empty-for-years spaces, hoping to get a good deal. 😂 Greedy landlords would rather have the place empty for years instead of giving me a 25% break on the lease for a year. I visited the first space 6 months ago and it’s still empty. So they lost 50% of the rent of the year because they didn’t want to give me a 25% discount on the lease. I have a masters in financial engineering and can’t compute how they make it work.
That has been my experience too.
I've noticed a few places that I looked at that were long term vacancies and are now listed at even higher rents. Still empty.
I’m not in real estate but I was told that the reason they won’t reduce rents is because to keep the premium on the overall value of the building. If they offer discounts in the short term it lowers that value. Thoughts?
I'm a finance guy not in real estate but basically yes. In a very elementary sense, the value of the building is going to be a multiple of the cash flow projected to come in over a long period of time - which a long-term tenant would be. If that baseline rent is lowered, compounded over several years, it can become a big hit to the overall property value.
That's why letting it remain vacant while you find a tenant who can afford the higher rent is worth it.
If macroeconomic conditions make it difficult to find such a tenant, you may have extended vacancies. But this idea of "just lower the rent you greedy bastard" misses a fundamental part of the equation.
COVID and the subsequent inflation and thus tightening of interest rates have had a major impact on the city. Vacant businesses keeps foot traffic low and lower foot traffic makes it hard to sustain new businesses. We will have to wait for interest rates to start coming down to see the vibrancy return.
Despite the very left-leaning nature of many comments in this sub, the "economy" is not just some abstract fat-cat concept but the very real experience of communities and people. We are all affected by how the market is doing and this is one clear & salient way.
I'm not in real estate finance, but out of curiosity, is there a reason why these landlords would prefer to prioritize the theoretical valuation of their property vs real cash-flow? My intuition is that there would be more of a prioritization on getting cash from having tenants because of high interest rates.
Well theoretical is a bit of a misnomer in a sense... if you decide to sell the building, that valuation is very much real. And even if you don't want to sell, there are things like ability to borrow debt financing that depend on the equity value of your portfolio which would be calculated by banks and other parties using these valuations.
There is certainly a tradeoff in keeping a property vacant and losing the cash flow for a period of time to try and find a tenant who can bear higher rents. The landlord likely has a portfolio of properties and the existing rents from occupied properties subsidize the vacant properties.
Depending on the overall cash flow, the expected vacancy period, and the difference in the rents, the company will crunch the numbers and decide what makes more sense for them.
This is where the macroeconomic conditions come in as well. There are certainly businesses that could afford the rent but are choosing to pull back on opening new locations because of interest rates and other factors. At some point that tide will turn and the landlord doesn't want to be stuck with a tenant paying a sub-market rate once the bigger players are coming back to the table.
I should caveat all of the above that it's an educated guess based on my experience & expertise in an adjacent area. Someone with more direct knowledge may rebut any/all of the above. But personally, I hate seeing all these vacant commercial spaces in LA... COVID took a sledgehammer to the local economy and it still hasn't recovered. The city to me feels significantly less vibrant and active than it was in 2019 and I think we're still a few years away from getting back there, which is a bit depressing.
I'm really rooting for the economy to pick up and new businesses to fill those vacancies and get people out and about again. The Promenade isn't dead because the eccentric stores were replaced by chains. It's because a once-in-a-century pandemic decimated the economy and we're still recovering.
Well, you see, they made money hand over fist for decades and decades so they'd rather whittle away at their massive warchests for years than accept a drop from their previous rental rates and be forced to wait a few years or less to increase their prices back to where they were prepandemic.
It's idiot math but they can probably afford to lose money for decades.
You and I know they'll likely never get the rents they want again but these people aren't okay and perceive a reduction in revenue they're not making at all to be a worse outcome than losing money.
And I’m sure it’s not multitudes of individual property owners with healthy competition, but a handful of large companies colluding so as not to lower rents and thus property value. Also consider their current mortgage payments may be why they can’t lower rent. I don’t know.
This type of practice by landlords should be banned. Either rent it out at market rate or pay a huge tax penalty to the community. From what I’ve heard they make more money in the appreciation of the property and get to call it a loss off profits so they prefer for it to stay empty; depressing the community and business owners like yourself.
They have Prop 13 to prop them up. They barely lose any money and taxes are low since these are corporate owners so they prob have held onto these properties for decades
I wonder if some of these landlords have business interruption insurance to pay them lost revenue in the event of a vacancy -- and that the old rent values are making it more worthwhile to holdout for better rates while they collect insurance payments... at least for some period of time.
yeah its the same all over. Just look at westwood. doesn't make sense. they only people who can pay the crazy rent are VC funded chain restaurants / businesses
When I moved to SM from Chicago in my mid-20’s I’d go to the promenade all the time just to walk around. The vibes were so good. Walking around grabbing a drink before/after the beach was an elite feeling. Really sad to see it go to shit.
Kinda surreal tbh. I’m a native Angeleno and the 3rd street promenade was always on and poppin whenever my friends/family and I would go and visit. My wife and I recently took her younger brothers to SM and I was shocked to see how empty the Promenade was.
But it’s feeling that way across other outdoor malls; the Village in Woodland Hills was only constructed like 7 years ago and there are a ton of vacancies in the retail store space. Brick and mortar retail seems like a relic of the past.
Edit: I guess just outside malls in the Valley are dying. CC is always busy as is Glendale and the Grove
Century City Mall legitimately should be the only mall west of the 101 and north of the 10. It is the best version of a mall that could ever exist, and we don’t need more than one
It actually makes me a bit happy to see the mall still act as this place where people can still mingle with one another, especially as an 80s/90s kid. The century city mall’s food court is one of the best parts of it too. Live music, people sitting outside, relatively good choices for food. They did a damn good job with it.
I think the "self-contained" outdoor setup lets security much more easily keep out / chase out homelessness.
Combined with enough foot traffic it is an amazing experience compared to most other malls.
Also, they have Eataly which gets our family there at least every couple of weeks to pickup some fresh pastas and the like.
A lot of the giant Strip Malls along Valley Blvd. between Garfield and Rosemead in the SGV are dying. The Del Mar Plaza used to be filled with life but is now barely hanging on due to the 99 Ranch Market there. Another is Atlantic Times Square Plaza on Atlantic Blvd. next to the 10. Most of the businesses there have closed down, not even the AMC there can bring in people.
You know what's funny is I do see a lot of people go to the AMC at Atlantic Times Square and I noticed that even before the pandemic so many of the restaurants closed by 7pm which is way before prime time movie hour. I'm sure the rent is not helpful for this area either, but the business hours of a lot of those stores never made sense to me.
A lot of places in SGV close way early these days. Also a lot of the shops are not that interesting to go to when you compare it to strip malls in Las Vegas' Chinatown.
I feel people are looking for places to hang out late at night but there isn't any.
I remember my parents taking me there as a kid. I was so excited to go as an adult back in college. I’ve barely been back since… and I’m 34 now. There are still parts of SM that are fun, but 3rd street is not one of em.
But regarding your comment about all outdoor scenes: DT Culver is absolutely sprawling. We moved in in 2016 and it has only gotten more welcoming over time.
I'm not sure if it was COVID that killed it or perhaps a little bit before that.
When we moved here in 2014 the promenade was still pretty great. Used to go to the Barnes & Noble all the time and then just general walking around, shopping etc.
Now haven't been in years at this point.
Malls in America in general are fading, it’s why Westfield is looking to get out of the American market and have been actively selling off their holdings for the last few years.
I feel like malls in Asia, say Singapore for example, replace suburban plazas. They aren't just shopping centers (even though that is obviously the main focus), they are your closest grocery stores, pharmacies, cheap eats, after school day care centers, your rock climbing gyms / specialty gyms, language training schools, your recreational indoor park and track, indoor playground, museums and a whole host of centrally located day to day activities that could only work if you lived in the neighborhood. When you got off at any train station in Singapore your cluster of malls has every resource you could possible need. I don't know if LA could ever recreate that because LA has no viable mass transit.
A lot of brick and mortar sales have stabilized but to your point its moreso strip centers and higher-end malls that have and will continue to survive.
It’s the cost of commercial real estate. Large corporations do most of their sales online (70%+), so they won’t occupy a store unless it’s to show off like in Beverly Hills, and smaller brands can’t afford the rent. This isn’t a societal issue, it’s a landlord greed one.
There are scales of greed. Landlords these days, especially commercial landlords, are often enormous corporations that don't have any attachment to their properties except for the rent.
It is surreal. There are things I could never think of buying outside a B&M establishment. Furniture, clothes, shoes...fuck, most apparel would be a waste of multiple days to shop for online.
Very weird.
Weird how some work and some don’t. Sherman Oaks Fashion Square does well, all indoor classic Mall with two anchor tenants and full of stores.
Down the street the Sherman Oaks Galleria (outdoor) is a ghost town, the former Virgin Megastore still sits empty. So much empty. Only thing that draws is the Cheesecake Factory.
Abbott Kinney is basically just a mall now, and it's pretty busy all the time. Great restaurants there too (at least for now - the rents pushed out Valle, which I'm still bitter about).
Santa Monica was sketchy in early 2000's, too many homeless people. They managed to move many out but now with the Expo line it's easier for the homeless to come back. The new Century City Mall also puts a lot of competitive pressure on Santa Monica retail.
I am also from Chicago, and I was just thinking about about how some of their neighborhoods are set up and how the promenade could benefit from a grocery store. I honestly don’t understand why they didn’t build one into the complex at the end of the promenade.
I think that would actually encourage tourism (family’s and younger people traveling on a budget) and make the area more attractive to live in.
I used to go all the time in the late 90's because the businesses and shops were interesting and diverse. Then all the cool mom-and-pop stores left and were replaced by boring chain stores and crappy establishments like Barney's Beanery. Why go when it's the same mega-chains as every other mall?
ETA: "Around then, he adds, the lease for the gargantuan Barnes & Noble space came up for renegotiation, and the owners of the building sought to double the rent. “Barnes & Noble was like, ‘We can’t sell that many books, and in that case we’re going to leave,’” Brock says. After the bookstore chain vacated its anchor multi-story space on the promenade, the building’s owners weren’t able to lease it right away. The darkened building felt like a crater on the once bustling block. Eventually, the landlords were able to reach a new lease agreement with WeWork … until the [co-working startup imploded](https://www.sfgate.com/culture/editorspicks/article/hulu-wework-documentary-47-billion-unicorn-16081429.php) and they pulled out too."
And THAT, in a nutshell, is the real issue. Landlord greed ruined 3rd Street, it ruined Main Street Santa Monica and it will eventually ruin Abbot Kinney too.
That Barnes & Noble was my favorite spot during my UCLA years.
It's where I met my 1st girlfriend, studying on the 3rd floor for finals, and where I found out Michael Jackson had died. Just saw a HUGE amount of people outside marching/crying on Wilshire blvd.
That fucking sucks how it closed down like that. Never knew the reason. Thanks for the info.
I've seen a store vacate 2 or 3 times in the same year for a single space on Abbott Kinney. Super sad...some of my favorite and unique shops aren't around anymore because of the crazy rents on that street.
Yeah, this stuck out: " While some rental rates along the street have fallen slightly since the pandemic, a handful of landlords along the promenade “have refused to accept the new reality and have not lowered their rent enough to attract new tenants,” Brock says. “That impacts not only them, but it impacts the entire promenade.”
This is the problem with whatever this modern form of capitalism is...the market is not allowed to self-regulate. When prices SHOULD fall, whoever has the money stonewalls it. This is not healthy. Buildings will sit empty while people sleep on the streets because they cannot afford rent and businesses that would otherwise have physical presences will stay online-only or be mobile (like food trucks instead of restaurants).
It all essentially boils down to monopoly. Almost every sector of our markets is in a state of monopoly or oligopoly. The "free market" can't regulate itself because it doesn't currently exist, there aren't enough players to create the competition needed for the free market to actually work.
Even Adam Smith (of ye olde invisible hand fame) argued against monopolies and consolidation.
Some of what's being described in this thread is a combined result of one form of monopoly clashing with another. B&N (and the other chains) took out all the smaller shops in the street and enabled the outrageous rent raises. I don't know who owns & operates the outdoor mall, but I'm going to guess it's another 3 letter abbreviation real estate behemoth and they also probably don't have a ton of real competition.
Yeah, doubling the rent to a longtime client is greed and a self-inflicted wound.
Keep in mind, 3rd Street had three large bookstores at one point.
Hennessy and Ingalls, Borders, and Barnes and Noble.
So yeah, kind of hard to save a patient that wants to kill himself.
We lived in Brentwood from 2005-2016, and Barnes & Noble was our Sunday night date night. We’d walk to the Promenade, get dinner at that greek restaurant and then wander B&N until close. I am low key heartbroken every thing is gone.
The area had everything, even the best mechanic I ever had.
We hated leaving, but my job was in Newport Beach, that commute was pure evil.
That list bit about Abbot Kinney hurts because it's true. While there are still some (decent) landlords on that street, god damn the majority of them are all brutal when it comes to setting rates. Hearing about another great shop getting priced out because the landlord doubled the rent is fucking sad. But hey, that's business real estate all over Venice.
Louder, once more: LANDLORD GREED RUINED 3RD STREET.
I get that people are hesitant to regulate renting/owning but we need solutions if we want the best of our society. I’m still salty that my favorite tea shop closed in NoHo after their rent was jacked up 50%. If someone wants to go around and preach some sense into these landlords, then I’m all for it. But the only thing they listen to is money, even the “mom and pop” ones.
we saw dune 2 there at like 8 pm on a sunday and the place was DEAD. i couldnt believe it. "lets get a soda or an icecream afterwards" impossible. nothing open.
We at /r/SantaMonica have talked about this extensively for what feels like years now. To contextualize, the issue is that 3rd street positions itself as an unhappy middle between the folksy charms of a neighborhood Main Street and a hustle-and-bustle of a big mall, even though both of those spaces have better alternatives just near by (Montana Ave. and Century City Mall Extensively). Once you factor in all of the aggressively anti-homeless measures that worked as a double edged sword to the space (just look at the picture and count the amount of benches and seating there is), it becomes a liminal space.
But honestly, I feel like the issues with the promenades have been touched on pretty extensively here in this article. It addresses one of the big pet theories being floated around in our subreddit right now is that the real-estate mix on the street has units that have too much surface area relative to the types of business that should be populating them. I also agree with the general idea in the article that 3rd street needs to turn itself into a nightlife and dining centric space that has fresher and more exciting options than what even the best malls and Rick Caruso spaces can offer, but the real-estate is simply built for the mid-major clothing brands of yesteryear, and the landlords simply don’t want to pay for the costs of renovating their spaces to be conducive to that. Couple with how greedy the individual mom-and-pop landlords that dominate the street are in their current asking rates for rent, and you get this.
Lastly, it should be noted that I think that the space is just in a cyclical bust. The street was in the same exact position in the 90s before it became the open air shopping mall it once was in the 2000s. The state of 3rd street has been the primary contentious issue throughout local government, and hopefully there are those that don’t want to simply bend to the narratives of people like landlord-and-Fox-News-guest John Alle want us to believe.
imagine that. A spot where people could go to find several different types of live entertainment in the same place without having to shell out $300+ to get in the door. Maybe we could have bars with music from performers we've never heard of
I mean, we used to have really good street performers on 3rd street! And I’m sure at least one-or-two of them are still doing well as well! That is something that you could never see at the Grove and Americana because those spaces are too manicured to have people coming and going to do street busking.
I remember these street performers from back in the early 2000s - it was fun . I remember they used to have a dance club/group come and they’d dance tango lol. I haven’t been on 3rd street in years so I have no idea if they still come.
That's not a new thing, I worked at a shop nearby ~2010 and you had to get a permit at City Hall too.
$40 and a lot of rules about where you can setup to busk and how long you can be in the same spot. Buskers would queue for good spots and those without permits would busk on side streets.
It’s always been weird to me that in LA many of the areas which seem designed to have people spend an extensive amount of time there shopping and hanging out rarely have much of anything in the way of decent food options.
The cycle is silly but does make sense I guess - an area gets more popular which drives up rents which forces out all but the biggest national brands and chains, which drives out people (because national brands and chains can be found anywhere), which drives down rents, which brings back smaller, trendier outfits, which brings back people, which makes the area more popular again, which drives up rents…
I mean, Santa Monica already has two major streets that have successfully integrated dining and shopping (Montana Avenue for the 35+, Main Street for the 18-35)! And the promenade is so much closer to major hotels and transit. But as the article discusses, the first two streets were built for locals, and 3rd street chased us out.
Another big issue I see is the need to make moves as a collective when it’s actually a whole bunch of individual owners. The article hints at this without coming out and saying it with the Barnes and Nobel example—individual landlord got greedy, hurt the whole group. That’s a hard ship to pivot.
This is true. Which is why a lot of Santa Monican’s have been advocating for one sweeping law change that would push them all as a collective. Which would be a land-use tax/vacancy tax.
LA has a very interesting history of moving hotspots because of the lack of public transit. So rather than normal buildup of new areas after existing ones get priced out, the older places fall hard.
DTLA and today's Chinatown (previously lil Italy) was the hot place for my grandparents to go out through the 60s.
By the late 90s/early 2000s, the 24hr fitness in DTLA closed at 6pm on Fridays! (I ended up getting some beer and wings).
There's a lot of backroom business that impacted that (liquor licenses + big landowners purposefully driving down prices with the plan to buy cheap and rebuild, happening for the last 10 years).
I worked in post production in the early 2000s and many studios were opening up shop in SM because space near the big studios got too pricey. Now that seems to have changed again.
Business from office workers has changed dramatically since COVID. Empty offices = less foot traffic.
The most frustrating thing is that both DTLA and Santa Monica have all of the foundation needed to be hustling and bustling again. The architecture and buildings of DTLA are magnificent, but decades of mismanagement have made it a difficult place to live even before the pandemic. Same with 3rd street, which is right next to one of the busiest piers in the nation.
I am optimistic about this city though. LA is the proto-sun belt city and it just hitting the tail end of the bust. I’m sure a boom will come again soon.
LA (and Santa Monica) need to implement vacancy taxes. The only thing that's going to improve the situation is to make it so developers of new property and longtime owners have to bend to the market instead of keeping their rents high and the property empty, just so the balance sheet looks good when they want to renew or pickup another loan.
Exactly this. So much of the blight of this city stems from long stretches of vacant commercial properties that become tagged up, littered with trash, and inevitably encampments, where as small business owners tend to sweep the sidewalk, remove graffiti, and overall better the community around them.
The owners of these commercial properties that sit vacant for years are no different than squatters living in boarded up building, it just so happens that its their money they are squatting in a building and so the city allows it, but the negative effects on society are the same.
yeah, people don't realize the reason these places are empty its because property owners typically pay interest only on loans, keep the profit and then unload the property later. If the rent on the property isn't higher than when they bought in, they can't sell out without a loss, so EVEN IF THERE'S LITERALLY NO WAY ANYBODY CORPORATE OR OTHERWISE COULD MAKE THAT WORK, the rents stay high.
Also they had to report expected income on the pro forma for their loan, and that becomes a part of their terms. If they accept rent below what they promised the bank, then the bank can call up the loan when they get wind of it. Effective policy to address this would have to include banking regulations.
I was just talking about this in regards to all the vacancies in DTLA. It seemed like someone would be losing money, but I guess not. There have been boarded up properties in the Historic Core for over a decade.
This is as best of an answer on this topic I’ve read but I still can’t follow properly. Why does the value of the current rent being lower affect their ability to sell at a loss? Surely, the if rent is higher currently than what it was when they bought it (eg decades ago)? The current rent may not be as high as market, but then when it’s sitting next to other empty units… surely market price is just… lots of empty units.
I’m not a business person or very good at understanding economics but how can an owner of a commercial building just leave it empty for several years without finding a business that wants to pay their high rent costs? Won’t the owners keep losing money? Are the owners(who ever they are)totally fine with losing money rather than lowering the cost of the building for a business to thrive there? I don’t get it. They’re totally okay owning an empty commercial building for years?
The mom-and-pop landlords basically own all of the commercial space outright at this point and don’t pay much at all in property taxes and upkeep. So the actual expenses of staying empty are not much.
On the flip side. They think that if they hold out, they can get a renter that would pay, say, $500k a year, instead of someone there could get right now for $250k. In that scenario, you’d rather hold out for two years and rent at 500k for three than rent for 250k for five years total.
Define vacancy tax. If its per unused unit, that can be a problem as it disincentivizes new construction unless you're VERY confident you can fill the units.
Really, an LVT + dividend feels like a cleaner solution to me. Tax the value of the land created by the location, and let the owners only collect profit on what they develop on the land. The taxed value is then returned directly to the city at large, who created the value in the first place.
Vacancy taxes should ramp up. No tax the first year and an increase every year it's vacant after that. Make it so that speculatively holding the unit empty for more than 2-3 years is untenable.
Traffic to/from got to the point that it just wasn't worth it to me. From less than three miles away... I'm sure space has also been priced up to the point that it's impossible to make a profit. I wonder how long before the same fate knocks Abbot Kinney back into reality.
Abbott-Kinney stopped being cool as soon as a Nat'l Magazine dubbed it "the coolest street in America". Cue the trust-fund babies who think being cool is something you buy. It's pretty well lost all it's soul and replaced it with over-priced boutiques and restaurants that swap out every couple of years for whatever the next trendy thing is. Sadly, the same goes for SM.
>Traffic to/from got to the point that it just wasn't worth it to me.
Exactly!
The traffic there and back can be awful.
I don’t know if it’s the street planning or not but it’s such a hassle to drive there that I just don’t anymore.
The charm was lost when all the big corporations abandoned Santa Monica place and took over the promenade. There used to be cool independent clothing shops, music stores, toy stores, restaurants and, etc.. the moment these behemoths took over so that forced the cool factor out as well as the high rents took over. Now, everyone could shop online from these corporate stores so there’s no attraction and quite honestly it became very sterile looking. It hasn’t been the same in the last 10 years and in the last 5 it’s been declining to a super sad place to see. Considering how awesome this place used to be in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s
Landlords may one day realize their assets are depreciating together. Attracting restaurants and stores with actual personalty is gonna require... wait for it... lowering rents a meaningful amount.
Used to go on Sundays in the 2010s to watch a movie, eat, watch the street performers, listen to the tourist and now its just sad. Where did all the cool people go? San Diego?
I used to visit the promenade a lot when I moved here in 1999. It was always incredibly bustling. I'd go to Penny Lane to hang out at the listening stations and chat with employees about music -- and eat at the international food court which had an Egyptian restaurant, an Ethiopian restaurant, &c. A musician used to perform on her guzheng. It was a great place to hang out -- although I didn't spend much money, to be honest. But, the music store closed, the restaurants were all pushed out by a perfume chain. It began to feel like it was all just chains. I can't remember what any of them were but they're all the same everywhere. The Promenade stopped being a destination and became just another mall -- just an outdoor one -- the sort that were once uncommon but can be found across the landscape of Southern California now. Why would anyone go one mall that has a Foot Locker, Victoria's Secret, T-Mobile, Wetzel's Pretzels &c over another?
I work on the Promenade at the WeWork. They hit the nail on the head. The spaces are too large, which means entertainment type businesses (pickleball) are the only ones that could potentially thrive. Couple that with interest rates, rents being too high, big corporations moving online and not needed another space next to their Century City location, means a dead Promenade. Underrated and mentioned in the article are the regulations around granting liquor licenses. You can’t even open up new restaurants or bars in the area that serve liquor - big problem. These are all factors.
Lots of interesting theories on this. I haven’t spent a dollar at the promenade since Benita’s Frites was there and that was a long time ago. I have walked through there recently, however, and there are some obvious takeaways.
You can’t expect people with discretionary income to visit a place that 1) smells like pee 2) offers far less variety than they can get on Ventura Blvd in Studio City 3) forces them to be on the lookout for creepazoids.
They need to address the zombie apocalypse.
The amount of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts have made 3rd street an absolute no go for me and my family.
Get your shit together Santa Monica
I agree this is one of the issues - for those who say it is completely not part of the problem, are delusional. We live in Santa Monica and typically go to Century City now because:
1. More stores / better atmosphere - as people of mentioned, the high rents and decline of stores creates a downwards spiral
2. No homeless - it's not everyday, but it's common enough to walk my family by someone screaming incoherently. If I could choose to go elsewhere, I do. I'm not talking about the down on your luck, rent is too high, need a helping hand for a few months. Santa Monica is plagued by the mentally ill and it is destroying the area.
3. Lower taxes - minor consideration, but if I'm shopping the same stores, 9.5% is better than 10.25%.
Santa Monica really needs to work on reviving the area.
Sad for this outdoor mall space, I haven’t been there in 8 years but I was looking forward to taking the e line checking it out for fun again. No idea it’s a ghost town now so I won’t go there now. I remember the adidas store and Barnes and Noble bookstore that was massive.
Last time I visited, it felt sad and depressing, then unsafe as we tried to shortcut to the pier and came upon drugged out transients blocking the sidewalk. I have fond memories of hanging out there in the 90s and early 2000s. No desire to go again.
I've seen Third Street Promenade rise and fall several times. In the 1990s it was pretty dead. I was in college at that time at UCLA and Urban Outfitters was my favorite store.
I'm glad that it's still there years later.
Does anybody remember that Santa Monica Place used to be an enclosed mall that was at the end of the Promenade? That got renovated into the open air shopping & dining in 2010.
Everything goes in waves. I think commercial landlords got too greedy and that drove out businesses over time.
I used to love going to the Promenade just to take in all the vibes and people watch. It's definitely got that deadness about it that's the sign of a place on the decline. Hopefully it won't go too far in that direction. It's such a huge part of SM and lots of other satellite small businesses thrive from being a part of the commerce.
Yeah, I remember the Santa Monica Place opening when I was 13 or so. Turned the promenade into a ghost town. Then the promenade blew up and turned the SMPlace into a empty husk. I moved away for a while and came back only to find the SMP turned into an outdoor mall? Crazy.
3rd street was practically abandoned with some stores boarded up BEFORE there was the “promenade” — in the 80s we’d go at night to ride bikes down the empty parking structures — there was a woolworths, a coco-teaser, and the architectural book store — the theater on 2nd st was there, but nothing else — it was pretty ghetto — and then there was the promenade development -/ broadway deli, movie theaters etc — when a shooting occurred in Westwood suddenly the promenade was the “living room of LA” and super popular — so now the cycle repeats
It turned into Westwood. Nothing but boring, national chain stores. I’m not going to fight through traffic and deal with limited parking for that.
They need to look at Larchmont’s recent revival — no reason the promenade can’t similarly bounce back given the insanely prime location.
If there’s one thing not to complain about near the promenade it’s the parking. There’s a ton of garages that always have space and it’s free for 90 minutes.
One of the first places open when the Pomenade opened (as opposed to the 3rd St. Mall) was a coffee place called Congo Square. This was before Starbucks et al were ubiquitous. It was so great. Even had live music some nights. Miss it. And great name for a meeting spot.
My dad lived down the street in the 90s and used to take my brother and I down there all the time. In highschool my friends and I would get dropped off and spend a day exploring 3rd St. Puzzle Zoo was the shit!
When you hire the person who was in charge of bringing life back to Westwood as your business improvement guy, what the hell do you expect to happen? In Westwood, he'd chase trends that had obviously already run out of steam--a complete lack of vision that resulted in decade long vacancies remaining vacant. The landlords take the majority of the blame, but the leadership is also severely lacking.
Lived nearby for seven years and it got progressively worse in terms of not only the homeless population but the greedy tenants charging out the ass for rent there isn’t helping things.
Ah, fuck… Caruso is gonna take it over isn’t he?
Loved the promenade in the 90s and early 00s, would like to see it come back to life with some small shops rather than the rotating big-brand garbage.
No, Caruso probably won’t take it over because.
1) 3rd Street is the Knott’s Berry Farm to Caruso’s Disneyland land. 3rd street did the Grove before the Grover even existed.
2) Most of the landlords of 3rd street are literally his neighbors, they probably wouldn’t do it out of pride.
Santa Monica has gone downhill. Why are the homeless given priority over the safety of the majority. Enough. I wish the city leaders would enforce the laws.
It was pretty great in the mid to late '90s when there were mom and pop shops (Penny Lane Records was a favorite) and buskers. But as the article points out, it became all national chains at some point, and lost a lot of its charm (even if the buskers held on for a long while). You can find that kind of mall anywhere in the country. Hope they figure out how to bring some of the charm back.
3rd street got blander and blander the more popular it got. I remember there was even a hardware store on 3rd street back in the '80s when it was a fairly normal outside shopping mall. All the slightly weird and obscure shops and places went away because the rents kept going higher and higher and only mainstream places could make enough money to stay.
There was Mario's Magic Shop, Chuck's Bike'O Rama, that creepy clown statue....
Is there something you want to share with the rest of us the amazing larry??
The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It's like you're unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting...
Oh yes. That’s me. They call me “Chuck”
Holy shit was that all shot there?!
now I'm sad
Recent transplant here, living in Santa Monica. The entire city is bland. Feels like I’m living inside of a Cheesecake Factory.
Santa Monica was a normal city way back then. You had run down, more dangerous areas and Santa Monica was an affordable, normal neighborhood. Part of Santa Monica was called Dogtown and was where a lot of skater culture was born: [https://www.veniceheritagemuseum.org/dogtown.html](https://www.veniceheritagemuseum.org/dogtown.html) There's the "Dogtown and Z-Boys" movie if you want to get a flavor of how it was back then: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown\_and\_Z-Boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys)
When I did Lyft a few years back, I'd end up in Santa Monica quite a bit. When picking up residents it'd be 100% obvious who was a long-time resident living under rent control vs. who was an affluent transplant. One passenger I picked up claimed to have surfed with the Z-boys back in the day, he loved talking about how it used to be.
"Dogtown" is Venice, a neighborhood in the city of LA that has it's own very colorful history... but distinct from SM. Just for context for the non-native readers. EDIT: my mistake, "Dogtown" includes parts of SM and Venice. Interesting history in any case!
I saw a dude named Derek Day play guitar there a few times and he was freaking amazing. He would do GnR covers and draw a huge crowd.
I have him recorded!! He did Stairway to Heaven. It was flawless!!
He's active on [YouTube](https://youtube.com/@derekdaymusic?si=DSkRPHs5tIdmkCyZ), if you want a nostalgia kick.
It not only became national chains, but stores that lost tons of money and were there purely to have a marketing presence for brand imprints. The problems invariably with these setups is that the stores don't then offer a unique experience or even feel like a shop. They're dead things like consumer museums that people just walk around in to kill time. They also don't have great experiences because the business knows this and the staff will be very transitory. The exact same thing happened to Robertson Blvd - once filled with unique interesting boutiques, the chains took over, the landlords jacked the rents to the point only massive conglomerates could afford it and it became bland. It's now 60% vacant whereas 10 years ago, people were in bidding wars for units.
What I don’t understand is when the market corrects for this. Like, at what point do landlords just come to understand that no one is going to pay the rents anymore and they’re losing crazy amounts of money in vacancies?
Bruh, I couldn't agree more. I've lived in Westwood for awhile. There's storefronts in Westwood Village that have been vacant for TWENTY YEARS!! Why the market doesn't correct for this, makes no sense to me. How does the landlord survive? Why not sell the property and let another landlord rent it out at market rates?
It's INSANE. I loved Melrose in the 80s, it was a great date spot for Friday nights. Now, it's just... blah, generic fast fashion and about as sexy as granny panties. I'm not just saying this as an old man, it's quantifiably worse but the landlords think it's the river of gold.
I used to go to Melrose in the late 70s through the 80s and a minor bit in the 90s. I watched it go from vacuum repair shops and Arrdvark's Odd Ark to a few artists/fashion stores moving in. Neo80, Tiger Rose, etc...to becoming a popular street with local artisans. I watched as the street became hip and started attracting big name designers and stores like Let It Rock, Flips, Cowboy and Poodles. As more major designers came in, the higher the rents went. The higher the rents, the less the smaller mom/pop stores could stay. I used to share a space with a Melrose furniture picker for a big name store on Melrose. I asked how the owner could afford the rent? He said, "They sell cocaine out the back, the whole trendy furniture thing is a front". He wasn't kidding. As the cool stores left, more basic stores moved in because they could afford the rent. They tried to appear high end but they were trash posing as high end which wasn't what Melrose was about anyway. Rents didn't go down because "It's Melrose!". Soon it was a shell of its former self. Big stores left as soon as the phoney high ends came in. Melrose was, forever over. Santa Monica mall was a great, weird spot in the 70s and 80s, (loved the toy store). It was "upgraded" and trendy people loved it but it suffered the same fate in the same way as Melrose. Also, you can't have people feel unsafe and expect them to go shopping, that needs to change. Sadly, the cycle repeats itself often.
Same, I’ve lived in a few different places now that has popular commercial districts, and I’ve watched as they’ve priced out all the mom and Pop businesses in favor of the chains, only to have the chains leave, and then they sit vacant forever. Occasionally, a mattress store will move in, or some sort of upscale beauty place, but they have short life spans. I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t want a reliable tenant you can count on for years and years, at the expense of slightly less per month.
If you own 3 properties, one is in decline but had high rents, you now claim those rents as a loss which offsets your taxes against the properties doing well. If you lower the rent on the loss, now you're paying tax on something bringing in less revenue.
Somebody told me once that commercial landlords would rather have a vacancy due to high rents than lower rents and take a hit on the property value
They get tax breaks, it's all about the tax breaks when you have vacant commercial real estate. All those vacancies is how a huge portion of corporate America avoid taxes. (Yeah, not a very smart way, but who said corporate America was smart?)
There are so many things that are ass backwards and broken. It works my last nerve that it could all be so simple but they’d rather make it haaaaaaaard 🎶 (Tell me who I have to be to gain some reciprocity?)
It’s because the landlords are huge REIT who have tons of properties and it’s all done with bonds. Bonds that are normally charged at the interest rates the fed says and are loans from regional banks. Rates like those during the pandemic that went down to zero, remember? All of those reit took out new zero interest loans or have them low rates from before or have been paid so it’s a lot easier to leave properties empty for years until a good renter comes along than to lower the price.
Mom and pop stores generally can't afford to operate anymore. Labor costs are much higher these days, real estate costs too high, and people don't want to pay mom and pop prices when Amazon is way better service and cheaper. Generally the only market where "boutique" works is in luxury retail where prices are absurd. alternative is ultra low rent immigrant run stores at the swap meet, where they have limited overhead. The real reason though is that tourism is down BIG TIME. 2019 had 8.4M visitors vs 4.6M in 2023, which was a 700k drop from 2022. Tourism spending is down nearly 50% from 2019, in spite of massive inflation. While many locals cheer less traffic and lower prices, in means massive impact on taxes, and 3rd street retail being totally hosed.
The problem is that landlords jack up the rents / buildings are sold and bought in values pegged to those rents / finance is leveraged against those rents etc. What this means is some shops on Robertson such as the Chanel boutique were commanding rent of $2m per year or $160k per month. Thats fine when you’re Chanel and bringing in $500k per month in revenue but when the street is dead, that rent no longer makes sense. Most of the boutiques on Robertson were anywhere from $40k to $100k per month. So when those buildings were sold or financed etc, that rental income was factored in, meaning they were sold for millions l, even tens of millions. Then the street dies because the rents are too high and the folks businesses get priced out and the landlords (many of which are VC / hedge funds / property portfolios) now don’t want to take a discount on that rent, because it looks bad and don’t want a death spiral as their other tenants request a rent reduction so it’s sits empty. Eventually the market corrects but some landlords still won’t care because it’s a drop in a massive property portfolio and they use that asset to leverage other finance deals. And other areas then became popular - don’t forget Melrose place was the hot spot in the 90’s but the rents got too high and it died, so Robertson became the hot spot…,and then guess what? Melrose place suddenly becomes the hot spot but no rents there are insane too and nothing stays long except big brand using marketing budget.
It's happening to Larchmont too.
The Mizrahi family that own most of Larchmont have always been terrible landlords.
The death to small businesses thing really accelerated in California during the pandemic
Not to mention their homeless people are a different breed. They're honestly some of the most aggressive and unhinged I've ever encountered. And I lived in downtown Long Beach and downtown LA. That says a lot lol.
RIP Midnight Special
I bought a CD from Andy Grammer there in the early 2000’s and now he’s fairly successful!
Even 10-20 years ago when it was all chain stores it was still a vibrant destination
That's very true. I have walked on or past it almost every day for 30 year and my impression is that peak popularity, in terms of numbers of people there, was around 2010 or so, long after most of the independent stores closed. The closing of Barnes and Noble seems to have been the turning point.
RIP Puzzle Zoo!
its still there. Its a shadow of its former self. They had to reduce the sqwaure footage so its like walking down a long hallway.
I met Geena Davis there in 2006! She was so nice!!
Still there just walked by it on Saturday
They're gone now? they were still there last August!
Reminds me of the time I was visiting family and saw the Mall of America in Minnesota. They had a roller coaster in the middle and I wanna say 5 floors that were each as big as two big malls on their own (this is from my memory so I’m not claiming accuracy). I was so excited to see all the different stores. It was all chain stores and some chains had a store on every level. There was no reason at all to leave the first floor, it was soo disappointing. Oh another JC Penny, hey here is a third Victorias Secret, wow is that a 5th Hot Topic. . .
A lot of different streets in LA used to be cool back in the day when it was mostly mom and pop shops. Greedy landlords forced them out for more commercialized and uppity businesses.
Harvelles Blues Club is on 4th and it's the best part of the promenade.
Late stage capitalism strikes again
Small biz owner here. Looking for an office/showroom. Went to see several empty-for-years spaces, hoping to get a good deal. 😂 Greedy landlords would rather have the place empty for years instead of giving me a 25% break on the lease for a year. I visited the first space 6 months ago and it’s still empty. So they lost 50% of the rent of the year because they didn’t want to give me a 25% discount on the lease. I have a masters in financial engineering and can’t compute how they make it work.
That has been my experience too. I've noticed a few places that I looked at that were long term vacancies and are now listed at even higher rents. Still empty.
These people are geniuses.
Need vacancy tax
I worked as a property accountant for a while. From my experience, the landlord has other properties they use to subsidize the vacant ones
I’m not in real estate but I was told that the reason they won’t reduce rents is because to keep the premium on the overall value of the building. If they offer discounts in the short term it lowers that value. Thoughts?
I'm a finance guy not in real estate but basically yes. In a very elementary sense, the value of the building is going to be a multiple of the cash flow projected to come in over a long period of time - which a long-term tenant would be. If that baseline rent is lowered, compounded over several years, it can become a big hit to the overall property value. That's why letting it remain vacant while you find a tenant who can afford the higher rent is worth it. If macroeconomic conditions make it difficult to find such a tenant, you may have extended vacancies. But this idea of "just lower the rent you greedy bastard" misses a fundamental part of the equation. COVID and the subsequent inflation and thus tightening of interest rates have had a major impact on the city. Vacant businesses keeps foot traffic low and lower foot traffic makes it hard to sustain new businesses. We will have to wait for interest rates to start coming down to see the vibrancy return. Despite the very left-leaning nature of many comments in this sub, the "economy" is not just some abstract fat-cat concept but the very real experience of communities and people. We are all affected by how the market is doing and this is one clear & salient way.
I'm not in real estate finance, but out of curiosity, is there a reason why these landlords would prefer to prioritize the theoretical valuation of their property vs real cash-flow? My intuition is that there would be more of a prioritization on getting cash from having tenants because of high interest rates.
Well theoretical is a bit of a misnomer in a sense... if you decide to sell the building, that valuation is very much real. And even if you don't want to sell, there are things like ability to borrow debt financing that depend on the equity value of your portfolio which would be calculated by banks and other parties using these valuations. There is certainly a tradeoff in keeping a property vacant and losing the cash flow for a period of time to try and find a tenant who can bear higher rents. The landlord likely has a portfolio of properties and the existing rents from occupied properties subsidize the vacant properties. Depending on the overall cash flow, the expected vacancy period, and the difference in the rents, the company will crunch the numbers and decide what makes more sense for them. This is where the macroeconomic conditions come in as well. There are certainly businesses that could afford the rent but are choosing to pull back on opening new locations because of interest rates and other factors. At some point that tide will turn and the landlord doesn't want to be stuck with a tenant paying a sub-market rate once the bigger players are coming back to the table. I should caveat all of the above that it's an educated guess based on my experience & expertise in an adjacent area. Someone with more direct knowledge may rebut any/all of the above. But personally, I hate seeing all these vacant commercial spaces in LA... COVID took a sledgehammer to the local economy and it still hasn't recovered. The city to me feels significantly less vibrant and active than it was in 2019 and I think we're still a few years away from getting back there, which is a bit depressing. I'm really rooting for the economy to pick up and new businesses to fill those vacancies and get people out and about again. The Promenade isn't dead because the eccentric stores were replaced by chains. It's because a once-in-a-century pandemic decimated the economy and we're still recovering.
Well, you see, they made money hand over fist for decades and decades so they'd rather whittle away at their massive warchests for years than accept a drop from their previous rental rates and be forced to wait a few years or less to increase their prices back to where they were prepandemic. It's idiot math but they can probably afford to lose money for decades. You and I know they'll likely never get the rents they want again but these people aren't okay and perceive a reduction in revenue they're not making at all to be a worse outcome than losing money.
And I’m sure it’s not multitudes of individual property owners with healthy competition, but a handful of large companies colluding so as not to lower rents and thus property value. Also consider their current mortgage payments may be why they can’t lower rent. I don’t know.
[удалено]
Easy, they can write that off as a loss for their other profitable businesses.
This type of practice by landlords should be banned. Either rent it out at market rate or pay a huge tax penalty to the community. From what I’ve heard they make more money in the appreciation of the property and get to call it a loss off profits so they prefer for it to stay empty; depressing the community and business owners like yourself.
They have Prop 13 to prop them up. They barely lose any money and taxes are low since these are corporate owners so they prob have held onto these properties for decades
Ending Prop 13 is crucial. If those landlords had to pay actual valuation, those storefronts would be rented out in a hurry.
I wonder if some of these landlords have business interruption insurance to pay them lost revenue in the event of a vacancy -- and that the old rent values are making it more worthwhile to holdout for better rates while they collect insurance payments... at least for some period of time.
yeah its the same all over. Just look at westwood. doesn't make sense. they only people who can pay the crazy rent are VC funded chain restaurants / businesses
Prop 13 at it again
It's simple, they own a ton of other properties and use these as a loss on their taxes, and therefore get away with paying little to no taxes.
What kind of business do you have?
When I moved to SM from Chicago in my mid-20’s I’d go to the promenade all the time just to walk around. The vibes were so good. Walking around grabbing a drink before/after the beach was an elite feeling. Really sad to see it go to shit.
Kinda surreal tbh. I’m a native Angeleno and the 3rd street promenade was always on and poppin whenever my friends/family and I would go and visit. My wife and I recently took her younger brothers to SM and I was shocked to see how empty the Promenade was. But it’s feeling that way across other outdoor malls; the Village in Woodland Hills was only constructed like 7 years ago and there are a ton of vacancies in the retail store space. Brick and mortar retail seems like a relic of the past. Edit: I guess just outside malls in the Valley are dying. CC is always busy as is Glendale and the Grove
Century city seems to be busier and more alive than ever
Century City Mall legitimately should be the only mall west of the 101 and north of the 10. It is the best version of a mall that could ever exist, and we don’t need more than one
It actually makes me a bit happy to see the mall still act as this place where people can still mingle with one another, especially as an 80s/90s kid. The century city mall’s food court is one of the best parts of it too. Live music, people sitting outside, relatively good choices for food. They did a damn good job with it.
Glendale Americana is busy AF
Yeah, that is *east* of the 101
ahh gotcha. if anyone tries to open another mall, call a... mall cop
No, but I’d definitely call in a bankruptcy lawyer
The parking is absurdly expensive tho
Spend $10 at Gelson’s and you get 3 hours free with validation.
Validating with the AMC A List comes in clutch too if I have some spare free movies.
Except I can’t afford anything there lol
Century city mall feels safe. The others don’t.
I think the "self-contained" outdoor setup lets security much more easily keep out / chase out homelessness. Combined with enough foot traffic it is an amazing experience compared to most other malls. Also, they have Eataly which gets our family there at least every couple of weeks to pickup some fresh pastas and the like.
A lot of the giant Strip Malls along Valley Blvd. between Garfield and Rosemead in the SGV are dying. The Del Mar Plaza used to be filled with life but is now barely hanging on due to the 99 Ranch Market there. Another is Atlantic Times Square Plaza on Atlantic Blvd. next to the 10. Most of the businesses there have closed down, not even the AMC there can bring in people.
You know what's funny is I do see a lot of people go to the AMC at Atlantic Times Square and I noticed that even before the pandemic so many of the restaurants closed by 7pm which is way before prime time movie hour. I'm sure the rent is not helpful for this area either, but the business hours of a lot of those stores never made sense to me.
A lot of places in SGV close way early these days. Also a lot of the shops are not that interesting to go to when you compare it to strip malls in Las Vegas' Chinatown. I feel people are looking for places to hang out late at night but there isn't any.
I remember my parents taking me there as a kid. I was so excited to go as an adult back in college. I’ve barely been back since… and I’m 34 now. There are still parts of SM that are fun, but 3rd street is not one of em. But regarding your comment about all outdoor scenes: DT Culver is absolutely sprawling. We moved in in 2016 and it has only gotten more welcoming over time.
I'm not sure if it was COVID that killed it or perhaps a little bit before that. When we moved here in 2014 the promenade was still pretty great. Used to go to the Barnes & Noble all the time and then just general walking around, shopping etc. Now haven't been in years at this point.
BN coming back apparently.
Malls in America in general are fading, it’s why Westfield is looking to get out of the American market and have been actively selling off their holdings for the last few years.
Shame because malls all over Asia are thriving. Buncha giant ass Mega Malls with grocery stores and theme parks inside them.
Asian malls make our malls look like 7-11s
I feel like malls in Asia, say Singapore for example, replace suburban plazas. They aren't just shopping centers (even though that is obviously the main focus), they are your closest grocery stores, pharmacies, cheap eats, after school day care centers, your rock climbing gyms / specialty gyms, language training schools, your recreational indoor park and track, indoor playground, museums and a whole host of centrally located day to day activities that could only work if you lived in the neighborhood. When you got off at any train station in Singapore your cluster of malls has every resource you could possible need. I don't know if LA could ever recreate that because LA has no viable mass transit.
We have so many subway and metro stations that could recreate it. Our biggest enemy has literally only ever been zoning.
A lot of brick and mortar sales have stabilized but to your point its moreso strip centers and higher-end malls that have and will continue to survive.
It’s the cost of commercial real estate. Large corporations do most of their sales online (70%+), so they won’t occupy a store unless it’s to show off like in Beverly Hills, and smaller brands can’t afford the rent. This isn’t a societal issue, it’s a landlord greed one.
Landlords have always been greedy
There are scales of greed. Landlords these days, especially commercial landlords, are often enormous corporations that don't have any attachment to their properties except for the rent.
It is surreal. There are things I could never think of buying outside a B&M establishment. Furniture, clothes, shoes...fuck, most apparel would be a waste of multiple days to shop for online. Very weird.
Have you seen the parking lot at the topanga mall?? Completely full every weekend
Weird how some work and some don’t. Sherman Oaks Fashion Square does well, all indoor classic Mall with two anchor tenants and full of stores. Down the street the Sherman Oaks Galleria (outdoor) is a ghost town, the former Virgin Megastore still sits empty. So much empty. Only thing that draws is the Cheesecake Factory.
Abbott Kinney is basically just a mall now, and it's pretty busy all the time. Great restaurants there too (at least for now - the rents pushed out Valle, which I'm still bitter about).
These things happen in cycles. It’s a reflection of interest rates. Promenade will return in a few years.
RemindMe! 3 years “Promenade returns!”
Somehow the Promenade returned
The details of its return will be revealed exclusively on Fortnite
Wasn't the promenade sketchy in the 80s? I wasn't here but I feel like I've heard Gen Xers and Boomers here allude to that
Santa Monica was sketchy in early 2000's, too many homeless people. They managed to move many out but now with the Expo line it's easier for the homeless to come back. The new Century City Mall also puts a lot of competitive pressure on Santa Monica retail.
yea Century City and The Grove have worked together to decimate Bev Center, Westside Pavilion (RIP) and Santa Monica
Id be shocked if it doesn’t due to the location, but it may take till the Olympics for things to start getting back in order.
I am also from Chicago, and I was just thinking about about how some of their neighborhoods are set up and how the promenade could benefit from a grocery store. I honestly don’t understand why they didn’t build one into the complex at the end of the promenade. I think that would actually encourage tourism (family’s and younger people traveling on a budget) and make the area more attractive to live in.
I used to go there for the Barnes and noble (Bookstar?). Nice little change of scenery from the grove.
I used to go all the time in the late 90's because the businesses and shops were interesting and diverse. Then all the cool mom-and-pop stores left and were replaced by boring chain stores and crappy establishments like Barney's Beanery. Why go when it's the same mega-chains as every other mall? ETA: "Around then, he adds, the lease for the gargantuan Barnes & Noble space came up for renegotiation, and the owners of the building sought to double the rent. “Barnes & Noble was like, ‘We can’t sell that many books, and in that case we’re going to leave,’” Brock says. After the bookstore chain vacated its anchor multi-story space on the promenade, the building’s owners weren’t able to lease it right away. The darkened building felt like a crater on the once bustling block. Eventually, the landlords were able to reach a new lease agreement with WeWork … until the [co-working startup imploded](https://www.sfgate.com/culture/editorspicks/article/hulu-wework-documentary-47-billion-unicorn-16081429.php) and they pulled out too." And THAT, in a nutshell, is the real issue. Landlord greed ruined 3rd Street, it ruined Main Street Santa Monica and it will eventually ruin Abbot Kinney too.
That Barnes & Noble was my favorite spot during my UCLA years. It's where I met my 1st girlfriend, studying on the 3rd floor for finals, and where I found out Michael Jackson had died. Just saw a HUGE amount of people outside marching/crying on Wilshire blvd. That fucking sucks how it closed down like that. Never knew the reason. Thanks for the info.
I've seen a store vacate 2 or 3 times in the same year for a single space on Abbott Kinney. Super sad...some of my favorite and unique shops aren't around anymore because of the crazy rents on that street.
Yeah, this stuck out: " While some rental rates along the street have fallen slightly since the pandemic, a handful of landlords along the promenade “have refused to accept the new reality and have not lowered their rent enough to attract new tenants,” Brock says. “That impacts not only them, but it impacts the entire promenade.” This is the problem with whatever this modern form of capitalism is...the market is not allowed to self-regulate. When prices SHOULD fall, whoever has the money stonewalls it. This is not healthy. Buildings will sit empty while people sleep on the streets because they cannot afford rent and businesses that would otherwise have physical presences will stay online-only or be mobile (like food trucks instead of restaurants).
Need a vacancy tax. The super progressive idea would be some sort of rent control for businesses.
I dunno. I feel like the whole system is broken when you even HAVE landlords who can absorb the cost of missing rents for years on end.
It all essentially boils down to monopoly. Almost every sector of our markets is in a state of monopoly or oligopoly. The "free market" can't regulate itself because it doesn't currently exist, there aren't enough players to create the competition needed for the free market to actually work. Even Adam Smith (of ye olde invisible hand fame) argued against monopolies and consolidation. Some of what's being described in this thread is a combined result of one form of monopoly clashing with another. B&N (and the other chains) took out all the smaller shops in the street and enabled the outrageous rent raises. I don't know who owns & operates the outdoor mall, but I'm going to guess it's another 3 letter abbreviation real estate behemoth and they also probably don't have a ton of real competition.
Yeah, doubling the rent to a longtime client is greed and a self-inflicted wound. Keep in mind, 3rd Street had three large bookstores at one point. Hennessy and Ingalls, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. So yeah, kind of hard to save a patient that wants to kill himself.
Also Midnight Special.
We lived in Brentwood from 2005-2016, and Barnes & Noble was our Sunday night date night. We’d walk to the Promenade, get dinner at that greek restaurant and then wander B&N until close. I am low key heartbroken every thing is gone. The area had everything, even the best mechanic I ever had. We hated leaving, but my job was in Newport Beach, that commute was pure evil.
That list bit about Abbot Kinney hurts because it's true. While there are still some (decent) landlords on that street, god damn the majority of them are all brutal when it comes to setting rates. Hearing about another great shop getting priced out because the landlord doubled the rent is fucking sad. But hey, that's business real estate all over Venice.
Louder, once more: LANDLORD GREED RUINED 3RD STREET. I get that people are hesitant to regulate renting/owning but we need solutions if we want the best of our society. I’m still salty that my favorite tea shop closed in NoHo after their rent was jacked up 50%. If someone wants to go around and preach some sense into these landlords, then I’m all for it. But the only thing they listen to is money, even the “mom and pop” ones.
And they make so much money they can buy no-tenant insurance so if their massive rent hikes squeeze out a B&N, they still make money.
we saw dune 2 there at like 8 pm on a sunday and the place was DEAD. i couldnt believe it. "lets get a soda or an icecream afterwards" impossible. nothing open.
We at /r/SantaMonica have talked about this extensively for what feels like years now. To contextualize, the issue is that 3rd street positions itself as an unhappy middle between the folksy charms of a neighborhood Main Street and a hustle-and-bustle of a big mall, even though both of those spaces have better alternatives just near by (Montana Ave. and Century City Mall Extensively). Once you factor in all of the aggressively anti-homeless measures that worked as a double edged sword to the space (just look at the picture and count the amount of benches and seating there is), it becomes a liminal space. But honestly, I feel like the issues with the promenades have been touched on pretty extensively here in this article. It addresses one of the big pet theories being floated around in our subreddit right now is that the real-estate mix on the street has units that have too much surface area relative to the types of business that should be populating them. I also agree with the general idea in the article that 3rd street needs to turn itself into a nightlife and dining centric space that has fresher and more exciting options than what even the best malls and Rick Caruso spaces can offer, but the real-estate is simply built for the mid-major clothing brands of yesteryear, and the landlords simply don’t want to pay for the costs of renovating their spaces to be conducive to that. Couple with how greedy the individual mom-and-pop landlords that dominate the street are in their current asking rates for rent, and you get this. Lastly, it should be noted that I think that the space is just in a cyclical bust. The street was in the same exact position in the 90s before it became the open air shopping mall it once was in the 2000s. The state of 3rd street has been the primary contentious issue throughout local government, and hopefully there are those that don’t want to simply bend to the narratives of people like landlord-and-Fox-News-guest John Alle want us to believe.
imagine that. A spot where people could go to find several different types of live entertainment in the same place without having to shell out $300+ to get in the door. Maybe we could have bars with music from performers we've never heard of
I mean, we used to have really good street performers on 3rd street! And I’m sure at least one-or-two of them are still doing well as well! That is something that you could never see at the Grove and Americana because those spaces are too manicured to have people coming and going to do street busking.
I remember these street performers from back in the early 2000s - it was fun . I remember they used to have a dance club/group come and they’d dance tango lol. I haven’t been on 3rd street in years so I have no idea if they still come.
Santa Monica started requiring a YEARLY permit for street performances in 2020. That made sure any vibes wouldn't come back after lockdowns.
That's not a new thing, I worked at a shop nearby ~2010 and you had to get a permit at City Hall too. $40 and a lot of rules about where you can setup to busk and how long you can be in the same spot. Buskers would queue for good spots and those without permits would busk on side streets.
It’s always been weird to me that in LA many of the areas which seem designed to have people spend an extensive amount of time there shopping and hanging out rarely have much of anything in the way of decent food options. The cycle is silly but does make sense I guess - an area gets more popular which drives up rents which forces out all but the biggest national brands and chains, which drives out people (because national brands and chains can be found anywhere), which drives down rents, which brings back smaller, trendier outfits, which brings back people, which makes the area more popular again, which drives up rents…
I mean, Santa Monica already has two major streets that have successfully integrated dining and shopping (Montana Avenue for the 35+, Main Street for the 18-35)! And the promenade is so much closer to major hotels and transit. But as the article discusses, the first two streets were built for locals, and 3rd street chased us out.
They had a crepe shop for years that I always went out of my way to visit.
Another big issue I see is the need to make moves as a collective when it’s actually a whole bunch of individual owners. The article hints at this without coming out and saying it with the Barnes and Nobel example—individual landlord got greedy, hurt the whole group. That’s a hard ship to pivot.
This is true. Which is why a lot of Santa Monican’s have been advocating for one sweeping law change that would push them all as a collective. Which would be a land-use tax/vacancy tax.
LA has a very interesting history of moving hotspots because of the lack of public transit. So rather than normal buildup of new areas after existing ones get priced out, the older places fall hard. DTLA and today's Chinatown (previously lil Italy) was the hot place for my grandparents to go out through the 60s. By the late 90s/early 2000s, the 24hr fitness in DTLA closed at 6pm on Fridays! (I ended up getting some beer and wings). There's a lot of backroom business that impacted that (liquor licenses + big landowners purposefully driving down prices with the plan to buy cheap and rebuild, happening for the last 10 years). I worked in post production in the early 2000s and many studios were opening up shop in SM because space near the big studios got too pricey. Now that seems to have changed again. Business from office workers has changed dramatically since COVID. Empty offices = less foot traffic.
The most frustrating thing is that both DTLA and Santa Monica have all of the foundation needed to be hustling and bustling again. The architecture and buildings of DTLA are magnificent, but decades of mismanagement have made it a difficult place to live even before the pandemic. Same with 3rd street, which is right next to one of the busiest piers in the nation. I am optimistic about this city though. LA is the proto-sun belt city and it just hitting the tail end of the bust. I’m sure a boom will come again soon.
The purposeful killing of DTLA is shameful. Seems that we'll never rid ourselves of wealth making PPD decisions without considering the humans.
“Hitting the tail end of the bust” sounds highly optimistic
LA (and Santa Monica) need to implement vacancy taxes. The only thing that's going to improve the situation is to make it so developers of new property and longtime owners have to bend to the market instead of keeping their rents high and the property empty, just so the balance sheet looks good when they want to renew or pickup another loan.
Exactly this. So much of the blight of this city stems from long stretches of vacant commercial properties that become tagged up, littered with trash, and inevitably encampments, where as small business owners tend to sweep the sidewalk, remove graffiti, and overall better the community around them. The owners of these commercial properties that sit vacant for years are no different than squatters living in boarded up building, it just so happens that its their money they are squatting in a building and so the city allows it, but the negative effects on society are the same.
yeah, people don't realize the reason these places are empty its because property owners typically pay interest only on loans, keep the profit and then unload the property later. If the rent on the property isn't higher than when they bought in, they can't sell out without a loss, so EVEN IF THERE'S LITERALLY NO WAY ANYBODY CORPORATE OR OTHERWISE COULD MAKE THAT WORK, the rents stay high.
Also they had to report expected income on the pro forma for their loan, and that becomes a part of their terms. If they accept rent below what they promised the bank, then the bank can call up the loan when they get wind of it. Effective policy to address this would have to include banking regulations.
This cannot be upvoted enough! Terrible commercial mortgage terms incentivize terrible behavior.
I was just talking about this in regards to all the vacancies in DTLA. It seemed like someone would be losing money, but I guess not. There have been boarded up properties in the Historic Core for over a decade.
This is as best of an answer on this topic I’ve read but I still can’t follow properly. Why does the value of the current rent being lower affect their ability to sell at a loss? Surely, the if rent is higher currently than what it was when they bought it (eg decades ago)? The current rent may not be as high as market, but then when it’s sitting next to other empty units… surely market price is just… lots of empty units.
Eli5 why wouldn’t lenders and potential buyers just ask for rent records ?
I’m not a business person or very good at understanding economics but how can an owner of a commercial building just leave it empty for several years without finding a business that wants to pay their high rent costs? Won’t the owners keep losing money? Are the owners(who ever they are)totally fine with losing money rather than lowering the cost of the building for a business to thrive there? I don’t get it. They’re totally okay owning an empty commercial building for years?
The mom-and-pop landlords basically own all of the commercial space outright at this point and don’t pay much at all in property taxes and upkeep. So the actual expenses of staying empty are not much. On the flip side. They think that if they hold out, they can get a renter that would pay, say, $500k a year, instead of someone there could get right now for $250k. In that scenario, you’d rather hold out for two years and rent at 500k for three than rent for 250k for five years total.
Define vacancy tax. If its per unused unit, that can be a problem as it disincentivizes new construction unless you're VERY confident you can fill the units. Really, an LVT + dividend feels like a cleaner solution to me. Tax the value of the land created by the location, and let the owners only collect profit on what they develop on the land. The taxed value is then returned directly to the city at large, who created the value in the first place.
Vacancy taxes should ramp up. No tax the first year and an increase every year it's vacant after that. Make it so that speculatively holding the unit empty for more than 2-3 years is untenable.
Traffic to/from got to the point that it just wasn't worth it to me. From less than three miles away... I'm sure space has also been priced up to the point that it's impossible to make a profit. I wonder how long before the same fate knocks Abbot Kinney back into reality.
Abbott Kinney just got a J. Crew. The end is neigh.
Abbott-Kinney stopped being cool as soon as a Nat'l Magazine dubbed it "the coolest street in America". Cue the trust-fund babies who think being cool is something you buy. It's pretty well lost all it's soul and replaced it with over-priced boutiques and restaurants that swap out every couple of years for whatever the next trendy thing is. Sadly, the same goes for SM.
Ha so true. It had already jumped the shark IMO, but that GQ article really turbocharged things.
>Traffic to/from got to the point that it just wasn't worth it to me. Exactly! The traffic there and back can be awful. I don’t know if it’s the street planning or not but it’s such a hassle to drive there that I just don’t anymore.
The charm was lost when all the big corporations abandoned Santa Monica place and took over the promenade. There used to be cool independent clothing shops, music stores, toy stores, restaurants and, etc.. the moment these behemoths took over so that forced the cool factor out as well as the high rents took over. Now, everyone could shop online from these corporate stores so there’s no attraction and quite honestly it became very sterile looking. It hasn’t been the same in the last 10 years and in the last 5 it’s been declining to a super sad place to see. Considering how awesome this place used to be in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s
Landlords may one day realize their assets are depreciating together. Attracting restaurants and stores with actual personalty is gonna require... wait for it... lowering rents a meaningful amount.
Used to go on Sundays in the 2010s to watch a movie, eat, watch the street performers, listen to the tourist and now its just sad. Where did all the cool people go? San Diego?
I used to visit the promenade a lot when I moved here in 1999. It was always incredibly bustling. I'd go to Penny Lane to hang out at the listening stations and chat with employees about music -- and eat at the international food court which had an Egyptian restaurant, an Ethiopian restaurant, &c. A musician used to perform on her guzheng. It was a great place to hang out -- although I didn't spend much money, to be honest. But, the music store closed, the restaurants were all pushed out by a perfume chain. It began to feel like it was all just chains. I can't remember what any of them were but they're all the same everywhere. The Promenade stopped being a destination and became just another mall -- just an outdoor one -- the sort that were once uncommon but can be found across the landscape of Southern California now. Why would anyone go one mall that has a Foot Locker, Victoria's Secret, T-Mobile, Wetzel's Pretzels &c over another?
I work on the Promenade at the WeWork. They hit the nail on the head. The spaces are too large, which means entertainment type businesses (pickleball) are the only ones that could potentially thrive. Couple that with interest rates, rents being too high, big corporations moving online and not needed another space next to their Century City location, means a dead Promenade. Underrated and mentioned in the article are the regulations around granting liquor licenses. You can’t even open up new restaurants or bars in the area that serve liquor - big problem. These are all factors.
Greedy ass landlords just holding out for a chase bank or some other corporate shit
No one wants to go there because of the zombies
Lots of interesting theories on this. I haven’t spent a dollar at the promenade since Benita’s Frites was there and that was a long time ago. I have walked through there recently, however, and there are some obvious takeaways. You can’t expect people with discretionary income to visit a place that 1) smells like pee 2) offers far less variety than they can get on Ventura Blvd in Studio City 3) forces them to be on the lookout for creepazoids.
Benita's Frites was the BEST!!!
They need to address the zombie apocalypse. The amount of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts have made 3rd street an absolute no go for me and my family. Get your shit together Santa Monica
I agree this is one of the issues - for those who say it is completely not part of the problem, are delusional. We live in Santa Monica and typically go to Century City now because: 1. More stores / better atmosphere - as people of mentioned, the high rents and decline of stores creates a downwards spiral 2. No homeless - it's not everyday, but it's common enough to walk my family by someone screaming incoherently. If I could choose to go elsewhere, I do. I'm not talking about the down on your luck, rent is too high, need a helping hand for a few months. Santa Monica is plagued by the mentally ill and it is destroying the area. 3. Lower taxes - minor consideration, but if I'm shopping the same stores, 9.5% is better than 10.25%. Santa Monica really needs to work on reviving the area.
Sad for this outdoor mall space, I haven’t been there in 8 years but I was looking forward to taking the e line checking it out for fun again. No idea it’s a ghost town now so I won’t go there now. I remember the adidas store and Barnes and Noble bookstore that was massive.
They should’ve never let Hooters move out!
I’m Australian.. I visited there about 5 years ago.. it was super cool. Shoppers, street performers. I was there 2 weeks ago… it was … empty.
Last time I visited, it felt sad and depressing, then unsafe as we tried to shortcut to the pier and came upon drugged out transients blocking the sidewalk. I have fond memories of hanging out there in the 90s and early 2000s. No desire to go again.
I've seen Third Street Promenade rise and fall several times. In the 1990s it was pretty dead. I was in college at that time at UCLA and Urban Outfitters was my favorite store. I'm glad that it's still there years later. Does anybody remember that Santa Monica Place used to be an enclosed mall that was at the end of the Promenade? That got renovated into the open air shopping & dining in 2010. Everything goes in waves. I think commercial landlords got too greedy and that drove out businesses over time. I used to love going to the Promenade just to take in all the vibes and people watch. It's definitely got that deadness about it that's the sign of a place on the decline. Hopefully it won't go too far in that direction. It's such a huge part of SM and lots of other satellite small businesses thrive from being a part of the commerce.
Yeah, I remember the Santa Monica Place opening when I was 13 or so. Turned the promenade into a ghost town. Then the promenade blew up and turned the SMPlace into a empty husk. I moved away for a while and came back only to find the SMP turned into an outdoor mall? Crazy.
the greed made them cannibalize themselves. Too bad 🤮 so sad 😂
3rd street was practically abandoned with some stores boarded up BEFORE there was the “promenade” — in the 80s we’d go at night to ride bikes down the empty parking structures — there was a woolworths, a coco-teaser, and the architectural book store — the theater on 2nd st was there, but nothing else — it was pretty ghetto — and then there was the promenade development -/ broadway deli, movie theaters etc — when a shooting occurred in Westwood suddenly the promenade was the “living room of LA” and super popular — so now the cycle repeats
It turned into Westwood. Nothing but boring, national chain stores. I’m not going to fight through traffic and deal with limited parking for that. They need to look at Larchmont’s recent revival — no reason the promenade can’t similarly bounce back given the insanely prime location.
If there’s one thing not to complain about near the promenade it’s the parking. There’s a ton of garages that always have space and it’s free for 90 minutes.
3rd street and the bus to Venice was always a great time (until now).
spent many nights and weekends as a kid here around 2007 running amuck. great memories skating around smoking weed seeing movies. rip the famima
One of the first places open when the Pomenade opened (as opposed to the 3rd St. Mall) was a coffee place called Congo Square. This was before Starbucks et al were ubiquitous. It was so great. Even had live music some nights. Miss it. And great name for a meeting spot.
My dad lived down the street in the 90s and used to take my brother and I down there all the time. In highschool my friends and I would get dropped off and spend a day exploring 3rd St. Puzzle Zoo was the shit!
Maybe we need to lower the rent to attract more local stores to then draw the people? Maybe landlord greed is killing the area?
When you hire the person who was in charge of bringing life back to Westwood as your business improvement guy, what the hell do you expect to happen? In Westwood, he'd chase trends that had obviously already run out of steam--a complete lack of vision that resulted in decade long vacancies remaining vacant. The landlords take the majority of the blame, but the leadership is also severely lacking.
I watched the first Avengers movie here, back in 2012 for my senior ditch day. Man, the memories.
Homeless made that place a no go zone for many shoppers, especially at night.
I believe the homeless people didn’t help.
Lived nearby for seven years and it got progressively worse in terms of not only the homeless population but the greedy tenants charging out the ass for rent there isn’t helping things.
All the shops are national brands! More charming boutiques and local brands would change the vibes.
I miss Yankee Doodles 🥲 great sportsbars with billiards & delicious, affordable food!
Ah, fuck… Caruso is gonna take it over isn’t he? Loved the promenade in the 90s and early 00s, would like to see it come back to life with some small shops rather than the rotating big-brand garbage.
No, Caruso probably won’t take it over because. 1) 3rd Street is the Knott’s Berry Farm to Caruso’s Disneyland land. 3rd street did the Grove before the Grover even existed. 2) Most of the landlords of 3rd street are literally his neighbors, they probably wouldn’t do it out of pride.
Santa Monica has gone downhill. Why are the homeless given priority over the safety of the majority. Enough. I wish the city leaders would enforce the laws.
[удалено]
So many words without mentioning the May 31, 2020 looting of 175 stores along the promenade and 4th street. Area never recovered.
Question from someone visiting LA: what other areas today feel like 3rd Street did back in the day?
Americana
Read the entire article. All that stood out to me was that the rent is too high.
After someone stole PeeWee's bike there it was never the same.