LOS ANGELES — Downtown in the City of Angels is looking more and more like a ghost town.
The famed Los Angeles neighborhood has become a shadow of its former glory — with rows of boarded up shops, chain stores leaving in droves and hoards of drug-using vagrants sparking major safety concerns for shoppers and business owners alike.
The Post can reveal that there are more than 100 vacant storefronts in the area’s Historic Core, which was the rip-roaring heart of the downtown shopping and entertainment district.
The area’s Art Deco buildings and lavish theater marquees are still there, but they now overlook busted windows, boarded-up storefronts, and throngs of homeless people smoking drugs from glass pipes in broad daylight.
Around one-third of commercial spaces sits empty, according to research firm Avison Young — a higher vacancy rate than Detroit.
Even the most stalwart businesses are being driven out by crime, record-high rents and an ever-shrinking pool of Angelenos with any reason to be downtown, according to business owners.
“Many historical independent restaurants are struggling under the weight of these issues and have already closed, while those remaining are fighting to survive,” wrote the LA’s oldest eatery, Cole’s French Dip, when it announced its forthcoming closure.
And it’s not just mom-and-pop joints — chain stores have also been closing downtown locations at a disastrous clip. Macy’s shuttered earlier this year as part of a massive corporate downsizing, leaving downtown without a department store for the first time in 150 years, according to LA Magazine.
Retailers Vans, Theory, Paul Smith and Acne have also vacated the nabe. In 2022, Starbucks closed one of its downtown locations, citing safety concerns.
Other big-name brands like the Adidas and Apple stores fell victim to looters — both during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the anti-ICE protests this summer, though they continue operating.
Each month, the streets of downtown get a little emptier — save for the homeless wandering into downtown from Skid Row in ever greater numbers.
“They’re coming all the way up to Spring Street now,” said one barber who works in the city’s “Historic Core.”
The day before speaking to The Post, the barber, who asked not to be named, had to call the cops when a homeless man stormed into the shop and barricaded himself inside.
“Everything is different now,” he said. “You used to have people partying in the street. Students would come in from the colleges. They’d get a haircut and go out and have fun.”
Before the pandemic, downtown LA was in the middle of a renaissance the likes of which it hadn’t seen since the Roaring Twenties, when playboys and flappers perused the boutiques and glittering movie palaces of Broadway Street, according to historian William Deverell, author of “Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles.”
“There was a high-water mark around 2015 to 2020. It was a period of energy and redevelopment in the Arts District, in addition to the Historic Core,” Deverell said.
But COVID-19 dealt a blow that downtown is still reeling from — and not just because people stopped going out.
Rioters smashed and looted dozens of shops and restaurants during the BLM protests, and many businesses either never reopened or went under within the year.
Today, many street-level businesses leave their windows boarded up as a standard precaution.
And some of the neighborhood’s most famous landmarks have become the biggest eyesores — including the empty former headquarters of the Los Angeles Times and the boarded-up Morrison Hotel, featured on the cover of the namesake Doors album.
A skyscraper sits empty: The abandoned 677-foot Oceanwide Plaza tower has become a giant playground for hooligans and vandals.
Down on the ground, criminals run roughshod, locals complain.
Violent crime is down in the city overall, but downtown LA feels like a huge exception, said the owner of Benny Jewelry Behzad on Broadway.
“It’s been a 180-degree change here,” said Benny, adding that he’s been held up at gunpoint twice in recent years.
Benny said his real problem is rent, which has gone up 2-5% each year since the pandemic.
He isn’t alone: Commercial rent in downtown reached a record high this year, with businesses shelling out almost $50 per square foot just for office space, according to Avison Young
By comparison, the average office rent in downtown Manhattan in New York City is $57 per square foot, and nearly $90 per square foot in Midtown — areas that have seen a boom from post-pandemic return-to-office policies.
“Landlords need lower rents instead of just holding onto empty spaces,” said Michael Backlinder, whose coffee shop features one of the only outdoor dining spaces left on Broadway.
“Landlords need to understand they aren’t sitting on a gold mine,” he said.
Yet Backlinder believes downtown remains a decent place for those who live there, thanks to a core of local watering holes, community art galleries, yoga studios and other services catering to neighborhood folk.
Glen Proctor, who moved from New York with his husband after the pandemic, said they like the quieter streets — even if those streets come with graffiti and hooligans.
“Our life from New York is much more relaxed,” he said. “It can get crazy with the unhoused around, but you get a lot more space for something you would pay a lot more for in Hollywood.”
Proctor and his husband aren’t alone: More Angelenos are choosing to live downtown rather than vie for space in ritzier neighborhoods. Apartment occupancy is currently around 90%, according to the DTLA Alliance, which is higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Backlinder believes neighborhood is due for a comeback, but it won’t get one by trying to be the next Greenwich Village.
“After the pandemic, you had corporate stuff coming in, high-end retail. High-end retail is what people buy online. We need landlords to activate the streets and invest in services for the people who live here.”
But for downtown to change, the city has to invest in it — and change the faded perception of the nabe.
“Everyone thinks people are dying downtown, but that’s not the case,” he said. “People just need to talk more positively.”
Read the full article here