HOLLYWOOD — For the first time in nearly four years, there are fewer empty storefronts on Hollywood Boulevard than there were the year before — a shift so modest that the people who track it are reluctant to call it a recovery, and so overdue that they cannot quite help themselves.
Ground-floor retail vacancy along the boulevard’s core stretch fell to about 21 percent this spring from roughly 24 percent a year earlier, according to a survey by the district’s business improvement association. The figure remains far above the low-teens vacancy of the years before the pandemic, and the association is careful to note that a single good quarter is not a trend. Still, the direction of the arrow has changed, and on the boulevard that counts as news.
“We’ve spent four years watching that number go the wrong way, so forgive me if three points feels like a parade,” said Camille Ferro, who directs the improvement district and has walked the block counting papered-over windows since 2019. “It’s small. It’s fragile. It could reverse by fall. But it’s the first time in a long time I’ve had to sharpen a pencil for good news instead of bad.”
The gains are uneven and easy to overstate. Much of the newly filled space has gone to short-term and pop-up tenants — a costume outfit, a seasonal candy store, a mobile-phone accessories shop — the kind of businesses that fill a window without necessarily committing to the block. But brokers say a handful of longer leases have also been signed, including a bakery expanding from a side street and a footwear brand taking a corner that sat dark for three years.
“The rents finally came down enough to meet reality,” said Owen Kessler, a commercial broker who handles several boulevard properties. “For a while landlords were holding out for 2019 numbers on a street that no longer existed. The ones who adjusted are getting deals done. The ones who didn’t still have papered windows.”
Merchants who stuck it out through the lean years greet the numbers with cautious relief and a certain wariness of being told things are better. “I’ll believe the recovery when the guy next to me stays open past Christmas,” said Priya Sandoval, who runs a souvenir and sundries shop near Las Palmas and has watched three neighbors come and go since 2022. She allowed that a filled storefront beats an empty one, if only because “an empty window makes the whole block look like it gave up.”
Ferro’s association is betting the trend holds long enough to compound, on the theory that occupancy breeds occupancy — that a block with fewer dark windows draws the foot traffic that fills the rest. For now she is keeping her survey clipboard handy and her expectations lower than the number. “Ask me again in December,” she said. “The boulevard has broken my heart before.”