In a small apartment outside Madrid on Jan. 11, 2022, an argument over household chores turned violent when Lobna Hemid’s husband smashed a wooden shoe rack and used one of the broken pieces to beat her. Her screams were heard by neighbors. Their four children, ages 6 to 12, were also home.

Ms. Hemid’s husband of more than a decade, Bouthaer el Banaisati, regularly punched and kicked her, she later told the police. He also called her a “whore,” “disgusting” and “worthless,” according to the police report.

Before Ms. Hemid left the station that night, the police had to determine if she was in danger of being attacked again and needed support. A police officer clicked through 35 yes or no questions — Was a weapon used? Were there economic problems? Has the aggressor shown controlling behaviors? — to feed into an algorithm called VioGén that would help generate an answer.

VioGén produced a score:

The police accepted the software’s judgment and Ms. Hemid went home with no further protection. Mr. el Banaisati, who was imprisoned that night, was released the next day. Seven weeks later, he fatally stabbed Ms. Hemid several times in the chest and abdomen before killing himself. She was 32 years old.

Spain has become dependent on an algorithm to combat gender violence, with the software so woven into law enforcement that it is hard to know where its recommendations end and human decision-making begins. At its best, the system has helped police protect vulnerable women and, overall, has reduced the number of repeat attacks in domestic violence cases. But the reliance on VioGén has also resulted in victims, whose risk levels are miscalculated, getting attacked again — sometimes leading to fatal consequences.

Spain now has 92,000 active cases of gender violence victims who were evaluated by VioGén, with most of them — 83 percent — classified as facing little risk of being hurt by their abuser again. Yet roughly 8 percent of women who the algorithm found to be at negligible risk and 14 percent at low risk have reported being harmed again, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the system.

At least 247 women have also been killed by their current or former partner since 2007 after being assessed by VioGén, according to government figures. While that is a tiny fraction of gender violence cases, it points to the algorithm’s flaws. The New York Times found that in a judicial review of 98 of those homicides, 55 of the slain women were scored by VioGén as negligible or low risk for repeat abuse.

Spanish police are trained to overrule VioGén’s recommendations depending on the evidence, but accept the risk scores about 95 percent of the time, officials said. Judges can also use the results when considering requests for restraining orders and other protective measures.

“Women are falling through the cracks,” said Susana Pavlou, director of the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies, who coauthored a European Union report about VioGén and other police efforts to fight violence against women. The algorithm “kind of absolves the police of any responsibility of assessing the situation and what the victim may need.”

Spain exemplifies how governments are turning to algorithms to make societal decisions, a global trend that is expected to grow with the rise of artificial intelligence. In the United States, algorithms help determine prison sentences, set police patrols and identify children at risk of abuse. In the Netherlands and Britain, authorities have experimented with algorithms to predict who may become criminals and to identify people who may be committing welfare fraud.

Few of the programs have such life or death consequences as VioGén. But victims interviewed by The Times rarely knew about the role the algorithm played in their cases. The government also has not released comprehensive data about the system’s effectiveness and has refused to make the algorithm available for outside audit.

VioGén was created to be an unbiased tool to aid police with limited resources identify and protect women most at risk of being assaulted again. The technology was meant to create efficiencies by helping police prioritize the most urgent cases, while focusing less on those calculated by the algorithm as lower risk. Victims classified as higher risk get more protection, including regular patrols by their home, access to a shelter and police monitoring of their abuser’s movements. Those with lower scores get less support.

In a statement, the Interior Ministry defended VioGén and said the government was the “first to carry out self-criticism” when mistakes occur. It said homicide was so rare that it was difficult to accurately predict, but added it was an “incontestable fact” that VioGén has helped reduce violence against women.

Since 2007, about 0.03 percent of Spain’s 814,000 reported victims of gender violence have been killed after being assessed by VioGén, the ministry said. During that time, repeat attacks have fallen to roughly 15 percent of all gender violence cases from 40 percent, according to government figures.

“If it weren’t for this, we would have more homicides and gender-based violence,” said Juan José López Ossorio, a psychologist who helped create VioGén and works for the Interior Ministry.

Yet victims and their families are grappling with the consequences when VioGén gets it wrong.

“Technology is fine, but sometimes it’s not and then it’s fatal,” said Jesús Melguizo, Ms. Hemid’s brother-in-law, who is a guardian for two of her children. “The computer has no heart.”

‘Effective but not perfect’

VioGén started with a question: Can police predict an assault before it happens?

After Spain passed a law in 2004 to address violence against women, the government assembled experts in statistics, psychology and other fields to find an answer. Their goal was to create a statistical model to identify women most at risk of abuse and to outline a standardized response to protect them.

“It would be a new guide for risk assessment in gender violence,” said Antonio Pueyo, a psychology professor at the University of Barcelona who later joined the effort.

The team took a similar approach to how insurance companies and banks predict the likelihood of future events, such as house fires or currency swings. They studied national crime statistics, police records and the work of researchers in Britain and Canada to find indicators that appeared to correlate with gender violence. Substance abuse, job loss and economic uncertainty were high on the list.

Then they came up with a questionnaire for victims so their answers could be compared with historical data. Police would fill in the answers after interviewing a victim, reviewing documentary evidence, speaking with witnesses and studying other information from government agencies. Answers to certain questions carried more weight than others, like if an abuser displayed suicidal tendencies or showed signs of jealousy.

The system produced a score for each victim: negligible risk, low risk, medium risk, high risk or extreme risk. A higher score would result in police patrols and the tracking of an aggressor’s movements. In extreme cases, police would assign 24-hour surveillance. Those with lower scores would receive fewer resources, mainly follow-up calls.

Predictive algorithms to address domestic violence have been used in parts of Britain, Canada, Germany and the United States, but not on such a national scale. In Spain, the Interior Ministry introduced VioGén everywhere but in the Catalonia region and Basque Country.

Law enforcement initially greeted the algorithm with skepticism, police and government officials told The Times, but it soon became a part of everyday police business.

Before VioGén, investigations were “based on the experience of the policeman,” said Mr. Pueyo, who remains affiliated with the program. “Now this is organized and guided by VioGén.”

VioGén is a source of impartial information, he said. If a woman attacked late at night was seen by a young police officer with little experience, VioGén could help detect the risk of future violence.

“It’s more efficient,” Mr. Pueyo said.

Over the years, VioGén has been refined and updated, including with metrics that are believed to better predict homicide. Police have also been required to conduct a follow-up risk assessment within 90 days of an attack.

But Spain’s faith in the system has surprised some experts. Juanjo Medina, a senior researcher at the University of Seville who has studied VioGén, said the system’s effectiveness remains unclear.

“We’re not good at forecasting the weather, let alone human behavior,” he said.

Francisco Javier Curto, a commander for the military police in Seville, said VioGén helps his teams prioritize, but requires close oversight. About 20 new cases of gender violence arrive every day, each requiring investigation. Providing police protection for every victim would be impossible given staff sizes and budgets.

“The system is effective but not perfect,” he said, adding that VioGén is “the best system that exists in the world right now.”

José Iniesta, a civil guard in Alicante, a southeastern port city, said not enough of the police are trained to keep up with growing case loads. A leader in the United Association of Civil Guards, a union representing officers in rural areas, he said that outside of big cities, the police often must choose between addressing violence against women or other crimes.

Sindicato Unificado de Policía, a union that represents national police officers, said even the most effective technology cannot make up for a lack of trained experts. In some places, a police officer is assigned to work with more than 100 victims.

“Agents in many provinces are overwhelmed,” the union said in a statement.

When attacks happen again

The women who have been killed after being assessed by VioGén can be found across Spain.

One was Stefany González Escarraman, a 26-year-old living near Seville. In 2016, she went to the police after her husband punched her in the face and choked her. He threw objects at her, including a kitchen ladle that hit their 3-year-old child. After police interviewed Ms. Escarraman for about five hours, VioGén determined she had a negligible risk of being abused again.

The next day, Ms. Escarraman, who had a swollen black eye, went to court for a restraining order against her husband. Judges can serve as a check on the VioGén system, with the ability to intervene in cases and provide protective measures. In Ms. Escarraman’s case, the judge denied a restraining order, citing VioGén’s risk score and her husband’s lack of criminal history.

About a month later, Ms. Escarraman was stabbed by her husband multiple times in the heart in front of their children. In 2020, her family won a verdict against the state for failing to adequately measure the level of risk and provide sufficient protection.

“If she had been given the help, maybe she would be alive,” said Williams Escarraman, Ms. Escarraman’s brother.

In 2021, Eva Jaular, who lived in Liaño in northern Spain, was slain by her former boyfriend after being classified as low risk by VioGén. He also killed their 11-month-old daughter. Six weeks earlier, he had jabbed a knife into a couch cushion next to where Ms. Jaular sat and said, “look how well it sticks,” according to a police report.

Since 2007, 247 of the 990 women killed in Spain by a current or former partner were previously scored by VioGén, according to the Interior Ministry. The other victims had not been previously reported to the police, so were not in the system. The ministry declined to disclose the VioGén risk scores of the 247 who were killed.

The Times instead analyzed reports from a Spanish judicial agency, released almost every year from 2010 to 2022, which included information about the risk scores of 98 women who were later killed. Of those, 55 had been classified as negligible risk or low risk.

In a statement, the Interior Ministry said that analyzing the risk scores of homicide victims doesn’t provide an accurate picture of VioGén’s effectiveness because some homicides happened more than a year after the first assessment, while others were committed by a different partner.

Why the algorithm incorrectly classifies some women varies and isn’t always clear, but one reason may be the poor quality of information fed into the system. VioGén is ideally suited for cases when a woman, in the moments after being attacked, can provide complete information to an experienced police officer who has time to fully investigate the incident.

That does not always happen. Fear, shame, economic dependency, immigration status and other factors can lead a victim to withhold information. Police are also often squeezed for time and may not fully investigate.

“If we already enter erroneous information into the system, how can we expect the system to give us a good result?” said Elisabeth, a victim who now works as a gender violence lawyer. She spoke on the condition her full name not be used, for fear of retaliation by her former partner.

Luz, a woman from a village in southern Spain, said she was repeatedly labeled low risk after attacks by her partner because she was afraid and ashamed to provide complete information to the police, some of whom she knew personally. She got her risk score increased to extreme only after working with a lawyer specializing in gender violence cases, leading to round-the-clock police protection.

“We women keep a lot of things silent not because we want to lie but out of fear,” said Luz, who spoke on the condition her full name not be used for fear of retaliation by her attacker, who was imprisoned. “VioGén would be good if there were qualified people who had all the necessary tools to carry it out.”

Victim groups said that psychologists or other trained specialists should lead the questioning of victims rather than the police. Some have urged the government to mandate that victims be allowed to be accompanied by somebody they trust to help ensure full information is given to authorities, something that is now not allowed in all areas.

“It’s not easy to report a person you’ve loved,” said María, a victim from Granada in southern Spain, who was labeled medium risk after her partner attacked her with a dumbbell. She asked that her full name not be published for fear of retaliation by him.

Ujué Agudo, a Spanish researcher studying the influence of artificial intelligence on human decisions, said technology has a role in solving societal problems. But it could reduce the responsibility of humans to approving the work of a machine, rather than conducting the necessary work themselves.

“If the system succeeds, it’s a success of the system. If the system fails, it’s a human error that they aren’t monitoring properly,” said Ms. Agudo, a co-director of Bikolabs, a Spanish civil society group. A better approach, she said, was for people “to say what their decision is before seeing what the A.I. thinks.”

Spanish officials are exploring incorporating A.I. into VioGén so it can pull data from different sources and learn more on its own. Mr. Ossorio, a creator of VioGén who works for the Interior Ministry, said the tools can be applied to other areas, including workplace harassment and hate crimes.

The systems will never be perfect, he said, but neither is human judgment. “Whatever we do, we always fail,” he said. “It’s unsolvable problems.”

This month, the Spanish government called an emergency meeting after three women were killed by former partners within a 24-hour span. One victim, a 30-year-old from central Spain, had been classified by VioGén as low risk.

At a news conference, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the interior minister, said he still had “absolute confidence” in the system.

‘Always cheerful’

Ms. Hemid, who was killed outside Madrid in 2022, was born in rural Morocco. She was 14 when she was introduced at a family wedding to Mr. el Banaisati, who was 10 years older than her. She was 17 when they married. They later moved to Spain so he could pursue steadier work.

Ms. Hemid was outgoing and gregarious, often seen racing to get her children to school on time, friends said. She learned to speak Spanish and sometimes joined children playing soccer in the park.

“She was always cheerful,” said Amelia Franas, a friend whose children went to the same school as Ms. Hemid’s children.

Few knew that abuse was a fixture of Ms. Hemid’s marriage. She spoke little about her home life, friends said, and never called the police or reported Mr. el Banaisati before the January 2022 incident.

VioGén is intended to identify danger signs that humans may overlook, but in Ms. Hemid’s case, it appears that police missed some clues. Her neighbors told The Times they were not interviewed, nor were administrators at her children’s school, who said they had seen signs of trouble.

Family members said Mr. el Banaisati had a life-threatening form of cancer that made him behave erratically. Many blamed underlying discrimination in Spain’s criminal system that overlooks violence against immigrant women, especially Muslims.

Police haven’t released a copy of the assessment that produced Ms. Hemid’s low risk score from VioGén. A copy of a separate police report shared with The Times noted that Ms. Hemid was tired during questioning and wanted to end the interview to get home.

A few days after the January 2022 attack, Ms. Hemid won a restraining order against her husband. But Mr. el Banaisati largely ignored the order, family and friends said. He moved into an apartment less than 500 meters from where Ms. Hemid lived and continued threatening her.

Mr. Melguizo, her brother-in-law, said he appealed to Ms. Hemid’s assigned public lawyer for help, but was told the police “won’t do anything, it has a low risk score.”

The day after Ms. Hemid was stabbed to death, she had a court date scheduled to officially file for divorce.

Before he began taking Mounjaro last summer, Nick Lovell was the weight-loss economy’s ideal customer.

He signed up for WeightWatchers and bought “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution” to try the low-carb regimen. He joined his first gym in middle school and has belonged to half a dozen others since. He paid for personal trainers and boutique fitness classes and underwent bariatric surgery in 2008. And yet, his 5-foot-9-inch frame stubbornly held onto its 258 pounds.

All told, Lovell, a photographer from Norwalk, Conn., spent tens of thousands of dollars over the decades on “things that ultimately failed.”

Weekly injections of Mounjaro, a prescription diabetes medication that spurs weight loss, changed everything. Down 80 pounds in 13 months, Lovell has canceled his diet program memberships and no longer belongs to a gym, preferring to exercise on his own at home. He goes out to eat less often. His cravings for ultra-processed foods such as cereal and Velveeta have subsided, and now he buys more fruits and vegetables and high-protein options such as chicken thighs, eggs and cottage cheese instead.

Lovell’s experience with the medication is one of countless success stories to emerge amid a monumental shift in the way people lose weight — and, consequently, how they live and spend.

So far, the powerful new anti-diabetes and anti-obesity drugs — a fast-growing family that also includes Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda, Zepbound and dozens more in the works — have been expensive and difficult to obtain because of widespread shortages. But as availability increases and costs come down, GLP-1 medications threaten to upend the long-standing natural order for industries across the board.

Executives and investors are nervously wondering whether droves of slimmed-down users will soon ditch their dieticians, skip the gym, order less at restaurants, and throw out their favorite snack brands. Many companies, acknowledging that the blockbuster class of drugs are a medical breakthrough and not just a fad, are swiftly repositioning themselves with new products and services in a bid to persuade customers that they still have plenty to offer in the booming age of Ozempic.

“We had to up our game,” said Dr. Gary Foster, chief scientific officer at WeightWatchers. “A lot of people said, ‘Was it an existential crisis for you?’ Absolutely not. When science evolves, we evolve. What we have to do as a brand is think about how we incorporate that.”

The changes to consumer behavior have already had far-reaching ramifications. Apparel retailers say they’ve noticed customers buying smaller sizes. Plastic surgeons are reporting a rise in facelifts and other procedures to correct so-called Ozempic face, the sagging skin that often accompanies rapid weight loss. In February, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk, said food company leaders had called him because they were “scared.”

“The question is, how widespread is Ozempic going to become?” said Simeon Siegel, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. “As it grows, so too will its impact.”

With studies predicting that the market for GLP-1 drugs — which help manage blood sugar levels, slow digestion and reduce appetite — will exceed $100 billion by 2030, businesses aren’t waiting around.

In November, WeightWatchers began offering the prescription medications through its WeightWatchers Clinic, which charges $99 per month for access (the cost of the drugs is separate). Foster said tens of thousands of people have since been prescribed GLP-1s directly from the company’s doctors.

It also introduced the WeightWatchers GLP-1 program, designed for members taking the drugs regardless of where they got them. The program aims to help users develop healthy lifestyle habits by teaching them about nutrition, meal timing, proper protein and hydration intake and the importance of a consistent exercise routine.

WeightWatchers began offering GLP-1 medications through its in-house clinic in November. Since then, tens of thousands of people have been prescribed the drugs directly from the company’s doctors.

(Richard Drew / Associated Press)

“These medications are not total fixes,” Foster said. “It’s a misnomer to say, ‘Oh, it’s the easy way out.’ When you do need biological treatments, you also need behavior treatments to be successful.”

The pitch is that health is a long-term commitment that is about more than just a smaller number on the scale. On its GLP-1 program page online, WeightWatchers says it is “your companion on your medical weight-loss journey.”

Atkins, a WeightWatchers rival, also wants a bite of the lucrative market and has adopted similar language: We’re “your ally in a new era of weight loss,” the low-carb diet program says on a dedicated GLP-1 page on its website.

“The new weight-loss medications have changed EVERYTHING. We’re actually thrilled at what lies ahead.”

With many GLP-1 users reporting muscle loss as a side effect, Atkins is pushing its line of high-protein bars and shakes, “a deliciously easy way to meet your protein requirements to help you maintain lean muscle mass and bone health while you’re losing weight.”

Two months ago, Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, introduced Vital Pursuit, a line of frozen foods that the company said is “intended to be a companion for GLP-1 weight-loss medication users and consumers focused on weight management.” The Swiss-based giant cited research from J.P. Morgan that predicted that GLP-1 users in the U.S. could reach 30 million by 2030 — or around 9% of the country’s population.

Nestlé has introduced Vital Pursuit, a line of frozen foods “intended to be a companion for GLP-1 weight-loss medication users and consumers focused on weight management.”

(Nestlé)

“As the use of medications to support weight loss continues to rise, we see an opportunity to serve those consumers,” Steve Presley, chief executive of Nestlé North America, said in a statement. By tapping into the emerging category with its new high-protein pasta bowls and sandwich melts, the food giant is trying to “stay ahead of the trends.”

Abbott, the company behind Ensure and Pedialyte, in January introduced Protality, a line of chocolate and vanilla shakes with 30 grams of protein that “provides nutritional support for adults pursuing weight loss.”

“We’re serving a new group of people who may be at a higher nutritional risk because they may be overweight or have obesity and use weight-loss medications,’’ Hakim Bouzamondo, Abbott’s division vice president of nutrition research and development, said in a statement. The shakes are now sold at stores including CVS and Walmart.

Gyms, too, are pivoting to retain clients who are now taking the drugs — and to attract people who might have felt too self-conscious to sign up for a membership before.

Although it might seem counterintuitive, “I think [Ozempic] brings new people in,” said Siegel, the analyst who tracks big-box fitness chains.

Equinox’s personal trainers have gone through a new GLP-1 Program to help tailor their sessions with clients who are on weight-loss medications.

(Equinox)

“When an ‘unfit’ person becomes a fit person,” he said, “more often than not those are the people that become the workout fanatics.”

Luxury health club chain Life Time is trying a multi-pronged approach to appeal to GLP-1 users.

In November the company launched Miora, a wellness clinic located inside one of its athletic clubs in Minneapolis. The clinic offers GLP-1 drugs as well as a host of longevity and performance amenities such as IV therapy and creates personalized programs for members based on their bloodwork and other tests.

Currently in pilot mode, Miora will roll out to Life Time’s other major markets in the coming months, including Southern California.

Life Time, a chain of luxury health clubs, has launched Miora, a wellness clinic that offers GLP-1 drugs as well as longevity and performance amenities. The clinic is in pilot mode in Minneapolis and is expected to roll out to other club locations in the coming months.

(Life Time)

In the meantime, the company has created a GLP-1 personal training program for its team of 3,500 fitness trainers, meant to help them understand the specific challenges faced by weight-loss-drug users and tailor their sessions accordingly. That could mean incorporating more strength and resistance training to combat muscle loss or helping prevent weight gain when a member stops taking the drugs or lowers the dosage.

“If we were just to get a fraction [of our potential member base] to engage in the way that we do things differently with GLP-1s — it’s an insane opportunity for the company,” said Cliff Edberg, senior director of Miora.

Personal trainers at Equinox and at Gold’s Gym SoCal locations have received similar GLP-1-focused instruction.

“We’re ready and waiting to assist clients using GLP-1 drugs,” said Mike Mitchell, vice president of fitness for Gold’s Gym SoCal.

To monitor the effect of the medications on lean body mass — the difference between a person’s total weight and body fat weight — the franchise group is recommending that members get regular comprehensive body composition scans at one of its 23 locations.

“Supporting individuals who are taking GLP-1 medications requires a nuanced approach,” Mitchell said. “Our role involves providing empathetic and personalized behavior-change coaching.”

Personal trainer Patricia Rubio, left, and Mike Mitchell, vice president of fitness for Gold’s Gym SoCal, at the franchise group’s Hollywood location.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

As groundbreaking weight-loss drugs reshape the consumer landscape, the difficulty for brands will be positioning themselves as authentic partners to GLP-1 users.

“I’m pretty cynical about companies getting into this space now,” said Lovell, the Mounjaro user. “It seems opportunistic. This is a huge phenomenon, there’s obviously money to be made in it. The major conglomerates come across to me more as just protecting their bottom line.”

To make it feel like less of a “money grab,” he said he’d like to see companies immerse themselves in the growing GLP-1 community and get to know their target customers.

“Otherwise, it’s Marie Antoinette: Let them eat cake — or let them eat protein bars, in this case.”

Once Santa’s Monica’s signature destination for shopping and dining, the Third Street Promenade is showing its age.

Its decline has left the promenade’s landlords and city officials trying to counter years of stagnation, public safety concerns and fast-changing retail norms in an attempt to breathe new life into it.

The climb back to commercial viability is steep. Foot traffic at the pedestrian mall that teemed with locals and tourists during its heydey in the 1990s has been thinning for years, dropping by more than a third since 2019. “For rent” signs front a discouraging number of empty stores.

The reasons for the Promenade’s troubles are many and layered. While, like many shopping districts and malls, it took a beating during the pandemic as shoppers stayed at home, its economic troubles predate COVID-19.

The Promenade, which has had few improvements since a renovation 35 years ago, was allowed to grow “tired and old,” real estate consultant David Greensfelder said. Its scale also presents challenges, as the mall’s unusually large stores are hard to fill in an era when many big retailers are reducing their footprints.

And issues and perceptions around public safety are also at play.

The Promenade’s reputation took a hit in May 2020 when protests in response to the murder of George Floyd devolved into violence and ransacking of stores. Over 100 businesses, many of them on or near the Promenade, were damaged or destroyed, said Santa Monica Mayor Phil Brock. In the years since, crime trends have been mixed in the city with robbery and shoplifting rates up slightly last year compared to 2022 and declines in several other categories. High-profile robberies in the region and an increase in the number of people living on the street in Santa Monica, meanwhile, have contributed to the sense among some that the Promenade is unsafe.

“We’re not only trying to fight the actual crime that’s occurring because it is, but we’re also trying to rehabilitate this perception of safety in Santa Monica,” said Santa Monica Police Lt. Ericka Aklufi.

A passerby is caught in the reflection of an empty storefront available for rent on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

On a recent weekday, “Optimus Crime,” a large mobile police command center that bears a resemblance to a Transformer, was parked at a crosswalk on the Promenade. Nearby, a banner hung over one of the mall’s vacant storefronts proclaiming, “Santa Monica is Not Safe.”

John Alle, who co-founded the Santa Monica Coalition about two years ago to bring attention to public safety issues in the city, manages about 15,000 square feet of commercial real estate, including the storefront where the sign hangs.

He claims rampant theft and near constant presence of homeless people forced one of his tenants in the building to leave. And although the sign likely is counter-productive to bringing people to the Promenade, Alle said he hopes the public shaming will prompt tourists and other visitors to demand the city do more to help the Promenade.

He added, “I don’t think it’s going to deter shopping. There’s not much shopping going on there.”

The high-profile success of the promenade in the 1990s also planted the seeds of the current struggle to keep stores occupied, experts said.

Third Street for decades was Santa Monica’s main commercial strip, but by the late 1950s it was laboring to keep up with new regional shopping centers. After a lengthy renovation in 1989, when the mall was renamed as the Third Street Promenade, real estate developer Shaul Kuba and his partners started acquiring troubled properties on the Promenade at a deep discount and set out to find a flashy national tenant that could serve as a bellwether.

Aaron Cohen plays the saxophone on Third Street Promenade earlier this month.

(Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)

They managed to land a Disney Store, and the match was lit, Kuba said. “That opened the door for a lot of other retailers — J. Crew, Banana Republic, Old Navy.” The Promenade began to thrive after a long stretch as a retail backwater.

But in recent years these “big box” stores have been hurt by competition from online sellers and narrowly-focused specialty retailers.

They have adapted by opening fewer, smaller stores, which is a problem for the Promenade. As tenants have departed, they have left behind uncommonly large spaces because of Third Street’s history as a prime retail venue serving large stores.

“I think every landlord is hoping a big box is coming back, and sometimes they do, but really, across the country retailers are shrinking,” said retail property broker Christine Deschaine of Kennedy Wilson.

Out of necessity, landlords are getting creative in an effort to fill the space and adapt to the changing expectations and habits of consumers, who now rely heavily on online purchasing. Shoppers, said Lars Perner, who teaches clinical marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business, want a unique experience, an antidote to the big chains that provide mass-produced products.

“The idea that you’re getting something special is what draws crowds,” Perner added.

What was once a JCPenney and later Banana Republic is now a roomy, upmarket John Reed Fitness gym. Pickleball is played at a hybrid clothing retailer, sports club and restaurant Pickle Pop, which occupies 10,000-square-feet that was a former Adidas store. The top floor of a shuttered food court will be transformed into a “golf experience” that may include miniature golf, Deschaine said.

Other large store spaces may be carved into units for smaller tenants, as has been done successfully on nearby 2nd Street, Deschaine said.

Some noteworthy retail tenants are already on the way, she said, including a technology company she declined to name that has agreed to take a prime space at the Broadway entrance to the Promenade. Also generating buzz is the pending arrival on the Promenade of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, a Louisiana fast-casual restaurant chain.

Restocking the Promenade with tenants is a tall order in part because of its overall size, said Devin Klein, a property broker with JLL.

A sign in a Third Street Promenade storefront warns, “Santa Monica is not safe.”

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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The Promenade and Santa Monica Place mall next door have a combined total of more than 1 million square feet, he said, about twice as much as the Grove shopping center in Los Angeles.

At its low point during the pandemic toward the end of 2020 and into 2021, vacancy on the Promenade rose to 30% to 35%, Klein said, and is now between 20% and 25%.

That improvement can be attributed to some property owners accepting that they can’t demand as much rent as they used to get when the market was hotter and landlords came to believe they could charge tenants “Rodeo Drive rents,” said Brock, Santa Monica’s mayor.

He added, “We were never Rodeo Drive.”

“Landlords have really started to play ball with retailers and adjust their rent according to the market,” Klein said, “which has allowed more spaces to to get leased.”

Over the past several years, Santa Monica city officials have tried to make it easier to open and run a business on the Promenade.

It has eased restrictions on the types of operating permits it issues in an effort to reverse a past in which it “micromanaged a little bit and maybe went overboard” on what businesses could set up shop, said David Martin, the city’s Community Development director.

Shopping traffic has long been in decline on the Third Street Promenade.

(Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)

For example, a quota on how many restaurants are allowed on a city block has been eased and a cumbersome entitlement process that effectively prevented pop-up events has been removed.

“We are trying to make sure that the city process is as clear as possible, as fast as possible, and then leave it to the market to bring in the kinds of businesses that the public is demanding,” Martin said.

For several years, Santa Monica city officials have had a blueprint to dramatically transform the Promenade itself, which hasn’t seen meaningful changes in decades.

A proposal, dubbed Promenade 3.0, was devised in 2019 at the behest of the city and Downtown Santa Monica Inc. a nonprofit that works with the city to manage the downtown area. The plan by architecture firm RIOS would cost about $60 million and is intended to make the Promenade more engaging to visitors so they linger and shop more.

A primary goal would be to stop funneling people through the middle of the street and encourage them to circulate in a loop pattern. Curbs might be eliminated to make it feel less like a closed street. Rooftop restaurants would be encouraged. Additions could include beer gardens, water features, a viewing tower and small pop-up retail stations to incubate new stores.

The proposal was stalled by pandemic-related challenges including plummeting city tax revenue that could have helped fund it, RIOS architect Nate Cormier said.

Martin said that property owners on the Promenade could possibly fund the initiative, but there’s nothing in the works.

“The idea of completely redoing the Promenade like was done in like the ’80s, that’s not currently on the table,” he said.

Nevertheless, the city’s seaside location will continue to make it a draw for visitors and businesses, encouraging recovery of the Promenade, Klein said.

“You can never change the fact that it’s still one of the prettiest areas in the world,” he said. “There’s always going to be some kind of a bounceback when you have this kind of real estate. Let’s face it — you’re a couple blocks from the ocean.”