Business
Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade is a retail relic. Can it be saved?
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.
A visitor walks past a shuttered Market Pavilion now surrounded by cyclone fence on the Third Street Promenade.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
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.”
For the record:
7:47 p.m. July 17, 2024An earlier version of this article said that John Alle manages 15,000 square feet of space on the Promenade; some of that space is elsewhere.
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)
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.”
The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.
Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.
The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through a partnership with DoorDash.
Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.
Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco, opens the top of the new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.
“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”
Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.
“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”
The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.
The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .
Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.
Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.
The new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) drives along the sidewalk at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.
There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.
“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”
The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.
Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.
With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.
The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.
Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.
“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.
Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.
The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.
Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.
The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.
Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.
“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”
President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.
In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.
The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.
Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.
The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.
“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”
The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.
On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.
The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.
Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.
“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.
Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.
“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.
Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.
“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”
Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.
The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”
Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.
The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.
new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk
By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey
February 27, 2026
Xiaomi 17 is a small(ish) phone with a big(ish) battery
World leaders split over military action as US-Israel strike Iran in coordinated operation
Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
Common nighttime noise exposure may trigger heart problems, study suggests
MLB pitcher Merrill Kelly says California tax rate swayed decision to reject Padres’ free agency offer
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 50 people
Anthropic CEO says he’s sticking to AI “red lines” despite clash with Pentagon
ICE blasts Washington mayor over directive restricting immigration enforcement
Did the EU bypass Hungary’s veto on Ukraine’s €90 billion loan?
-
World2 days agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts3 days agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Montana1 week ago2026 MHSA Montana Wrestling State Championship Brackets And Results – FloWrestling
-
Louisiana5 days agoWildfire near Gum Swamp Road in Livingston Parish now under control; more than 200 acres burned
-
Denver, CO3 days ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Technology1 week agoYouTube TV billing scam emails are hitting inboxes
-
Technology1 week agoStellantis is in a crisis of its own making
-
Politics1 week agoOpenAI didn’t contact police despite employees flagging mass shooter’s concerning chatbot interactions: REPORT