Downtown L.A. businesses demand attention from the mayor’s race

Cemal Clik was rinsing some strawberries for lunch when he felt a gun on his temple.

The 61-year-old was sitting near his gift shop in downtown Los Angeles this month when two men threatened to kill him if he didn’t give up the gold chain hanging from his neck. They grabbed the chain and disappeared down South Broadway.

It took 45 minutes for the police to arrive, he said. He doubts they will ever catch the criminals or recover his chain.

“This is what downtown is now,” Clik said. “Who would want to come here?”

As the city’s mayoral elections approach, business owners are pleading with officials to address the area’s problems. They want a heightened police presence and better amenities, including easier parking options and public restrooms, to bring life back to downtown, Clik said.

He opened the garage-sized store in 2001, offering a wide variety of goods including snacks, suitcases, sunglasses and stuffed toys to tourists, office workers and area residents. He has witnessed the once bustling corner of town turn into a shell of its former self, strained by rampant crime, rising costs and stiff competition from safer neighborhoods. He is scared every time he opens up shop, afraid that any incoming customer could rob him. He’s suffered from panic attacks since the incident.

More than six years since COVID-19 hit downtown, businesses in this part of L.A. say they need a mayor who can do what it takes to make the streets safer and cleaner and bring shoppers and workers back to the sidewalks and skyscrapers.

Some are trying to draw attention to their problems as the June primary election approaches, begging city representatives to pay more attention to the challenges hindering downtown’s comeback.

The continued crisis downtown is crushing the spirit of L.A.’s most urban enclave, driving away businesses and visitors despite its status as the city’s historic seat of government, finance, arts and sports, its supporters say. Without intervention, the state of downtown may sully the city’s reputation when world attention arrives with the 2028 Olympics.

After a lull from 2021 to 2023, the number of businesses reporting they left downtown has shot up over the last two years, according to data from the Los Angeles Office of Finance. Meanwhile, over the last five years, downtown has accounted for an ever-larger share of overall exits from the region.

Downtown ZIP Codes have regularly reported the highest number of closures, according to a Times data analysis. Businesses in the South Park, Fashion District, Central City, and Pico-Union areas downtown topped the list of closures in 2024 and 2025.

Many large companies have shrunk their offices or given up on downtown, including Deloitte and KPMG. Financial services firm Wedbush Securities moved from a prominent office tower to Pasadena.

The exodus of businesses to Century City “points out the obvious,” said Nella McOsker, president of Central City Assn., or CCA, a business advocacy group. “It’s clean and safe.”

Now, nearly 40% of the office space in the Financial District is functionally empty, according to CBRE, and about 30% of retail space for stores and restaurants is vacant. Average attendance in office buildings in the Los Angeles metropolitan area is around 48%, according to the latest data from Kastle Systems, which tracks workers’ key card swipes. That’s a step up from lows a few years ago, but still one of the lowest rates in the country.

Downtown businesses say their neighborhoods are experiencing the most extreme examples of the issues that are at the core of the mayoral race: crime, homelessness and dilapidated infrastructure. They complain that city and county officials are not doing enough to make downtown safe and prosperous by demanding more policing, an end to outdoor drug use and homelessness, clean, well-lighted streets and incentive programs that will help fill empty storefronts and office towers.

Paul Kaufman, who has owned a handmade shoe store on South Broadway for 12 years, says his problems are growing. On top of the crime and homelessness in some blocks, local businesses now have to deal with attracting customers to an area with so many empty storefronts.

“It’s not a simple problem,” he said. “There’s not one solution.”

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass said she has prioritized revitalizing the downtown L.A. region by working directly with residents and business owners to address their public safety concerns and by investing in projects to spur economic growth. She has targeted downtown homelessness through her Inside Safe initiative and, after taking office, prioritized police hiring, saying she wanted to restore the force to 9,500 officers, though she has fallen short of that goal.

Challengers have tried to pick away at her track record, saying she hasn’t done enough or has spent too much money on the wrong things.

Mayoral candidate and Councilmember Nithya Raman says Bass’ housing program is too costly. She wants the city to rely more on apartment vouchers, which she described as more effective and less expensive.

Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, a former reality television star with ties to Republican leaders, told Atlantic magazine that he will clear downtown homeless encampments and “get rid of the zombies.”

Improved public safety is the top priority for downtown advocates. In an April letter to Bass, the CCA complained that downtown has about 2% of the city’s population and 9% of serious crimes such as robbery, assault and burglary. The CCA is backing Bass’ reelection bid.

Downtown should be a priority, it says, because it’s a huge economic engine, the public face of the city and home to about 90,000 people. Right now, it’s being neglected when the city needs it most as a source of unrestricted revenue for the city budget, the group complains. Downtown is less than 1% of L.A.’s landmass but has historically generated 30% of the city’s business, parking and bed taxes, said McOsker, so downtown’s downturn is contributing to the city’s budget shortfalls.

“A clean and safe and thriving downtown quite literally pays for sidewalks and streetlights and sanitation in the Valley and on the Westside and at the harbor,” she said.

Downtown businesses say they are struggling with the city’s inability to keep basic infrastructure functional.

Dirty, damaged sidewalks are “a huge issue,” said Suzanne Holley, president of the DTLA Alliance, a business improvement district funded by local property owners. “Lighting is another big issue the city needs to get on top of.”

The city has a backlog of repairs for streetlights that has been exacerbated by copper wire theft, and it often takes months to repair them, leaving streets dark and seeming less safe.

Last month, the mayor and City Council announced L.A.’s first Capital Infrastructure Program to build and maintain vital infrastructure, such as roads, sidewalks and curb ramps, to improve streets and parks. It is intended to better coordinate capital spending.

One of the biggest things civic leaders say could be done to help downtown businesses is make a much more powerful push to get public servants to show up at the office.

Los Angeles long had one of the largest concentrations of public employees outside Washington, but a high percentage of them, including city employees, work remotely for much of the week.

“We have to remember how large and important the government worker sector is to the economy,” said Nick Griffin of the DTLA Alliance business improvement district. “Their absence has really hurt us, especially the small businesses that rely on them.”

Bass has said that her staff is in five days a week, “but that needs to be citywide, and that is absolutely within the power of the mayor,” McOsker said.

Specific budget requests to the mayor’s office from the CCA call for a permanent police “entertainment detail” to safeguard the area surrounding L.A. Live, Crypto.com Arena and the Los Angeles Convention Center, which have been subject in recent months to disruptive street “takeovers” by rowdy crowds.

The businesses also want accelerated deployment of public safety video cameras as well as additional allocations for street cleaning and the maintenance of public spaces.

Many point to the recent success in San Francisco as a model to follow.

The tech capital had been stuck in a similar downward trajectory of shoppers and workers getting scared away by crime, drugs and unhoused people. Although the artificial intelligence boom is bringing more jobs, offices and billions of dollars in investment to the city, many of its citizens attribute part of the city’s recent rebound to its new mayor, Daniel Lurie.

He has received high marks from voters for downtown revitalization, keeping neighborhoods clean and enhancing public safety.

“Nationally, I think people are saying that San Francisco is on the rise,” Lurie said in a recent phone conversation with The Times.

Lurie has blazed a path Los Angeles would do well to follow, downtown supporters say, with his initiatives to clean up the city by reducing homelessness, shutting down illegal drug sales and improving public spaces. Lurie recently announced that the number of homeless tents on city streets has declined by 85% since 2024. Unsheltered homelessness was down by 22% to its lowest level in 15 years, he said.

Business leaders and corporate philanthropists have helped bankroll Lurie’s vision by contributing millions of dollars to the effort.

“Mayor Lurie has learned that listening and being a partner, he has opened up the business community to play a part,” Griffin said. “That’s something we would love to see” in Los Angeles.

Another San Francisco initiative that Los Angeles business leaders hope to bring downtown would activate empty storefronts and other vacant spaces.

The activation program would be based on San Francisco’s “Vacant to Vibrant” program, which has turned abandoned spaces into bakeries, bookstores, cafes, chocolateries, galleries and other spaces.

Local entrepreneurs are given grants and support from the city and charities, as well as months of free rent to set up shop. The idea is to leverage empty storefronts to build buzz and entice more shoppers to city sidewalks.

Although Los Angeles County is seeing its own smaller boom in defense and tech businesses, it may not lift L.A.’s downtown in the same way AI has helped San Francisco. The Southern California tech boom is generally concentrated outside downtown in places such as El Segundo and Culver City.

It is too early to tell whether the San Francisco revival is real and resilient, but Los Angeles’ downtown businesses want more attention and hope the elections will help them get it.

“It’s a big hole that a lot of small businesses are in,” said Kaufman, the shoe store owner. “The question really is, can we climb out of it?”