In the heart of affluent Studio City, "for lease" signs dot the Ventura Boulevard shopping district, and cars zoom past vacant storefronts.
"This was the main drag historically," said Lynn Crandall, who owns an art sales and picture-framing business on Ventura near Laurel Canyon Boulevard. "Now it's become like a ghost town."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, June 09, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 53 words Type of Material: Correction
Retail space: An article in Business on Saturday about rising vacancy rates at retail centers said pottery studio Color Me Mine had "closed its doors" on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, implying that the store had gone out of business. The business moved to another commercial space, on 4th Street in Santa Monica.
It was a similar scene over the hill, where on a recent afternoon shopkeeper Norman Duarte sat alone in his boutique in the quiet of once-bustling Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.
In better times, Duarte's menswear shop, Station 25, got visits from fathers who had left their children off to paint plates at nearby Color Me Mine. But the pottery studio has closed its doors. So have a raft of others, including the flagship store of Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic, which called it quits last week.
The snowballing retail recession, which had initially hit shopping centers in the troubled Inland Empire and overbuilt parts of Orange County, has finally reached wealthier parts of the region, leaving empty storefronts from the deserts to the sea.
In Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the vacancy rate in the first quarter rose more than 50% over the previous year to more than 3% and asking rents fell from an average of $2.29 a square foot per month to $2.14, according to the real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis Inc. Vacancies increased 16% in Orange County and 11% in the Inland Empire.
A big part of the problem, broker Michael Epsteen said, is that some landlords hiked rents greedily during the boom years, particularly in upscale urban shopping districts such as Montana Avenue and parts of Melrose Avenue and Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles.
When the market was hot in those hip locales, competing landlords "saw the other guy get away with murder" and hiked their own asking rents, Epsteen said. Rents on the hottest blocks of Robertson, for instance, quadrupled since 2006 from about $6 a square foot per month to as much as $25.
"They must be falling now," Epsteen said. There are more than 20 vacant stores on Montana Avenue, and vacancies will soon "be popping up on Melrose -- wherever people overpaid," he said.
It's even worse in areas hard-hit by the housing bust. In the eastern end of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, where hundreds of new housing tracts sprang up in recent years, the retail vacancy rate is almost 16%, according to CB Richard Ellis.
