DTLA Retail at a ‘Tipping Point’

Nick Griffin

Downtown Los Angeles is rapidly becoming a retail epicenter, attracting major retail brands and the home of several retail hubs. According to the DCBID, Apple, Nike, Uniqlo, Nordstrom, West Elm, Vans, Blue Bottle, Shake Shack, GAP, Warby Parker have all arrived in the market, showing an evolution of the submarket’s retail cache beyond the earlier adopters, restaurants and daily-needs resources. The massive population growth—now at 70,000 residents and a 500,000 day-population—has been a major driver of this retail growth, but the DCBID says that there is still more to come.

“This is essentially the tipping point moment of all of the things that we have been attracting over the last several years,” Nick Griffin, executive director of the DCBID, tells GlobeSt.com. “The base residential population is getting to the critical mass that it has at over 70,000 is an underlying driver, because that is what gives retailers the sense that Downtown Los Angeles is a standalone market and a market that can support itself. There was already a certain amount of strength with the size of the working population downtown, but I think that the residential population was the missing ingredient there in terms of making it a really viable market.”