An interactive map tracking all 98 Third Street Promenade storefronts shows vacancy concentrated on one block and new investment surging on another, complicating the "ghost town" label national media pinned on the strip earlier this year.
Guy Schackman built the map. The Santa Monica resident and product designer, who has worked at Yahoo and The Walt Disney Company, launched ThirdStreetOccupancy.com in 2024 after noticing a vacancy while walking the Promenade with his wife and finding that online search results were months or years out of date.
"Things were happening so fast, and as a resident, I had trouble getting a sense of what was actually going on," Schackman told the Santa Monica Sun.
The site color-codes every ground-level space from Wilshire Boulevard to Broadway as occupied, vacant, coming soon or pop-up. It drew quiet interest from local realtors and business owners before gaining national attention in April, when the New York Post published a story citing his data to report that 28.5% of storefronts were vacant. The Post noted Schackman did not respond to interview requests. Schackman told the Sun he never spoke with the outlet and that his site has no political agenda.
His current data puts the vacancy rate around 25 to 26.5%. The headline number masks sharp differences block by block.
Three blocks, three stories
The 1200 block near Wilshire is the most troubled stretch. Long-term vacancies dominate, and Sephora is relocating south in fall 2026, leaving Foot Locker as virtually the sole remaining national chain on the block.
The 1300 block near Arizona has held relatively steady, with the lowest vacancy rate on the strip. Barnes & Noble and Holey Moley are among recent additions.
The 1400 block near Broadway is the most active. Raising Cane's, a new TurboTax experience center and Sephora's incoming buildout sit alongside Apple and ALO, drawing foot traffic from the Expo line and Santa Monica Place.
'Zombie vacancies' and dueling data
Schackman coined the term "zombie vacancies" for storefronts that have been dark for months or years but remain full of abandoned fixtures and outdated signage. The Trick Art Museum is one example. These spaces make the Promenade look worse than lease data alone suggests, he said.
His independent tracking has also caught discrepancies with official counts. Downtown Santa Monica Inc. listed a planned HQ Gastropub at 1360 Third Street as "Coming Soon" in its August 2026 presentation. Schackman reclassified the same address as vacant after watching 18 months pass with zero construction progress.
The vacancy figures themselves vary by source and methodology. Schackman's storefront-level count shows roughly 25%. The DTSM presentation put ground-level occupancy at 79%, or about 21% vacant, and reported 1.1 million Promenade visits from June 1 through Aug. 15, up 10.9% year-over-year, with $7.49 million in total spending. A RAND Corporation study published Thursday, Oct. 1, pegged the rate at 31%, drawing on CoStar data covering 37 retail properties. Large buildings over 30,000 square feet were 47% vacant; smaller ones under 10,000 square feet were 12% vacant.
Santa Monica dining blogger Todd Bursaw, who tracks Westside restaurant openings at Toddrickallen.com, told the Santa Monica Sun in August that he saw momentum building. "There are five or six new restaurants planned around the Third Street Promenade," Bursaw said.
Schackman said the long-term fix requires reimagining the Promenade's large, multi-level retail spaces for experiential venues and restaurants rather than traditional apparel anchors. He plans to keep walking the three blocks every week. His site's most recent update, on Sept. 27, recorded the closure of The Cloud-Tech Store Powered by Neutrogena.
