There’s plenty of space to open bars, restaurants and shops in downtown Fort Worth.
That’s because one out of every four ground floor retail spaces are closed or empty, according to a Star-Telegram survey.
However, that’s an improvement over a Star-Telegram check in 2021, in the wake of the pandemic, that found 31.4% of ground floor street-facing commercial spaces were closed.
The survey consisted of a pair of Star-Telegram reporters walking a roughly 104-square-block area of downtown and counting the number of empty spaces.
The survey conducted July 1-2 was informal, and the results are not intended to be scientific.
City leaders and downtown advocates say the decrease is a positive sign for downtown’s growth. They pointed to new hotels and apartments in the pipeline as evidence of resurgence and future prospects.
What did we count?
The Star-Telegram’s survey attempted to recreate its June 2021 count by walking block-by-block in an area bounded by Lamar Street to the west, Weatherford Street to the north, Calhoun Street to the east and Lancaster Avenue to the south.
Reporters counted 188 commercial spaces, of which 47 were either vacant or closed to the public. Storefronts that were occupied but had no sign of business activity were included in the count of vacant spaces.
The Star-Telegram counted only ground floor businesses open to the public including bars, restaurants, music venues, clothing shops and nail salons.
Government buildings, offices, and residential buildings that typically don’t invite members of the public inside were not counted.
What did we find?
Most of the empty space was concentrated on the northwestern end of downtown along Houston and Throckmorton streets, north of Third Street. The area had 12 of the 47 empty spaces counted in the survey.
There was also a concentration along Houston Street between Seventh and Ninth streets.
Sundance Square Management’s 20 empty storefronts was the most of any downtown property owner.
However, Sundance also had the largest number of occupied properties with 55 of the 141 occupied spaces counted in the survey.
Four of those open businesses are art galleries, and seven were participants in Sundance’s ‘Next Big Idea’ initiative supporting small businesses downtown.
Two of Sundance’s closed businesses — Third Street Market and Hop Scotch — also participated in Sundance’s small business initiative.
The next largest property owner is Sada Tower LLC, which had 17 commercial spaces compared to 75 for Sundance Square.
Sundance Square also had the highest occupancy rate of the downtown property owners counted in the Star-Telegram’s survey with roughly 73% of its storefronts occupied.
Sada Tower LLC, which owns the Tower at Throckmorton and Fifth Street, had roughly 53% of its spaces occupied, but the building’s commercial broker, Derek Anthony, said most of those spaces will be filled soon.
Bocado, a three-story Mexico-city style speakeasy and restaurant, will occupy the Tower’s southeast corner at Fifth and Throckmorton streets next to Salsa Limon.
The southwestern corner of the building at Fifth and Taylor streets will be occupied by the Italian restaurant Belle Gente, whose pizza crusts will be shipped in from Italy, Anthony said.
Parking has been a concern for some prospective businesses, but most of the ones that inquire about spaces downtown know that going in, he said.
Sundance Square spokesperson Bryan Eppstein did not directly respond to questions sent by the Star-Telegram asking about the company’s empty retail spaces and its plans to fill vacancies.
The Star-Telegram asked questions about how ground floor retail has changed since the pandemic, what challenges the company has seen in the downtown marketplace, as well as what opportunities Sundance Square Management sees for downtown going forward.
“Sundance Square is the #1 visitor destination in Fort Worth (15 million visitors annually). It’s vibrant, it’s relevant. It’s for locals, by locals. It’s the heart of Fort Worth,” Eppstein wrote in an email.
The 15 million visitor figure came from an independent comparative market study commissioned by Sundance to see how the district stacked up against other popular destinations across Texas including the San Antonio Riverwalk and downtown Austin, he said.
The company declined to share the study with the Star-Telegram, and reporters were not able to independently verify its findings.
Sundance Square saw 10.1 million visitors in 2022, according to a study by commercial real estate firm JLL. That same study found 7.3 million people visited the Fort Worth Stockyards in 2022.
Fort Worth as a whole saw 10.8 million visitors in 2022, and 11.4 million visitors in 2023, according to statistics from the tourism nonprofit Visit Fort Worth.
Majestic Realty Co., who has partnered with the city of Fort Worth on the redevelopment of the Stockyards, estimated that historic district saw 9 million visitors in 2023.
New sources of foot traffic
Fort Worth is following national trends when if comes to downtown retail space, said Andrew Matheny, a real estate researcher with the firm Cushman and Wakefield.
Work from home is bringing fewer workers downtown, or in some cases only bringing workers downtown two to three days a week, Matheny said.
With a decline of office workers, downtown Fort Worth has seen an uptick in traffic from hotels.
There was a 32% increase in the number of hotel rooms sold in downtown since 2021, according to Visit Fort Worth.
Three hotels have opened since 2021, and a fourth, Le Meridian, is scheduled to open in August.
Fort Worth has done a good job at converting its older downtown buildings into hotels and residential, Matheny said.
The Kimpton Harper and Sandman Signature hotels were converted from office buildings previously owned by XTO Energy. The oil and gas company was acquired by ExxonMobil in 2010 before being relocated to Houston in 2017.
The Bob R. Simpson Building at 110 W. Seventh St. — another former XTO Energy Building — is being converted into a Residence Inn.
“You want to get a 24-hour population that is going to support those retailers all the time, even on nights and weekends,” Matheny said.
The more than 3,500 downtown hotel rooms are the area’s biggest asset, said Reata restaurant owner Mike Micallef. It makes the area more walkable and brings in traffic that other parts of the city don’t see, he said.
A lot of foot traffic comes from convention-goers, said Brian Perkins, owner of Barber’s Bookstore on the corner of West Eighth Street and Throckmorton Street.
“I have a huge place in my heart for whoever keeps our convention center full,” he said.
Perkins worried developers might be building too many hotels and outstrip the demand coming from conventions.
“The people who go to our conventions are not what you’d call high rollers,” he said, adding its usually families or groups on a budget.
“That’s to my interest though, ’cause just about everyone can afford a book,” he said.
Challenges and opportunities
“Downtown feels dead,” said a shop worker who spoke on condition of anonymity because she wasn’t authorized to speak for the business.
A lot of stores on the north side of downtown have closed, and there’s not as much opportunity to shop as there was before the COVID-19 pandemic, the shop worker said.
Most of the closed spaces north of Fifth Street are owned by Sundance Square Management.
“New businesses that want to be on the ground floor can find a place in Sundance Square where they haven’t been able to in the past,” said Andy Taft, president of the business advocacy nonprofit Downtown Fort Worth Inc. “That’s certainly an opportunity.”
While businesses have been affected by the loss of office workers, some of that buying power has been replaced by out-of-town visitors who are more inclined to shop or eat downtown, he said.
Even with the city of Fort Worth moving its government offices into the former Pier 1 Tower, the old City Hall will be filled with other city employees quickly, so those consumers aren’t going away, he said.
COVID-19 took a toll on the city center, because the businesses that were there largely served people who worked in downtown, said Fort Worth city council member Elizabeth Beck, whose district includes downtown.
“It’s a positive sign that the number of vacant storefronts has decreased, and I think there are definite positive markers happening right now in downtown,” she said.
Beck cited the recent opening of the Deco 969 apartment complex as one of those markers, saying the 27-story tower’s addition to the Fort Worth skyline was a huge step.
Downtown has morphed from solely a central business district to an entertainment district and now to a neighborhood, Beck said.
“As you bring more people downtown, whether it’s to live there or to work there, there will be the opportunity for a rising tide lift all boats,” she said.
Staff Writer Jaime Moore-Carillo contributed to this report.
Source Agencies
