Downtown Los Angeles Didn't Fall. It Was Pushed.
Downtown Los Angeles didn't lose its businesses. It drove them out, and the receipts are sitting in public filings, court transcripts, and lease records for anyone who wants to look.
Start with who's already gone. Skadden Arps left One California Plaza for Century City in 2023, cutting its footprint nearly in half on the way out. PwC signed a 15-year, roughly $200 million lease in Century City this year, walking away from 601 South Figueroa. Wedbush Securities cut its downtown footprint by 80% on its way to Pasadena. AECOM and CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate brokerage, both moved their global headquarters out of Los Angeles entirely, to Dallas.
That's not a rounding error. That's a market voting with its feet, one signed lease at a time.
The numbers back it up. Downtown office vacancy was 20.5% at the end of 2019. It hit 33.3% in the third quarter of 2025. By this June it was pushing 35%, per CBRE data reported by The Real Deal. Century City, by comparison, sits closer to 12%. Towers that traded near $450 a square foot before the pandemic are now changing hands closer to $150. The Aon Center sold for $268.5 million in 2014 and $147.8 million a decade later, a 45% haircut.
The tax bill is real, even where City Hall won't add it up. Gas Company Tower left the property tax roll entirely when LA County bought it out of foreclosure for $200 million, against a basis near $650 million, and government-owned property doesn't pay property tax. Add the Aon Center and Union Bank Plaza and three buildings alone cost the city and county more than $11 million a year, north of $30,000 a day. A study commissioned by the Central City Association projects a cumulative $353 million property tax shortfall over the next decade, tied to a $69.5 billion hole in assessed value. Downtown is roughly 1% of the city's land and, by Central City Association President Nella McOsker's own accounting, generates close to 30% of LA's hotel, parking, and business tax revenue combined. To my knowledge, no city report has ever tied the billion-dollar deficit to what's happening a dozen blocks from City Hall, and Los Angeles doesn't break out business, hotel, or sales tax by neighborhood at all. When you don't measure the damage, you don't have to answer for it.
The law firms and banks can absorb a bad decade. They have balance sheets and Century City to move to. The people who can't are the ones who never show up in a CBRE report: the dry cleaner, the lunch counter, the barber, the guy who shines shoes in the lobby.
Take Don Kohan, who runs Cleaners Depot a few blocks from what used to be the AT&T Center downtown. His revenue is down 60% since 2019. He put it plainly to a reporter: "People are not going to work — they're not dressing up. Everybody is in front of a computer in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts." He says he can't afford to close his downtown stores, and he can't really afford to keep them open either, but three families depend on the paychecks. That's not a company relocating to Century City. That's a guy who has nowhere to relocate to, watching his customers disappear one empty office floor at a time.
He's not alone. Wexler's Deli, gone from Grand Central Market in March 2025. Floyd's 99 Barbershop, closed. None of these were hedge funds trimming a footprint. These were people who put everything into a storefront, and the storefront died with the foot traffic.
The mechanism isn't complicated. Downtown's own business association counted roughly 500,000 people coming into the core on a weekday in 2019, versus closer to 400,000 today, a 20% drop in the customers who used to buy the lunch, drop off the shirts, get the haircut, and hit the gym on their way home. Every office tenant that left for Century City took hundreds of employees' daily spending with it, and none of it is coming back.
None of this happened because Los Angeles stopped being a good place to build a business. It happened because two mayors in a row, Eric Garcetti's and now Karen Bass's, and a City Council that never seriously checked either of them, let the basics slide until tenants stopped believing downtown was safe. The mayor proposes a budget; the Council can rewrite it, and holds its own sign-off authority over LAPD staffing and the settlements now driving the deficit. This isn't a one-branch problem, and I'll put my name on saying so.
Downtown's own council seat is Exhibit A. Jose Huizar represented downtown for over a decade, then pleaded guilty to racketeering and tax evasion and was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for roughly $1.5 to $2 million in bribes, cash, casino chips, and private jet flights, tied directly to downtown development approvals. His successor, Kevin de León, was caught on tape in a racist conversation about a colleague's child in 2022, was asked to resign by the mayor, the governor, and the President, and simply refused, serving out his term.
Nithya Raman doesn't get a pass either. The sitting councilmember now running against Bass for mayor has chaired the Council's Housing and Homelessness Committee since 2023, voted yes on the 2023 budget that funded Inside Safe, then campaigned against its results, and was absent for the vote on the budget that produced this year's deficit. Running against a record you had a vote and a gavel over is different than running against someone else's.
Don't take my word for it on the safety problem. Take the mayor's. Asked directly what's holding downtown back, Karen Bass told Commercial Observer this June: "First and foremost is safety... Thousands and thousands of people don't want to come if they don't perceive it as being safe." That's not a critic talking. That's the sitting mayor, on the record, naming a problem her own administration owns.
Brokers say the same thing without the political filter. CBRE's Jeffrey Welch has described what's happening downtown as "quiet leaves, quiet downsizes" to Century City and Pasadena, and calls safety an "impediment" downtown is "swimming upstream" against. Starbucks didn't hedge at all. It closed 16 stores nationally in 2022, several in the LA area, and named the reason outright: safety.
Then there's the train system that's supposed to move people through downtown. A USC survey found 84% of LA County residents now consider Metro trains unsafe, up from 76% before the pandemic; among riders who quit the system, only 19% say they still feel safe, down from 34%. Crime per rider climbed every year from 2019 to 2024, and Bass had to order an emergency law-enforcement surge onto buses and trains in 2024 just to stabilize it. You cannot build a functioning downtown around a transit system people are afraid to use.
And homelessness, the piece nobody in City Hall wants to actually account for. The city's own homeless count rose from roughly 29,700 people in 2013 to nearly 43,700 in 2025, a 47% increase, after more than a decade and billions of dollars poured into the problem. Proposition HHH promised 10,000 new housing units in 2016; nine years later, roughly 3,800 are complete, at a cost that ballooned past $500,000 a unit. A federal judge overseeing the city's homelessness settlement put it bluntly in March 2025, after an audit found the city couldn't account for $2.4 billion in spending: "We pay your bills. Figure this out." That is a sitting federal judge, not a critic.
Put it together and the picture is not complicated. Companies didn't leave downtown Los Angeles because the office product got worse. They left because the city around the office got worse, and City Hall and the Council that funds it spent a decade treating that as someone else's problem to solve. Every lease that moved to Century City, every tower that sold for half its former value, every dollar of tax revenue that vanished with it, that's the bill for a policy choice, made by people who are mostly still in office or running for a bigger one. It isn't just landlords and law firms paying it. It's Don Kohan, and everyone like him, still showing up to open a business nobody told them was already dying. They didn't write this bill. They're the ones losing everything to cover it.