DTLA is losing its pulse.
Downtown Los Angeles ranked among the least vibrant urban cores in a global survey of 75 city centers, as the district continues to grapple with visible homelessness and crime concerns.
According to Gensler’s 2026 City Pulse report, DTLA placed near the bottom for vibrancy and scored even worse when respondents were asked to rate its beauty.
Other cities with similar population sizes — including Madrid, Chicago, and Toronto — performed far better than Los Angeles on measures of downtown energy and appeal.
About 65% of survey participants described DTLA as vibrant, compared with 77% for Madrid, 84% for Chicago, and 71% for Toronto.
Elsewhere in California, downtown San Francisco also posted weak results with a 67% vibrancy score, while San Jose ranked lower still at 61%.
For beauty, downtown LA ranked the seventh worst in the US, just above cities like Denver and St. Louis.
It has a 743% higher crime rate than the rest of the city of LA, Spectrum News reported.
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The area’s notorious Skid Row contains one of the largest homeless populations in the US.
Businesses have fled the area due to crime, homelessness and an increasingly absent customer population.
“LA’s kind of central problem is that businesses have left LA. We need them to bring the offices back in,” Kelly Farrell, the managing director of Gensler’s LA office, told the Los Angeles Times. “Bring the people back in so they’re staying after work and interacting with those businesses that are in the area.”
The Gensler report noted that downtown areas should be walkable and characterized as cultural and entertainment hubs, with a blend of shops, offices and housing.
A California Post report in August 2025 noted there were more than 100 vacant storefronts in the area’s Historic Core, the heart of the downtown shopping and entertainment district. One business pointed to crime, record-high rents and an ever-shrinking pool of Angelenos visiting as the reason.
“Many historical independent restaurants are struggling under the weight of these issues and have already closed, while those remaining are fighting to survive,” LA’s oldest restaurants, Cole’s French Dip, said when announcing its closure last year.
LA has tried to revitalize the area by transforming abandoned office buildings into housing. City leaders enacted a sweeping overhaul of reuse rules in February, dramatically expanding where and how vacant commercial buildings can be turned into apartments.
Farrell thinks downtown LA needs to draw more residents in to revitalize the area.
“One of the best things we can do for safety is have an abundance of population,” Farrell said. “You will see right now that we have a lot of great ground-floor retail that’s empty. As that gets fuller, we typically see that crime starts to go down with it.”
