[someone123]

Seems like a pretty small list. Spring Garden Road has 200+ stores in total.

How many of these empty retail spots aren't related to renovations and redevelopment projects where the landlords chose not to renew tenants' leases? This is what happened in the Roy Building, for example. That sort of stuff is actually more of a positive than a negative sign.

A harder to answer but still relevant question has to do with "frictional" vacancies from tenants moving around, relocating, or going out of business for reasons that have nothing to do with their particular location (one clear example is HMV, and a lot of mom and pop places close down because people just want to retire or whatever). If you go to the busiest, most expensive retail areas in North America you will see some of these vacancies.

My impression of the downtown retail scene is that Spring Garden Road is pretty successful, Barrington is OK (and will probably get better as some of the current projects wrap up), and the north end of downtown has a bunch of structural problems related to how it's set up. Hopefully those will be fixed over the next couple of years.