It’s a tale of two Santa Monicas.

With quaint boutiques, bustling cafes, friendly shopkeepers and pampered pooches galore, the charming, thriving shopping strip on Montana Avenue has quietly become Santa Monica’s unofficial new downtown — a breezy, beautiful retort to the doom and gloom of the beach city’s beleaguered traditional retail core.

Barely a mile away, the once-booming Third Street Promenade appears to be dying in broad daylight — plagued by empty storefronts, trash-strewn sidewalks, boarded windows, homeless people and an unsettling apocalyptic energy. At its lower end, the once-vibrant Santa Monica Place is dying — most of the mall’s high-end shops long-ago shuttered.

But up along Montana, where the walkable stretch between 7th and 17th Sts. brims with curb appeal., there are just seven vacant storefronts out of more than 150 — a sharp contrast to the put-upon Promenade, where 26 out of 98 currently languish empty.

This affluent, tree-lined corridor comes off like a Stars Hollow-on-Sea, straight out of “Gilmore Girls” — bustling with locals, many of them hyper-wealthy, spending freely and chatting happily. Up and down the street, the retail trade booms — as if the widespread collapse of urban shopping districts around the LA region were happening on another planet, not a handful of blocks away.

As other strips flail, Montana’s retail real estate is nearly impossible to get your hands on, according to commercial real estate broker Jay Luchs of Newmark.

“For every space that looks empty, there’s a tenant going in,” Luchs told the California Post. “There’s really no space.”

The numbers back up the claim — four of Montana’s empty storefronts already bear signs announcing they’ve already been leased.

Luchs, a retail heavyweight who brokers deals across some of LA’s most coveted shopping districts, said Montana is among a handful of lucky locations that are managing to buck the area’s broader retail woes.

“Every street that’s got its own community — like Montana, like Abbot Kinney in Venice, the Brentwood Country Mart, or Melrose Place — anywhere brands want to be, you cannot find a space,” Luchs said.

One of the newest arrivals on Montana will be the uber trendy WeHo cafe Community Goods, which is coming in with a tea concept outpost, the broker revealed. Luchs said his team has handled roughly six or seven deals on the street this year.

Walk into Bijou Indochine, a jewelry and vintage boutique on Montana that has occupied its current address for nearly five years, and the sweet, small-town vibe feels unmistakeable.

“It’s charming,” Carolina Hummel, who works at the shop and grew up in the area, told The Post. “It’s really a neighborhood. Everyone walks their dog daily, every shop has treats for dogs, and we see the regulars, even if they aren’t shopping.”

Hummel routinely watches stunned tourists wander in from downtown in disbelief. “A customer from out of town said she read on the flight that she should visit Third Street Promenade. She went, saw it, and said, ‘What the hell was that?’ Then she found Montana and asked, ‘Why didn’t anyone recommend this?’”

Unlike downtown’s dwindling mix of national chains and touristy retailers, Montana offers a patchwork of independently owned boutiques, restaurants and familiar faces — all nestled within walking distance of some of the Westside’s most affluent residential neighborhoods, which is one of the reasons it remains so successful, Luchs said.

“Even without daily visitors, which they do get a lot of, they have built-in traffic from people who don’t even have to drive,” he explained. “They walk. They live there. They’re in the community.”

Some boutiques have been a fixture on Montana for over four decades, and generations of loyal shoppers have helped insulate the business from the broader retail downturn. At Footsie, a customer might drop $400 on a single bra, while just down the street, shoppers can pop into a more mainstream retailer like Free People.

The unusual mix of high-end specialty shops and recognizable brands is part of Montana’s appeal, and the avenue’s deep neighborhood roots are proving especially valuable at a time when shoppers have fewer reasons to visit traditional retail districts.

While Montana’s rents are hardly cheap, Luchs revealed that they’re actually something of a bargain, when compared with other fashionable strips in the region.

Retail on Montana typically commands around $8 to $12 per square foot per month, plus additional property expenses, Luchs said. By comparison, rents on Venice’s trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard have climbed above $20 per square foot monthly, while Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills can fetch $25 to $30.

Even with its problems, the Third Street Promenade is no bargain, either, Luchs said, estimating that rents there average around $12 per square foot monthly — which might sound affordable until you take into account the enormous storefronts make the overall bills dramatically higher.

But the differences between the two are about more than numbers, ultimately. “Third Street Promenade, as we all know, has a lot of homeless and it’s a different customer,” Luchs said.

Another aspect of Montana’s success, beyond affordability, is that it’s not trying to be downtown — instead leaning into a magical mix of small store charm and good restaurants, while also having the downtown-style services that locals need. That neighborhood-first formula has turned Montana into a hangout, rather than just a place to buy things. The street has also been a life raft to high-end businesses fleeing surrounding enclaves after the devastating January 2025 fires.

After the blazes left much of Pacific Palisades’ commercial district gutted, Montana Avenue became the immediate destination for merchants looking to salvage their livelihoods.

“We were in the Palisades for almost 25 years,” Pamela Hayer, owner of Keetan, a luxe children’s boutique, told The Post. The shop, once a fixture across the street from Rick Caruso’s exclusive Palisades Village development, relocated to Montana in September 2025.

“Montana was another boutiquey kind of shopping area that seemed to have a good mix of stores that would complement our higher-end product,” she said.

When she first moved the store, Hayer noted that 80% of her business was from old customers from the Palisades.

But within the last six months, her clientele is bulking up with Santa Monica locals, she said.

“There is no other real good shopping center left,” Hayer said of the city. “Downtown by the Promenade just isn’t the same as it used to be.”

Down the block at home goods store ARJ, which opened its doors selling artisan porcelain and ceramics to well-heeled shoppers, Emma, the store manager, sees Montana as a boomtown.

“In Santa Monica, everywhere is closing because the rent is so high,” she told The Post. “That’s all I’ve been hearing.”

While she doesn’t see that to be true on Montana, she did admit that after the fires, things slowed, with many Palisades residents temporarily relocating far away: “We saw a really big drop.”

In fact, shopkeepers on Montana Ave. say that behind that Mayberry-meets-Melrose facade of easy, oceanfront glamour, they’re privately wrestling with post-fire fallout and the sagging foot traffic that came along with it.

“It’s been shitty,” Bijou Indochine’s Carolina Hummel said bluntly. “We lost an entire community that would shop here regularly. Some people come in wanting to spend insurance check money to replace things, but it’s horrible. The Palisades residents are scattered all over the city now.”

Erin, a stylist of five years at the boutique clothing store Gramercy who asked to withhold her last name, was also quick to point out the strip’s struggles.

“Traffic hasn’t been what it used to be. There used to be lines to get into a dressing room, and now you’re lucky if three people come in a day,” she explained. The fires led to the store losing “like, a third of its customers,” she said.

But that doesn’t change the way she feels about the neighborhood.

“It’s safe, it’s nice quality, quality food, quality coffee, and we don’t have homeless,” she said. “I think it’s perfect.”

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