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MY VIEW - If you want to understand what’s broken in Los Angeles, don’t start with budget spreadsheets. Stand on Hollywood Boulevard for an hour. Watch what happens when the world shows up for one of America’s great icons and sees what we’ve allowed that icon to become.
Hollywood Boulevard is more than a famous street. Hollywood is a federally recognized historic district, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 for national significance in commerce, entertainment and architecture. More than 100 buildings along the Boulevard are officially listed as “worthy of preservation,” a physical record of the Golden Age when Hollywood became the motion picture capital of the world. On paper, this corridor sits on the country’s honor roll. On the sidewalk, the Boulevard sits in Saturday detention.
What Los Angeles has done to Hollywood Blvd isn’t neglect. It's complete abandonment. Some places belong to more than the city that built them - they belong to everyone who ever believed in what they promise. The Statue of Liberty is one. Hollywood is another. Both tell the world that ours is a country where you can arrive with nothing and build something for yourself. No one would tolerate the Statue of Liberty covered in tagging, chaotic vending and unsafe conditions, tourists confused to see so much disorder. Yet we have accepted that state for Hollywood Boulevard - year after year, in full view of millions of visitors - as though no other alternative exists.
And here is where the failure becomes unforgivable: we’re not just squandering symbolism. We are actively exporting our own revenue.
Los Angeles is cutting jobs and scrambling to close budget gaps while sitting on one of the most valuable cultural brands on Earth. Hollywood draws on the order of tens of millions of visitors a year - local tourism and district data put that figure north of 30 million - and yet the current experience, by our own choice-making, encourages those visitors to spend money somewhere else. Guests give us an hour on the Boulevard and then take their wallets to Beverly Hills, to Culver City, to any place that feels cleaner, safer and more intentional. We’re not just leaving money on the table. We’re picking up that money and handing it over to our neighboring cities.
The Hollywood Partnership's dashboard reports that the average visitor spends about 2.5 hours in the district and only one hour on the Walk of Fame. Because that's what we gave them: one hour to hunt the sidewalk for a star with a celebrity’s name, snap a photo, buy a souvenir T-shirt, and leave.
In the past month alone, four businesses have announced they’re closing, taking their jobs with them. The ones left are barely hanging on. Small business owners talk about daily theft, people coming in off the streets and throwing trash at their employees, their customers being verbally assaulted.
Street vendors have exploded in number - carts and tables are crammed along the curb at Hollywood and Highland; vendors are setting up cartons of cheap souvenirs directly on the sidewalk; food sellers are disposing of food waste in the street; and speakers are blasting music and promotional sales pitches so loud to be deafening. The sidewalks are no longer something you walk for pleasure. They’re something you rush through.
Hollywood Partnership data shows nearly one in four office spaces in the district sitting empty, four consecutive quarters of businesses leaving faster than new ones arrive, worker visits 21 percent below pre-pandemic levels, and, on the Walk of Fame specifically, foot traffic down 4 percent and tourist visits down 4.5 percent last year alone. On homelessness, one of the neighborhood's greatest challenges, headline numbers celebrate percentage declines, but RAND and Hollywood 4WRD’s counts describe more people sleeping on sidewalks, and unsheltered numbers that have flattened rather than disappeared. Leadership can cherry‑pick photo ops and statistics to tell whatever story they want about “momentum.” A single walk down the Boulevard tells you what’s actually happening.
Compare that to how another country treats a comparable icon. After a catastrophic fire nearly destroyed Notre Dame in 2019, France spent roughly 700 million euros restoring the cathedral not only as a stand-alone monument, but as the anchor of a living Parisian neighborhood around it. When it reopened in December 2024, visitors returned in greater numbers than before - over 11 million people in the first year alone, roughly 30 percent more than pre-fire levels. That is what real stewardship produces: not a tourist trap, but a neighborhood people choose to return to, again and again, because someone decided the icon was worth saving.
Hollywood Boulevard was once the heart of what made this city extraordinary: where studios premiered their films, where agencies signed the talent that built an industry, where the Oscars once crowned the best work in the world. Today visitors see drugs being used freely, humans passed out on the Walk of Fame stars, and card tables and tents crowding out the sidewalk. The message could not be clearer: this is not a place to linger. This is a place to pass through and leave.
A different path already exists in other cities. Distressed corridors elsewhere have become engines of pride and revenue through preservation, programming and serious management. Tools already sit on the shelf: design standards that respect historic fabric; enforcement against unsafe, unpermitted or predatory activity; curated vending and performance rules that support rather than overwhelm the streetscape; and joint governance structures that bring residents, businesses, preservation advocates and city departments into the same room with an actual plan.
What’s missing is not another study or dashboard. What’s missing is a decision to treat Hollywood Boulevard as a national asset, entrusted to Los Angeles, that demands real stewardship. That decision begins with honesty about the state of the street, acknowledgment of economic squander and symbolic damage, and a commitment from City Hall and partners to invest in Hollywood at a scale matching the importance of this corridor.
Hollywood is our inheritance, our story to tell the world, and our responsibility. City Hall flunked stewardship. Now the test is simple: admit what's happened to Hollywood Boulevard and repair it or keep watching the decline City Hall is writing.
(Dylan Kendall is a small business owner, nonprofit founder, former Los Angeles City Council candidate for District 13, and managed the Hollywood Sign intellectual property for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.)
