The Promenade Is Building Two Different Futures at Once, and Only One of Them Is Actually Under Construction

Walk the 1200 block of Third Street Promenade right now and you'll see steel framing going up outside buildings near Wilshire and Arizona, work that crews started earlier this month. That's not scaffolding for a facade repair. It's the skeleton for Santa Monica's first digital billboards, physically rising on a street that banned off-site advertising back in 1985.

About a week after that construction was first reported, a different vision of the same block went viral online. No steel, no permits, just a rendering: the Promenade reimagined as a garden, retailers pushed to the edges, people sitting in grass where the paseo used to be concrete. Nearly 70,000 views in a matter of days.

Same three blocks. Two futures. Only one has a crew on site.

If you live here, you've probably felt the last few years of this street without needing a headline to tell you: storefronts sitting empty longer than they used to, foot traffic that comes and goes with events rather than staying steady. What's worth understanding right now, this month, is that the city isn't waiting to pick a direction. It's running three different bets on the same three blocks at the same time, and they don't all point the same way.

What's actually going up

The billboards are real and they're happening now. The city's Digital Display District ordinance allows up to 16 large displays across downtown, generally capped at 1,000 square feet each, split between Santa Monica Place and the Promenade itself. Council approved development agreements covering seven of those displays first: four at Santa Monica Place and one each at 301 Arizona Ave./1253 Third Street Promenade, 1202 Third Street Promenade, and 1310 Third Street Promenade. Because the Promenade sits in the coastal zone, three of those projects, at 1202 Third, at 301 Arizona, and at Santa Monica Place, also needed sign-off from the California Coastal Commission, which approved them in April.

That's the part that makes this different from a normal storefront renovation. This isn't one landlord updating signage. It's a coordinated district-wide advertising program that took years of hearings to get approved, and the construction now underway is the first physical evidence that it's moving from paperwork to reality. The framing going up this month at Wilshire and Arizona is the leading edge of a 16-screen build-out, not the whole thing.

It's also landing on a block that, by the city's own account, still has several vacant storefronts. That's not a contradiction so much as the actual strategy: the empty spaces and the billboards are arriving in the same news cycle because the city is treating advertising revenue and foot traffic as two separate problems it's solving in parallel, not one problem with one fix.

The version nobody built, but everybody's talking about

The garden rendering that went viral came from Raad Mobrem, a tech entrepreneur, not a city planner, and it has no funding, no permit, and no place on any council agenda that's been reported. What it has is a number: close to 70,000 views on a single post, plus a wave of replies from people who clearly wanted to see something softer than another retail corridor with screens bolted to the buildings.

That gap matters if you're trying to read where this actually goes. The thing under construction right now is advertising infrastructure. The thing residents are visibly rallying around online is the opposite instinct: less commercial density, more green space, fewer things trying to sell you something as you walk. Both of those energies are real. Only one of them currently has a construction crew.

If you're the kind of person who walks the Promenade on a Tuesday afternoon rather than for a special occasion, this is worth knowing before you form an opinion about what the street is "becoming." It isn't becoming one thing. It's got a city-approved advertising rollout moving forward on a fixed timeline, and a public mood that's pulling somewhere else entirely, with no mechanism yet connecting the two.

The thing that's already proven to work, and it isn't either of those

Here's where the story gets more useful than either the billboards or the rendering. The Promenade also has a monthly event that's already shown it can move the needle, and it costs the city nothing like what a billboard district or a park redesign would.

Santa Monica Block Fest runs the second Saturday of every month, 5 p.m. to midnight, three blocks of the Promenade closed to normal retail traffic and turned over to music, food, and a night market. The most recent one, on August 8th, drew a crowd big enough that longtime vendors noticed the difference in real time. Marquis Cook, an artist who used to sell his drawings on the Promenade before the pandemic hollowed the street out, came back this summer and was struck by how much had shifted. Fusun Cesuroruc, co-owner of the shop Ugo, credited the city's cleaner-and-safer push with actually landing, saying people are responding to it.

That's a meaningfully different signal than either the billboard construction or the viral rendering. It's not a bet on future infrastructure and it's not an internet wish list. It's a recurring, low-overhead event that's already demonstrated it can bring people back to a specific block on a specific night, repeatedly, for months.

The city has backed this kind of activation with money too. In March, Santa Monica approved a $3 million economic development fund for tenant improvement assistance, business recruitment, and capital renewal studies aimed specifically at the Promenade. Mayor Caroline Torosis has been direct about the thinking behind it: the city can't coast on reputation alone and has to actively invite people back. The Entertainment Zone, which lets people of legal drinking age buy alcohol from participating businesses and carry it within a designated outdoor area, launched last year and has since been expanded so it can stretch wider during major events. Both of those moves are aimed at the same target as Block Fest: get bodies on the street on a recurring basis, not just for a ribbon cutting.

What this actually means for your next walk down there

If you live in Santa Monica, here's the practical read. Through the rest of this year, expect to keep seeing construction activity around Wilshire and Arizona as the first billboard structures go up, alongside whatever storefront vacancies haven't yet been filled by the tenant-improvement fund. That combination, active construction next to open vacancies, is going to look unfinished for a while because it is unfinished. It's not a sign the effort is failing. It's a sign multiple slow-moving projects are overlapping in the same physical space.

Expect the second Saturday of each month to keep being the most reliable night to see the Promenade at something closer to full energy, since Block Fest has already shown it draws a crowd without waiting on permits from the Coastal Commission. If you want to see the street as the city hopes it eventually reads, full-time, that's the closest current preview.

And expect the debate over what the Promenade should look like long-term to keep running well ahead of what's actually approved. A viral rendering with no funding and no council vote can still shape public expectations faster than an actual infrastructure build-out, and right now that's exactly what's happening. Nobody voted for a garden. Plenty of people are picturing one anyway, while the billboards get built regardless.

None of these three threads, the ad displays, the online wish for green space, or the monthly street party, cancels the others out. They're just running on different timelines, funded by different people, with different odds of actually reshaping the block a year from now. If you're watching this street the way anyone who lives near it naturally does, that's the distinction worth holding onto: construction is a commitment, a rendering is a mood, and a recurring event with a track record is the only one of the three that's already proven itself.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Santa Monica, whether that's timing, presentation, or just understanding how a changing corridor might touch your street, The Carrabba Group has been reading Westside neighborhoods like this one for two decades. Work With Us when you're ready for a conversation grounded in what's actually happening here, not just what's trending.