Two Numbers Tell You What's Really Happening on Market Street This Year

Walk south from Florence Avenue on a weekday morning and you will pass a stretch of Market Street where half the storefronts are fresh paint and new signage, and the other half are papered over, waiting on a demolition date. Both are funded by the City of Inglewood. Both got a City Council vote this year. And they are pulling the same block in opposite directions.

The number most residents have heard is $8.5 million, the state grant pool the City Council voted 4-0 in March to split among Market Street businesses for facade work and streetscape upgrades, with individual grants running up to $250,000 per storefront. The number fewer people have connected to it is $125 million, the budget Inglewood has set aside to acquire and clear the shopping plaza at Market Street and Florence Avenue, the one anchored by a beauty salon, a jewelry store, and a handful of restaurants that have served that corner for decades. One number is meant to keep businesses on Market Street. The other is buying the land out from under twenty of them.

The Grant Money and the Bulldozer Money Are Not the Same Story

The $8.5 million program has a name, Destination Market Street, and it is aimed at the merchants who are staying: painting facades, replacing signage, fixing up storefronts that have sat tired for years while other parts of Inglewood absorbed a decade of stadium-driven investment. City development services director Bernard McCrumby has described the goal as turning the street into a cultural hub that represents the best of Inglewood.

The $125 million is a different kind of money entirely. It comes from transportation funding tied to the Inglewood Transit Connector, and it covers real estate acquisition and business relocation costs for eight parcels at Market and Florence, the site of a shopping center that houses more than twenty tenants. The City Council authorized eminent domain proceedings on those parcels on February 10, voting 4-0 to move forward even without signed purchase agreements from the landowners. Councilmember Alex Padilla said at the time he did not want residents to think the city was "slamming the door shut," but the mechanics are the same either way: the city can force the sale if a deal is not reached.

Roughly fifteen times more money is going toward clearing one plaza than toward renovating storefronts across the entire rest of the street.

What's Actually New This Year, and Where It Sits

If you have noticed new signage going up around town, it is real. Three anchors have landed or are about to:

Sprouts held its ribbon-cutting three days ago, taking over a building that had sat vacant after 99 Cents Only closed, months after a Food 4 Less on Century Boulevard also shut down earlier this year. The Applebee's/IHOP combination, open 24 hours a day, is one of the first major sit-down restaurants to open in Inglewood since the city's Sports and Entertainment District opened in 2020. The Kali Hotel will bring a rooftop bar and full-service lobby dining to Hollywood Park when it opens next month.

None of these three are on Market Street. Crenshaw Boulevard, Century Boulevard, and the Hollywood Park campus are gateway corridors, the roads visitors and event traffic use to get in and out of the stadium district. The investment dollars are landing on the perimeter, not downtown.

What's Leaving Market Street Itself

The businesses actually losing ground this year are the ones at Market and Florence, next to the K Line's Downtown Inglewood station. Lavern Upton has run a salon there for 15 years and told reporters she is not ready to move, even though she has already lined up a more expensive space about five minutes away. Nina Wong, who owns Silk Nails, said she initially panicked and still does not know what comes next. Amelia Hernandez, who runs Selwyn Jewelers, a business that has operated in Inglewood for close to five decades, was reportedly offered less than $60,000 in relocation compensation. The Martin family, who run Fiesta Martin Bar & Grill and Inglewood Pedicab out of five separate spaces in the plaza, say they are still working out a relocation plan. As of early August, Red's Flavor Table and House of Tacos were still open, holding on while storefronts around them sat empty.

The timeline is set. Tenants received a 90-day notice on July 1. A second 30-day notice is due in September. The city intends to take possession of the property on October 1, with construction expected to start roughly six months after that, according to Mayor James Butts.

What replaces the plaza is not new retail. It is a parking structure and a bus loop, a hub for the Inglewood Transit Connector's shuttle system, designed to move concert and game-day crowds between the K Line and the stadium district. Rahab Mitchell, a longtime Inglewood resident, put it plainly at the public hearing, asking what happens to seniors who rely on that plaza for their errands once they can no longer walk there with their walkers. Community advocates have also raised concerns that the plaza's CVS is the city's only 24-hour pharmacy, a service some residents worry will not have a clear replacement once construction starts.

The Pattern Worth Watching If You Live Here

Put the two halves of this year side by side and a clearer picture forms. The money and the announcements are landing on the edges of downtown, at a grocery store on Crenshaw, a restaurant on Century, a hotel inside Hollywood Park, while the plaza that sits at the actual geographic center of Market Street, next to the train station that is supposed to be Inglewood's transit anchor, is being cleared for infrastructure that serves people passing through on event nights.

The $8.5 million in storefront grants is real, and it is going to the merchants who remain further up the block, the ones who turned out for February's Taste of Inglewood Love-N-Basketball Block Party, timed to NBA All-Star Weekend, where The Wood, Strips and Dips, Keokia's Kitchen, The Nile, 3 and Out, and Little Belize served food steps from the plaza now slated for demolition. Those businesses are the ones the grant program is trying to help outlast the construction years ahead. The plaza at Florence is a different case, not a renovation candidate but an acquisition target, and its tenants are not being helped to stay.

If you use Market Street for your own errands, a haircut, a ring resized, a plate of tacos, expect the corner at Florence to look and feel different by early next year. Expect the rest of the block, the part getting the grant money, to keep its rhythm a while longer. The distinction matters if you are trying to figure out which version of "new Inglewood" you are actually going to be living next to.

If you are weighing what any of this means for a property near Market Street, or you just want a straight read on how a corridor like this tends to settle out once construction starts, The Jones Group Realtors has been watching Inglewood's cycles for decades. Schedule a free consultation and get a local, no-pressure read on what's actually changing on your block.