AUSTIN, Texas — Three more stores on South Congress Avenue are joining the list of businesses closing up and moving out.
Mi Casa, a business that has been around 28 years, The Good Company and the Sunroom have all closed their locations on the street within the last month or are about to.
Flipping through the pages of a brochure from 2020 listing all the businesses on South Congress Avenue, Brandon Hodges said now, it's like looking at an obituary.
“We've really seen a fairly drastic decrease since the pandemic in locally-owned shops,” he said.
Hodge owns both Big Top Candy Shop and Monkey See Monkey Do toy store on South Congress Avenue. He's also president of the South Congress Merchants Association, a collective of the business owners there.
He said the retail world is already treacherous to navigate.
“Retail is a tough business and, you know, just having your strange little pocket of the commercial space has gotten increasingly harder with rent, taxes and wholesale,” Hodge said.
He said South Congress is the gem of South Austin, but the area's popularity is a double-edged sword – South Congress is a victim of its own success.
“That local flair, that local funk, that small business flavor that we brought – and that attracted a lot of eyes and a lot of attention,” he said. “However, that sort of foot traffic that that generated got the attention of, you know, bigger money.”
Hodge said after the pandemic, bigger corporations began to offer more money to fill spaces and renovate them, driving up prices for everyone else.
“The data I have shows that we've seen a triple-digit rent increase,” he said.
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KVUE also spoke with owners of Good Company and the Sunroom. They said their rent increased more than 500%, and they were told as recently as March.
“We're seeing that we're having a decrease in foot traffic because of the displacement of a lot of those local businesses that brought people here in the first place,” Hodge said.
He said 65% of the stores on South Congress Avenue are still locally owned, but that may continue to change.
“I would say it's still quintessentially Austin,” Hodge said. “Is that as funky and weird as it once was? Not quite. But you have to ask yourself if Austin is as weird and funky as it once was.”
Hodge said about a third of the businesses that were on South Congress in 2020 are gone, and more businesses may leave in the future.
Boomtown is KVUE's series covering the explosive growth in Central Texas. For more Boomtown stories, head to KVUE.com/Boomtown.