Downtown Decatur retail is on fire despite closings, additional space

Few places in metro Atlanta offer a combination of transit-connectedness, walkability, and quaint street-front retail on par with Downtown Decatur, which seems even more bustling after the recent addition of several hundred apartments at developments such as ARLO.

So it should come as no surprise that this ITP city’s retail scene is thriving.

As Decatur Metro points out this week, downtown D-town suffered a couple of stinging closures in recent months when local fave Yogurt Tap and Cook’s Warehouse/Sherlock’s Wine Merchant bowed out, proving that Decatur isn’t immune to retail blank spots.

The aforementioned multifamily developments have also brought new retail space (in most cases), helping to trigger what the city calls a net gain of businesses and employees in 2016.

Despite recent closures, the website points to numbers from the city-published Decatur Focus that show the downtown commercial vacancy rate “is around 5 percent, which is significantly lower than the national average of 11.3 percent.”

Adds the city publication: “The handful of key storefronts that are currently vacant will most likely not be vacant for long.”

The old Yogurt Tap space is already filled, in fact.

Maybe the Midtown Mile should take note.

• Decatur Notes Retail Vacancies Are At Just 5%, Even After Recent Closings of Local Favs [Decatur Metro]
• Inside ‘ARLO,’ Decatur’s Latest Mixed-Use Component [Curbed Atlanta]
• Does ‘Midtown Mile’ have a retail closure problem? [Curbed]