Closure of last big downtown retailer, Walmart, prompts fears

First the downtown Walgreens closed about a year ago, followed six months later by the shuttering of the neighborhood Longs, and now the last major retailer, Walmart, plans to shut its doors after April 21 — leading to fears that the Fort Street Mall area will become a magnet for even more crime, homeless activity and graffiti.

“It’s not a good sign that a national chain would shut down,” said House Speaker Scott Saiki, whose district includes downtown. “It’s an indication of the demise of the downtown area.”

Sean Fitzsimmons, an attorney who lives on Bishop Street, shops at the Fort Street Walmart at least a couple of times a week for basic essentials.

“And now there’s no place locally for downtown residents to get their daily living essentials,” he said.

To get his household supplies, Fitzsimmons will have to walk several blocks to the Pali Longs and Safeway, which are often crowded and have their own homeless issues.

But as vice chair of the Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board, Fitzsimmons especially worries about neighbor seniors who will have to walk farther with armfuls of groceries, sometimes in the rain.

Then they’ll have to head home and navigate a neighborhood where “empty storefronts serve as a magnet for homeless activity,” he said.

Walmart said its Fort Street Mall location is underperforming, even when it has outlasted its competitors.

“Every time I did go in there, it was quite busy,” Fitzsimmons said.

But Walmart’s bathrooms had become “almost an attractive nuisance” for homeless people, and “it’s been a target for shoplifting and petty crime.”

Speaker Saiki said the closure of downtown retail shops is part of a national trend. The phenomenon accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when more people worked remotely instead of going into downtown offices, Saiki said.

“Office workers will continue to work from home and will not be returning to their offices,” he said.

He wants the state to help owners of downtown Honolulu high-rises convert to residential units with ground-level retail, which would especially appeal to younger residents and those still working downtown.

“It would almost be an extension of what we’re seeing in Chinatown, with new restaurants, new activities,” Saiki said.

More immediately, Saiki hopes that retailers move back into the Fort Street Mall area with a much smaller footprint to serve residents more cost-­effectively.

“We don’t need a three-story Walmart,” Saiki said. “A corner store might suffice. There’s a direct correlation to the lack of office workers in the area.”

Walmart announced Tuesday that it plans to close its Fort Street Mall store and pharmacy April 21.

“We are grateful to the customers who have given us the privilege of serving them at our Fort Street Mall location,” spokesperson Lauren Willis said in a statement. “We look forward to serving them at our other stores in the surrounding communities and on walmart.com.”

Walmart operates 10 Walmart stores across the islands — five on Oahu — and two Sam’s Clubs also on Oahu.

Its last — an 80,000-square-foot store and pharmacy on Fort Street Mall — opened in July 2014, replacing the Macy’s outlet that closed in February 2013. Macy’s had replaced Liberty House, which filed for bankruptcy.

Walmart opened by offering groceries and lawn and garden supplies.

Its 169 employees will have the opportunity to transfer to other locations, and the Fort Street Mall pharmacy will help customers transfer their prescriptions to other locations, company officials said.

Crime at night

“I’m very concerned about the fact that downtown is losing the last remaining big retail store,” said Council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, who represents downtown. “But beyond that, this means an entire stretch of Fort Street Mall is now going dark after 4 o’clock.”

He wants the city to come up with ideas “to make sure that area is not a dark hulking shell that stays empty.”

The old Walgreens site has become “a big canvas for graffiti,” he said.

The Longs location is supposed to reemerge as a Korean supermarket but has yet to open, Dos Santos-Tam said.

Despite bus traffic on Hotel Street and major traffic on King Street, “We can’t seem to make Fort Street work,” he said. “I would certainly welcome someone coming in there as soon as possible. It’s a big challenge. Fort Street Mall can’t be dead.”

Like others, Dos Santos-­Tam worries about crime and homeless activity soaring once the last major retailer closes.

“Crime at night, that’s a big concern,” he said. “Big stretches of dark invites crime and other negative elements.”

Gov. Josh Green told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” live­stream program Monday that he hopes the city’s emergency HONU (Housing, Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered Persons) homeless pop-up tent moves to downtown — followed by a permanent downtown homeless kauhale to provide long-term housing and social service treatment in response to homeless complaints.

“They’ve been causing trouble, scaring people downtown,” Green said.

But Dos Santos-Tam said the appearance of both the HONU and a homeless kauhale would likely receive community pushback — and could deter retailers from filling the void of the departures of Walgreens, Longs and Walmart.

“Downtown and Chinatown have taken the burden of a lot of (homeless) services,” he said. “Adding on more, I think the residents would not welcome that. I think it’s going to be a tough sell.

“We’re trying to invite more retailers to do all of these positive things,” Dos Santos-Tam said. “A homeless encampment or village might frustrate those efforts.”

Retail evolution

The future for downtown remains unclear but likely will not include another large retail chain, said Hawaii real estate analyst Stephany Sofos.

“What probably will happen is you’ll have a second generation of tenants, like a fitness center or a church,” she said. “Or they could break up the space. It depends what the market is for the landlord.”

Walmart’s upcoming departure represents the latest evolution of retail space in Honolulu’s urban core, Sofos said.

“Up to 1960, everybody went downtown for retail,” she said. “Then everybody shifted to Ala Moana (after the center opened in 1959). In the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was a push to re-gentrify the downtown area with the building of Bishop Square, the Aloha Tower Marketplace development, Waterfront Plaza and then HPU (Hawaii Pacific University) using more of the area for their classrooms.

“Then in the last 15 years the homeless started taking over the area, and then you had COVID and more people doing remote work. Now everybody is working remotely and there’s not enough people.

“The bottom line,” Sofos said, “is there’s a perceived feeling of fear in that location because of the homelessness and the sketchiness of the area, and what is the government going to do to stop that, to grow downtown? You have to have a partnership. A private entity can’t do it all. We need to have help — more police, more cleaning, more what? I don’t know the answer.”

———

Staff writer Dave Segal contributed to this report.