Storefronts on Fourth Street, Atlantic Avenue, and Linden are staying open, not closing. Long Beach's independent business scene has been building toward this for years, and 2024 is the year the rest of the region started paying attention. Here's what's actually driving it, block by block.
A city that doesn’t wait for permission to build
Long Beach’s small business scene didn’t get quiet during the hard years. It got resourceful. A century-old auto shop on the east side nearly closed for good before new ownership kept the lights on and the regulars coming back. A market in Cambodia Town rebuilt after a fire and reopened stronger. A mobile-kitchen company that’s spent fifteen years customizing food trucks for first-time entrepreneurs is still building them today (Long Beach Post). Across this city, the pattern repeats itself: someone loses a lease, someone else signs one, and the block never actually goes dark.
That resilience is why 2024 feels different. Long Beach didn’t just discover small business. The rest of the region is finally catching up to what this city already knew.
Retro Row proves weird sells
Walk Fourth Street between Junipero and Cherry Avenues and you’ll find the stretch locals call Retro Row: vintage furniture dealers, record shops, secondhand bookstores, and independent boutiques stacked block after block, none of them apologizing for being niche. The Center Long Beach has held a storefront here since 1986, longer than most chains survive a single lease cycle (Long Beach Post). This is a street that built its identity on specificity instead of scale, and it has outlasted a dozen retail trends that promised to replace it.
That’s the throughline for the whole scene. The businesses succeeding here aren’t chasing a formula built somewhere else. They picked a lane, dug in, and let the neighborhood find them.
“A city doesn’t get a small business scene by accident. It gets one because enough people refused to play it safe long enough for the rest of us to notice.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
Bixby Knolls remembers how to be a downtown
A few miles north, Bixby Knolls is proof that a neighborhood can lose its anchor and still find its way back. The old Roberts department store, once the retail heart of Atlantic Avenue, closed in 1994 and sat empty for fifteen years before it finally came down. What replaced that loss wasn’t another big-box tenant. It was dozens of small ones: restaurants, boutiques, and, block for block, the greatest concentration of brewpubs anywhere in the city, enough that locals started calling the neighborhood Brewery Knolls (Visit Long Beach).
The monthly First Fridays event on Atlantic Avenue draws thousands of people every time it runs, businesses stay open late, and the street fills with live music and street performers until well past a normal closing hour (Visit Long Beach). Nobody handed Bixby Knolls that turnout. Homeowner associations, neighborhood groups, and the business owners themselves built it, one open storefront at a time, in a neighborhood the city’s own historians once described as being in decline. That’s not a comeback story anyone wrote for them. That’s one they wrote themselves.
East Village keeps building without waiting on permission
Downtown’s East Village Arts District tells the same story from a different angle. When the neighborhood’s longtime Second Saturday Art Walk organizer stepped back, the event didn’t quietly disappear. Local business owners Michael Mosselli and Marty Meier picked it back up, with backing from the Arts Council for Long Beach, the East Village Association, the Downtown Long Beach Alliance, and Make Collectives. The relaunched route now runs past 22 galleries and businesses and 22 murals (Long Beach Post).
"Our main goal is to bring increased traffic to the area for the many businesses, galleries and artists," Meier said of the relaunch (qtd. in Long Beach Post). That’s the East Village in one sentence: a district that treats its small businesses as infrastructure worth protecting, not decoration worth photographing. Nobody waited for a developer to greenlight that. The neighborhood did it because the work deserved better than letting it quietly stop.
The city is finally putting its weight behind it
None of this happened without a push from City Hall and the organizations built to back it. The Long Beach Economic Partnership exists to build "reliable pathways for entrepreneurs to confidently start and grow successful business," with a stated focus on advancing economic opportunity in the neighborhoods that get overlooked first when investment dollars move elsewhere (City of Long Beach). LBEP’s 2024 annual report frames the moment plainly, built around three priorities: technology and future focus, promotion and attraction, and support for the business and industry already here, with the 2028 Olympics adding real urgency to the timeline (Long Beach Economic Partnership).
"This is an exciting time to be a part of Long Beach and an even better time to join hands in creating a city that inspires, supports, and provides for each of our residents," said Randal Hernandez, LBEP Ambassador (qtd. in Long Beach Economic Partnership).
“This is an exciting time to be a part of Long Beach and an even better time to join hands in creating a city that inspires, supports, and provides for each of our residents.”
Randal Hernandez, LBEP Ambassador, qtd. in Long Beach Economic Partnership
That momentum sits on top of an economy that was never fragile to begin with. The Port of Long Beach alone supports roughly one in five local jobs, more than 51,000 of them, a 70 percent jump from 2004 (Port of Long Beach). A city with that kind of working backbone was always going to produce small businesses with the same stubborn staying power.
Why this is our kind of momentum
We don’t get credit for any of this. Retro Row, Bixby Knolls, and East Village built their own momentum long before we opened our doors down the street. But we recognize the pattern because it’s the one we build brands around every day: independent owners who refuse to blend in, who bet on themselves before anyone else placed that bet, and who earned the attention they’re finally getting instead of buying it.
Long Beach’s small business scene isn’t having a moment because it got lucky. It’s having a moment because it never stopped building through the years nobody was watching. That’s the kind of defiance worth backing.
