Disclaimer: The following article was provided by The Executive Committee of the Shiloh Hills neighborhood. The opinions are their own and not necessarily those of Inland Northwest Business Watch.
The Clock Is Ticking on Spokane's Commercial Core
Spokane's business community faces a convergence of economic pressures that don't get discussed together nearly enough — and the timeline for acting is shorter than most people realize.
The most concrete threat is the North Spokane Corridor. When it opens around 2030, a significant share of the 50,000-plus vehicles currently moving daily along Division Street will bypass the corridor entirely. That's not a traffic statistic. Those are lunch customers, errand runners, and impulse shoppers — the daily foot traffic that keeps thousands of Spokane businesses viable. History is unambiguous about what happens next. When Interstate 40 bypassed Route 66 in the 1970s, commercial activity along that corridor collapsed within months. The same story played out along US 99 in California's Central Valley. Division Street is Spokane's version of that corridor, and the ribbon-cutting is roughly four years away.
What makes this moment genuinely urgent is that the NSC doesn't arrive in a vacuum. It lands on top of forces already squeezing Spokane's commercial districts right now.
Downtown's Class B and C office vacancy rate hit 28% in early 2025, up from 19.7% just two years earlier. That translates to roughly 2,000 fewer workers per day spending money in the core — at restaurants, coffee shops, retail stores, and service businesses that built their models around that foot traffic. That customer base isn't coming back. Remote work isn't a phase. It's a structural shift, and the businesses that haven't adjusted yet are running out of runway.
Layer on top of that a national retail environment recording more than 8,200 store closures in 2025 alone. When major anchors like Macy's and Walgreens reassess their portfolios, locations in markets with declining traffic counts get cut first. And when an anchor leaves, the independent businesses around it lose the gravitational pull that brought customers to that block.
Then there's the friction that's already keeping residents away today. Parking costs tip the calculus against downtown trips for price-sensitive shoppers. Spokane's city sales tax puts local merchants at a disadvantage against suburban alternatives and e-commerce. And a growing segment of residents simply describe reluctance to come into the city at all, citing safety concerns and a sense that the environment has become unwelcoming. Perception, whether or not it matches statistical reality, functions exactly like reality for businesses that depend on customers choosing to show up.
None of these forces is new. What's new is their convergence — and the fact that Spokane actually has the rare advantage of knowing this is coming, and roughly when.
That window won't stay open. Business associations, city officials, property owners, and anchor tenants need to be at the table before the NSC ribbon is cut, not scrambling after the first wave of closures. The planning that should have started yesterday needs to start now.
The North Spokane Corridor is scheduled to open around 2030. Division Street currently carries more than 50,000 vehicles per day
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