9 Vacancies, 14 Months, Zero Empty Storefronts: Centerville's Business Recruitment Story

A downtown with nine empty storefronts doesn't stay stuck quietly. It pulls other businesses toward the exit, discourages new ones from considering the neighborhood at all, and sends a message to every passerby: something is wrong here. By fall 2023, that was Centerville's situation on two blocks of Main Street. Nine units vacant. Some dark for eight months. One for nearly three years, since the pandemic-era closure of a long-running pottery studio that never reopened.

The standard playbook wasn't working. Listings were posted on commercial real estate sites. There had been a social media push. A couple of ribbon-cutting announcements that never materialized into signed leases. The street wasn't recovering on its own.

What changed things wasn't money, though some funding was involved. What changed things was strategy. Specifically: instead of waiting for the right tenants to find the spaces, the Main Street Centerville team went out and found the tenants first.

Why Passive Vacancy Management Stops Working

Most downtown vacancy efforts are passive by design. Post a listing. Do some outreach. Hold events to drive foot traffic and hope visibility converts to lease inquiries. That works when a market is healthy and the right tenant just needs to discover an opening. It stops working when the vacancy cluster itself has become the barrier.

Prospective tenants visit a block and see empty windows. They hesitate. They look elsewhere. The vacancies self-reinforce. Research from the National Main Street Center consistently shows that concentrated vacancies depress activity in surrounding businesses by reducing perceived safety and destination value. The effect compounds: the longer units stay empty, the harder they are to fill, because the vacancy signals that the location isn't viable.

Centerville had fallen into that trap on its 400 and 500 blocks. Nine units. An aggregate void that was visible from both ends of downtown. The team knew a different approach was needed.

Phase 1: Know What You Have and What You Need

Before reaching out to a single prospect, Main Street Centerville staff spent six weeks doing two things: auditing the available spaces honestly, and asking the community what was missing.

The space audit was not flattering. Of the nine vacant units:

• Three were move-in ready with no issues
• Two had layout problems (one was long and narrow, one had a step-up entrance that created accessibility complications)
• Two needed HVAC upgrades to support food service
• One had a complicated ownership structure, two estates, one unresolved
• One had an asking rent roughly 30 percent above comparable units on adjacent blocks

That last one matters. Overpriced listings are often invisible to prospective tenants who screen by price range and never even look at the space. The property owner was anchored to a 2019 rate. The market had moved. Nobody had told them clearly enough.

The community survey ran for four weeks and collected 410 responses. Research from the University of Wisconsin Extension's downtown development resources suggests that communities conducting formal demand surveys before recruitment consistently outperform those relying on staff assumptions alone. Centerville's numbers backed that up quickly: the survey results reshaped their entire outreach strategy.

These weren't surprising findings. But having them documented and quantified changed the recruitment conversations that followed. When you tell a prospective tenant "there are 14,000 people in this trade area and 61 percent of them said they want exactly what you do," that lands differently than "we think downtown could use a restaurant."

Phase 2: Going to Find the Tenants

The recruitment push targeted two categories: established entrepreneurs who were ready to open a storefront but hadn't committed to a location yet, and promising operators still in early stages who needed a push and a path.

For the first category, the team identified eight food entrepreneurs in the region who had been running successful pop-up operations, catering companies, or home-based food businesses. Not restaurants looking for a second location. Individuals with proven concepts who had been doing the work without a permanent home.

One was a woman who had spent two years running a Sunday brunch pop-up from a church kitchen forty minutes outside town. She sold out every weekend for eighteen months. She had a following, a menu, and an aesthetic. She was profitable on a one-day-a-week model. What she lacked was a permanent space and someone to show her one was available and actually workable.

The Main Street team invited her to walk two of the available units. One had the HVAC issue. They talked through it directly: here is what the buildout would cost, here is how the Facade Improvement Grant could offset part of the exterior work, here is what the landlord has already agreed to contribute toward ventilation as a tenant improvement allowance. She signed a lease in the fourth month of the program.

That individualized approach was repeated for every space. A couple who sold handmade furniture at regional craft fairs got paired with the long, narrow unit. The layout that had scared off retail prospects turned out to be perfect for a gallery-style display where large pieces could be staged with room to walk around them. They needed a space like that. They hadn't been looking in Centerville.

For the family activity space, the team reached out to two board game cafe owners in larger nearby cities who had mentioned publicly that they were looking to expand to a smaller-market location. One came for a visit, reviewed the trade area demographics and school enrollment numbers, and talked through event foot traffic patterns with staff. He is now eighteen months into a lease and has hired four part-time staff.

The Open 4 Business program served as the connective tissue for many of these conversations. License guidance, connections to local lenders, introductions to the Chamber, a checklist so nothing got missed in the setup process. Entrepreneurs who feel supported commit. The ones who feel like they're figuring it out alone stall out or look elsewhere.

The Hard Cases

Four of the nine spaces required problem-solving before recruitment could even begin.

The two units with HVAC issues needed capital. The team worked with the building owners to structure leases where tenant improvement allowances covered a meaningful portion of the ductwork, with the Business Development program helping connect incoming tenants with bridge financing for remaining fit-out costs.

The overpriced unit got a frank conversation. The Main Street coordinator brought a commercial broker's market rate analysis to the property owner and presented it directly. "Here is what comparable spaces are leasing for. Here is what prospective tenants are budgeting. Here is the gap." No judgment. Just numbers. The owner adjusted the rate. A specialty spice and pantry shop signed within six weeks.

The estate-ownership complication was the slowest. Two heirs, different opinions about whether to sell or hold, communication going through lawyers. The Main Street team didn't try to resolve the legal question. They kept a prospective tenant warm with updates, facilitated one meeting between the heirs and city economic development staff, and made clear that a ready tenant was waiting. The property changed hands in month eleven. A neighborhood barbershop that had been cramped in a strip mall suite signed the lease and moved in by month fourteen.

What the Numbers Showed

At the fourteen-month mark, Main Street Centerville conducted a follow-up review across all nine filled units. The results:

• 22 net new jobs created, full-time and part-time combined
• Average lease length across the nine tenants: 3.2 years
• Downtown sales tax revenue on the 400 and 500 blocks: up 21 percent year-over-year
• Pedestrian counts on the two blocks: up 29 percent during weekday lunch hours
• Four of nine tenants cited the Open 4 Business program as important to their decision to commit

The most telling data point wasn't financial. In a follow-up community survey at month fifteen, 74 percent of respondents who had previously said they "rarely" or "never" visited that stretch of downtown now reported visiting "occasionally" or "frequently." Perception had shifted. Not because of advertising. Because the block looked occupied, alive, and worth visiting.

That is the mechanism passive vacancy management misses. You don't fill spaces just to generate rent. You fill them to change what people believe is possible on that street.

What Other Downtowns Can Take From This

Centerville's approach wasn't complicated or expensive. It was methodical. Here is what worked:

Do the market research before starting outreach. Knowing specifically what residents wanted to see made every recruitment conversation stronger. Don't guess. Ask. The survey cost almost nothing and shaped everything that followed.

Be honest about each space's problems. Knowing the issues with each unit before showing it to prospects let the team get ahead of objections instead of being blindsided. Prospects trust you more when you identify the challenge before they do.

Go to the entrepreneurs instead of waiting for them. Pop-up operators, craft fair vendors, home-based food businesses: these are people with proven concepts and customer bases who haven't made the storefront leap yet. They often need an invitation more than anything else. If you're curious about how to structure that invitation, our piece on pop-ups vs. permanent storefronts covers what operators are weighing when they make the decision.

Treat the hard cases as solvable problems. Ownership complications, overpriced rents, and buildout barriers all have solutions. Walking away from them just means the vacancy persists. Staying with the hard ones is the work.

For towns considering a similar push, the Main Street America network provides frameworks and peer learning designed for communities at every stage of this kind of work. The U.S. Small Business Administration also maintains tools for downtown business development that are underused by most local programs. And if you're just starting the process of thinking through what your downtown actually needs, the guide to starting a downtown business walks through the fundamentals from the entrepreneur's side of the table.

The vacancy problem looks different from every angle: property owner, prospective tenant, community member, program staff. The approach that worked here recognized all of those perspectives and built a process that moved each one forward. That is the work. And it is very doable.

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