Walk south from Florence Avenue on a Tuesday afternoon and the sidewalk tells two stories at once. Half the storefronts are papered over. The other half are getting fresh paint, new signage, and in a few cases up to a quarter of a million dollars in state grant money to finish the job. Market Street is the block residents have been waiting on for a decade, and 2026 is the year the city stopped waiting.
The thing worth understanding, if you live here, is that the transformation is not a rising tide. It is a sorting. Some longtime businesses are being funded to stay. Others are being priced out on the same timeline. The forcing function is not organic demand. It is a calendar of global events that begins this summer and ends at the 2028 Olympics.
The $8.5 Million Ledger
In March, the Inglewood City Council voted 4-0 to move forward with plans to split $8.5 million in state grant money between Market Street businesses for renovation projects. The program has a name, Destination Market Street, and a model that echoes the Destination Crenshaw work already underway a few miles east.
Seven restaurants have already been approved for grants of up to $250,000 each:
- Little Belize
- Randy's Donuts and Chinese
- Keokia's Kitchen
- Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen
- The Wood Urban Kitchen
- Rosalie's Caribbean Cuisine
- The Toast & Jam, a Southern-style restaurant pending approval for a $250,000 grant for storefront renovations
The city plans to award 16 restaurants and nearly 20 other businesses with grants of up to $250,000 each for exterior and interior renovations, and nine more restaurants have been approved for grant funding pending final documents. The money can be used for facades, signage, kitchens, or interiors, which means what you see from the sidewalk this fall will not look like what you saw last fall.
Mayor James T. Butts has been direct about the ambition. "The purpose is to have Market Street, which used to be downtown Inglewood, regain its luster and attractiveness. We want to make it Wall Street, Third Street, Old Town Pasadena."
Who Didn't Make the Cut
The grant list is the optimistic half of the story. The other half is on the same block.
Amanda-Jane Thomas opened Sip & Sonder coffee shop with co-owner Shanita Nicholas on Market Street in 2019 and was forced to close in December 2025 after being rejected for a grant, and she said there could have been more transparency surrounding the project timeline, process, criteria and guidelines. The shop had held a flagship spot on the corridor for seven years and functioned as one of the few daytime gathering places on the street.
Stuff I Eat, a vegan restaurant that had served the corridor for close to two decades, is closing on a different mechanism. Owner Babette Davis said the restaurant was ineligible for the grant due to not having a lease, and the vegan restaurant that has served as a local staple on Market Street for nearly 20 years will close on April 26, after a corporation purchased the building and increased the rent.
The pattern residents should watch: the grant program rewards businesses that have signed leases, which rewards landlords who signed them, which arrives at the same time property is trading hands at higher prices. If you own a home nearby, that is the mechanism sharpening your block. If you rent commercial space on Market, it is the mechanism reshaping who your neighbors will be by 2027.
Jeffrey Psalms, who owns the Cuban Leaf Cigar Lounge on the corridor, put the current state plainly. "It's a ghost town for the most part." He estimated half of the storefronts around his lounge are vacant.
The Deadline Nobody Talks About
Ask why now, and the answer is on a wall calendar.
A transformation for Market Street is becoming urgent, with Inglewood hosting L.A.'s World Cup matches in June, Super Bowl LXI in 2027 and the Olympics in 2028, and the city has launched an $8.5-million state grant program to help revitalize the corridor with hopes of attracting more visitors to Market Street ahead of the major events. Inglewood is aiming to have all of its Market Street beautification efforts done in advance of the Olympics.
That is a compressed timeline for construction of any kind, and it is running parallel to a transit build. City leaders are timing their beautification efforts to coincide with a hopeful boost in foot traffic from the planned Inglewood Transit Connector, and the city is currently moving to take over the shopping mall on Market Street and Florence Avenue for the transit station. If you live within walking distance of the northern end of Market, expect the intersection at Florence to be a construction zone for the foreseeable future, and expect the mall footprint to become something else entirely.
What Opened While Market Street Waited
The imbalance residents feel between the corridor and the Hollywood Park side of town is not imagined. It is measurable in ribbon cuttings.
Around SoFi Stadium and Intuit Dome in the last twelve months:
- Raising Cane's opened its first California flagship restaurant in Inglewood on June 22, 2026, bringing a stadium-sized experience to Los Angeles ahead of the summer's biggest matches. It sits at 3895 W. Century Blvd. in Hollywood Park, directly across from Intuit Dome and minutes from SoFi Stadium and YouTube Theater.
- Lounge 1888 opened in January 2026 inside the Intuit Dome ahead of the 2026 NBA All-Star Game, which was scheduled to take place at the Intuit Dome on Feb. 15.
- Kali Hotel and Rooftop, a luxury hotel under Marriott's Autograph Collection, is getting ready to open in Inglewood at Hollywood Park near SoFi Stadium, with developers expecting to debut the property in September 2026. It will feature multiple dining components, including a rooftop restaurant and bar, a full-service lobby bar, and an all-day dining concept for hotel guests and visitors.
- On the Century Boulevard gateway, a dual-branded Applebee's and IHOP opened its doors on June 9 as the first Applebee's IHOP in the LA area, located at 4410 W. Century Blvd. and open 24/7.
- On the grocery front, Sprouts Farmers Market was set to open its first store in the city on Crenshaw Boulevard on July 10, later updated to August 21, months after the Food 4 Less on Century closed at the end of March.
Six openings in a mile-wide radius, on a corridor that was already busy. That is the baseline against which Market Street's own progress will get measured, and it is why the grant program reads urgent rather than ceremonial.
Where to Actually Spend an Evening on Market Right Now
The stretch is not empty. It is uneven. A few anchors worth knowing:
Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen. Open since 1999, Dulan's is located near downtown Market Street on E. Manchester Boulevard. Owner Terry Dulan has been watching the corridor since the Lakers played at the Forum, and his read on the slow decline of the district starts with their move downtown in 1999.
Nile Bar and the Miracle Theatre. The Urban Land Institute's spring tour of the corridor ended at both, with a walk down Market Street stopping at Nile Bar and the Miracle Theatre for complimentary drinks and appetizers and live jazz music. If you live in Inglewood and have never been inside the Miracle, this is the year to fix that.
The Astra. A 242-unit market-rate residential project with a Target and CVS anchors the newer end of the corridor. The block around it is where residents will feel the shift first.
Cuban Leaf Cigar Lounge. Psalms is one of the more quoted voices on Market Street's arc. His lounge stays busy, he says, on a stream of out-of-town visitors. Worth a stop if only to hear how the block used to sound.
The through line for a resident is this: the businesses named on the grant list are the ones the city is betting on to still be there in 2028. The ones that already closed, or are closing this spring, are the cost of moving that fast. If you have lived here longer than five years, you already know which side of that line each block is on. If you have moved in more recently, the grant list is a rough map of what the corridor will look like when the World Cup crowds arrive.
If This Is Your Block
Market Street is not the whole city, but what happens on it in the next eighteen months will set the tone for property along the Manchester, La Brea, and Crenshaw corridors that feed into it. If you own nearby and are curious what the sorting means for your address specifically, Keyholder Estates has watched Inglewood through more than one cycle. Reach out for a current read on your home's value before the next grant cycle prices it.
