Anyone who’s walked past a shuttered plaza unit with a sun-bleached “For Lease” sign knows the feeling. In a thread posted to r/londonontario, one person trying to find commercial space put it plainly: some units are listing at over $10,000 a month, and the process of even getting basic information out of landlords can feel like a full-time job.
The frustration isn’t new, but it keeps compounding. One person described searching for space for three years with nothing to show for it. Another called a number posted across three vacant units, reached what sounded like an answering machine from a previous era, and was met with the question “and what do you think you are opening in them?” before getting any details about size or price.
The vacancy picture is part of what makes this so maddening. There are units sitting empty for six months or more, and yet the asking prices aren’t dropping. Several people in the discussion pointed to why: for larger commercial landlords, a property’s value is tied to the rent it commands on paper, not whether anyone is actually in it. Keeping rents artificially high, even through vacancy, can protect or inflate the assessed value of the building. The tenant is almost beside the point.
Small, independent businesses get the worst of it. One person laid it out clearly: commercial landlords prefer leases backed by a corporate covenant, something a national chain or franchise can offer and a two-year-old independent business simply cannot. The risk premium gets passed directly to the small operator in the form of higher rent, worse terms, and less negotiating power.
The lease terms themselves are a separate problem. One person described opening a production kitchen outside the city with a four-page lease and a handshake, only to have the building sell to out-of-town owners who arrived with a document full of open-ended clauses, including provisions for extra rent with no cap and no clear trigger. Another described a lease that nearly doubled at renewal, forcing a closure after the business had survived COVID and was finally turning a profit. The unit is now a pharmacy, a.k.a. methadone clinic.
Then there’s the squeeze mid-lease. One person described a friend whose plaza landlord raised rent by $1,000 with one month’s notice. Another friend kept the same rent but lost a third of their space when the landlord carved off a section for a new tenant. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re the reason a shawarma costs $15, as one person put it.
Zoning came up as a factor too. London’s rules around where commercial activity is permitted are, by multiple accounts, strict enough to quietly kill off the kind of scrappy, mixed-use retail that keeps smaller cities feeling alive. Someone asked why Stratford seems to sustain so many independent shops and couldn’t figure out the formula. Zoning flexibility and municipal appetite for small-business density are likely part of it, though that’s not spelled out in any source here.
The most discussed potential fix was a commercial vacancy tax, the idea being that landlords sitting on empty units would face a cost for doing so, creating pressure to lower rents and fill spaces. Supporters argued it would bring private equity out of the warehousing business and get occupancy up. Skeptics pushed back hard, arguing it would just get passed to tenants in the form of higher rents, and that the math doesn’t work the way vacancy-tax advocates think it does. The thread ended with the two sides still disagreeing.
Our take: the vacancy tax debate is worth having at city hall, not just on Reddit. London’s downtown has enough empty storefronts to make the argument for intervention, and the current system clearly isn’t self-correcting. Whether a tax is the right tool or not, the status quo of half-year vacancies at $10,000-plus asking prices isn’t working for anyone except the people who’ve decided it is.
One person summed up the ceiling on all of this: there’s a building available right now in a central area for $379,000, and their threshold for buying it was a $100,000 price drop. That gap between what landlords are asking and what would actually move the market is where most of London’s commercial ambitions are quietly dying.