Where is the spending?

Last Saturday I had a couple of hours to spare and went for a walk around Fortitude Valley, the inner city area which has had a lot of urban development in the last 10 to 20 years.  It was a beautiful Brisbane late winter's day for being outside.

I went down to the Emporium shopping and restaurant area, which is surrounded by new to new-ish apartments, a pretty upmarket hotel, and used to be very popular for mid range restaurants:  

 

 This is what one of the large, outdoor eating areas look like now:

It also used to have an upmarket deli (many years ago, when it first opened.)  That has been replaced by a Chemists Warehouse.

The place still has one upmarket restaurant (an Italian one which we ate at last year - it was OK, but I didn't think particularly good value for money).   But the other eating places left are decidedly more downmarket - a Guzman & Gomez, a Grill'd hamburger joint (and a second burger joint), as well as (I think) a teppanyaki place that is somehow still surviving.

I then walked further down the road to a shopping centre that contains a Harvey Norman and a furniture store.  They were extremely quiet in terms of the number of shoppers.

This area has had huge development in the last 20 years - Teneriffe is a very nice, riverside suburb within walking distance of these shopping and eating areas, too, that has had many large highrise apartments blocks opening continuously in recent years - but it seems that the increase in residential living in this part of Brisbane just has not been enough to sustain the commercial centres opening within it.

And don't get me started on the nearby Chinatown mall - it was attempted to be revived by a re-design about 10 years ago too, and it is nearly completely dead.  A mere handful of restaurants left now, it seems.

This obvious lack of spending in an area of town that used to looked to be doing well only a few years ago seems a very bad sign to me as to what is going on economically in Australia.

It certainly gives a sense that discretionary spending is way, way down, and that funds that have invested in commercial retail developments must be doing much, much worse than they ever expected only 5 years ago.

I do not think there is much confidence in most aspects of the economy.

Update:  I forgot to mention, across the road from Emporium there was a yum cha restaurant that opened a couple of years ago in a pretty new building.  It was large, seemed busy on the couple of times we ate there, and had parking beneath the building.   I liked it.   It has closed, and the landlord is trying to lease it again as a retail/display space - not even as restaurant or food outlet.   (What must have been a pretty extensive kitchen has been completely removed - I could see inside the building.)