Katong is one of Singapore’s coolest streets—so why are so many shop units sitting empty?

The neighbourhood’s heritage charm hasn’t saved it from a growing vacancy problem

Walk down East Coast Road on a weekday afternoon, and you might notice something that doesn’t quite fit the postcard image of Katong: shuttered shopfronts, darkened interiors, and “For Rent” signs that have clearly been hanging there a while.

Katong is the area where Joo Chiat Road meets East Coast Road, and it’s known for its hipster vibes—heritage shophouses, popular cafés, and a neighbourhood energy that earned it a spot on Time Out‘s list of the world’s coolest streets in 2025.

But that reputation is increasingly at odds with what people are actually seeing on the ground.

The unexpected side of Katong finally spilt into public view when a Reddit post on r/singapore gained traction. User u/HB_SG asked a simple question: has anyone else noticed the growing number of vacant shop units around Katong?

“An endless parade of opening and closing”

What the discussion made clear is that the vacancies aren’t new.

Residents and visitors pointed to a growing number of units that have sat empty for extended periods, including several within i12 Katong.

The mall, located at the junction of East Coast Road and Joo Chiat Road, closed for renovations in 2020 and only reopened in 2022. Yet years later, some retail spaces remain unoccupied, while others have seen a steady churn of tenants come and go with little fanfare.

One commenter described it as an “endless parade of opening and closing.” Among the apparent casualties are Zero Healthcare, which relocated its East Coast Road showroom to Parkway Parade, and fried chicken brand Frosti Fck, whose last social media activity was a Nov 2025 post and whose Google listing now shows as closed.

Vulcan Post has reached out to both businesses for further comment, but has not received a response at the time of publication.

The Reddit thread kept circling back to one word: rent. One Redditor summed up the prevailing sentiment bluntly: “Rents, rents, rents, rents—no vacancy tax. If rents were halved, everything will be occupied.”

Others pointed to specific examples. One commenter claimed that several shophouses along Koon Seng Road have remained vacant for years despite strong demand in the area, arguing that landlords are holding out for rents that many businesses simply cannot afford.

The issue also appears to extend beyond Katong. In other parts of the East Coast region, including Siglap, rising rents have become a growing concern for business owners. In 2025, it even pushed out several long-running businesses, including Flor Patisserie.

The frustration about retail rents has even reached Parliament. In Apr 2026, Member of Parliament Elysa Chen raised the issue in the House, asking how the government reconciles official data which suggests rent has actually fallen as a share of business costs, with what retailers on the ground are experiencing.

DPM and MTI Minister Gan Kim Yong acknowledged the gap in his written reply: while aggregate rental costs for F&B dropped from 26% to 17% of total business costs between 2019 and 2024, he noted that “at the local level, rental costs can vary for retailers due to attributes such as proximity to key transport nodes or estates with high population density.”

In other words, national averages may look fine, but they reveal little about what an individual business owner is paying for a shophouse in a highly sought-after neighbourhood.

ERA’s 1H 2025 shophouse market report also noted that more F&B operators were shutting down, and that a weaker rental outlook might push some landlords, particularly those with less holding power, or private equity investors looking to exit, to start accepting lower rents.

But for many, that moment hasn’t come yet.

Beyond just rent

The vacant units around Katong are not the result of a single problem. Beyond rental costs, Redditors highlighted a range of factors that may be contributing to the area’s retail struggles.

Firstly, parking is a nightmare on Katong’s roads. The streets around the area are notoriously narrow—barely two car-widths in places—and roadside parking creates its own bottleneck. On weekends, cars are often caught waiting for a spot to free up, which puts people off before they’ve even stepped out of the vehicle.

Then there’s the heat. Katong’s charm is mostly outdoors, but the dense rows of shophouses create a concrete warming effect that traps heat and humidity. Browsing around on foot in the middle of the day is genuinely unpleasant for most of the year.

The layout of buildings themselves doesn’t help either. Narrow footprints, tight staircases, and without the climate-controlled comfort of a mall, browsing on foot in Singapore’s heat is already a hard sell. Moreover, bus services through the smaller back streets are also sparse, limiting how easily people can get there without a personal vehicle.

Lastly, the gradual gentrification has narrowed the appeal of Katong. Several commenters pointed out that the shop mix has drifted toward expensive, Instagram-friendly concepts—the kind of places influencers visit once for the photo, not twice for the overpriced food. When the locals themselves don’t want to patronise the local shops, the foot traffic problem starts to make a lot more sense.

On top of all that, these aren’t units you can just slap a fresh coat of paint on and hand to a tenant. Shophouses fall under conservation rules, meaning any renovation requires engaging a qualified person, submitting drawings to URA, getting conservation approval, and then separate BCA permits for structural work.

Restoring a “shell” unit can run between S$700 and S$1,000 psf before a single tenant moves in. With shophouses in Katong and Joo Chiat now trading at S$3,000 to S$5,000 psf and heritage-restored stock commanding roughly a 10% premium on top of that, many landlords simply cannot afford to drop rents without the entire investment falling apart.

Why landlords won’t budge

This is where the broader market context matters.

ERA’s data shows that landed shophouse transactions fell to just 34 in H1 2025, totalling S$234.7 million—the lowest half-year figure since 1998, and a steep fall from the peak of 245 transactions worth S$1.8 billion in 2021. District 15, which covers Katong and Joo Chiat, saw only four transactions in that period.

Many of the landlords sitting on empty units aren’t being stubborn for no reason—they’re caught in a bind.

For owners who bought at high prices, the rent they collect helps determine the property’s investment returns. Accepting a significantly lower rent may reduce their yield and potentially affect how the property is valued when they refinance or sell.

That creates a difficult trade-off: some landlords may prefer to wait for a tenant willing to pay closer to their asking price rather than lock in a lower rent that changes the financial assumptions behind the investment.

The problem is that prolonged vacancies carry their own costs. Empty storefronts can weaken a street’s vibrancy, reduce foot traffic, and eventually make it harder for landlords to attract the quality tenants needed to revive the area.

The empty units are hard to ignore

What the Reddit thread captured, more than any single data point, is a lived sense of mismatch: a neighbourhood with genuine heritage value and cultural cachet that isn’t consistently translating into a viable environment for the businesses trying to operate there.

Whether the fix requires lower rents, a vacancy tax to nudge landlords off the sideline, better infrastructure, or pedestrianising the area altogether, locals are clearly paying attention, and the patience for empty units is wearing thin.

For now, the “For Rent” signs stay up.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

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Featured Image Credit: u/HB_SG via Reddit/ Visit Singapore