Why New Businesses Are Clustering on Foothill Boulevard

Drive Foothill Boulevard through La Verne this month and count the new signs. A Sicilian sandwich counter. A coffee shop wedged between a Trader Joe's and a Jimmy John's. A third location for a Southern California brunch chain. A flight school at Brackett Field expanding into maintenance work. A locally owned grocery store hiring ahead of an opening this September. None of this reads like coincidence once you look at where it's landing.

What actually opened, and where

The specifics matter here, because a scattered list of openings and a genuine pattern look identical until you check the addresses.

• Sí Roma took over 1253 Foothill Boulevard in the Gateway Pointe center with an August 1 grand opening, serving Sicilian-style stirato sandwiches and house-made pesto. The brand already runs a counter inside Pokitomik in Glendale, so this isn't a first-time operator testing an idea. It's a working concept opening its second Southern California kitchen.
• Rev'd Up Coffee & Classics soft-opened June 1 at 2320 Foothill Boulevard, Suite B, in the strip between Trader Joe's and Jimmy John's.
• Haven Haus Cafe held its ribbon cutting July 7 at 1532 Foothill Boulevard. It's the brand's third location, joining existing cafes in Rancho Cucamonga and Temecula.
• A locally owned discount grocery store began hiring this summer ahead of a planned September opening, according to La Verne Daily News's business coverage, with plans built around deep discounts and what the outlet described as a community-first approach.
• At Brackett Field, an aviation company has expanded from aircraft sales and management into flight training and maintenance, adding a service line rather than a new storefront.
• A longtime family-owned service station on Foothill also marked a grand reopening this summer, the same season a seasonal Halloween retailer confirmed it's returning and hiring.

Several kinds of business activity surfaced around La Verne this summer, including on Foothill Boulevard and at Brackett Field.

Why this landed all at once

The city of La Verne answered this question before any of these businesses opened, in a page explaining how new business finds its way to town. The city's own projection put Old Town La Verne at effectively no vacancies by the end of 2025, with Foothill Boulevard overall running an anticipated 4.4 percent vacancy rate.

Read that number against what actually opened this summer and the pattern gets simpler. None of the new arrivals landed inside Old Town's core blocks. Sí Roma is in a shopping center. Rev'd Up Coffee is in a strip mall slot next to a Trader Joe's. Haven Haus is on Foothill Boulevard proper, not tucked into the D Street corridor where La Verne's older restaurant row sits. When the walkable core of a downtown has nothing left to lease, operators who still want a Foothill Boulevard address don't wait. They take the next available storefront on the same road, even if it means a parking lot instead of a sidewalk table.

That's a different story than "La Verne is popular right now." Plenty of Southern California cities are popular. Few of them can point to a city document stating their downtown core is functionally full, and then see several business changes unfold across La Verne within a single season. The vacancy number isn't background noise here. It helps explain why the storefront openings cluster along Foothill, while the summer's broader business activity also reached Brackett Field and included a returning seasonal retailer.

The one box still sitting empty

If that reading holds, the interesting question isn't what opened this summer. It's what's still standing empty, and why.

The former LA Fitness building at 1275 Foothill Boulevard sat vacant as of this spring, the largest unclaimed footprint left on that stretch of road. By late July, a proposal to convert it into a 24-hour fitness center was headed to the Planning Commission for a public hearing. That single detail says more about the corridor's tightness than another new coffee shop would. The city's projection of effectively no vacancies in Old Town didn't mean every space on Foothill was occupied. The fact that it took most of a season to draw a proposal, and that the use under consideration is another fitness concept rather than something entirely new, suggests operators are working with a genuinely short list of options rather than a wide one.

Put differently: this isn't a boulevard with room to spare where a big box happened to open recently. It's a boulevard where one large vacant building stood out, and the market spent the summer considering what to do with it.

What this means if you already live here

None of this changes anything about your mortgage or your home's value, and that's the point. This is a read on your own street, not a pitch about it.

Practically, it means the wave probably isn't over. If Old Town stays full and Foothill Boulevard stays this tight, the next new business is more likely to land in another strip center slot than in a storefront with a sidewalk view. It also means the businesses that did open aren't gambles by first-timers hoping La Verne works out. Sí Roma already has a working kitchen in Glendale. Haven Haus already runs two other locations and knows what a brunch crowd looks like on a Saturday. Those existing operations give context to their La Verne openings.

The tightening isn't limited to restaurants, either. Brackett Field, which the county reports handled more than 134,000 operations in 2025 and is home to nearly 300 based aircraft, is seeing its own tenants expand in place rather than move elsewhere. A city that's out of downtown storefronts and also seeing its general aviation tenants grow their footprint is a city where more than one part of the local economy is running at capacity at the same time.

If you're the kind of resident who tracks what's new on your own street the way some people track weather, that old LA Fitness box is worth watching. Whatever the Planning Commission ultimately decides, the building's eventual use will be one more sign of how the corridor is changing, and everything about this summer suggests it won't stay open for long.

For those weighing what any of this means for buying or selling nearby, Maureen Haney Real Estate tracks these shifts as part of daily work in the Foothill communities and can walk through what a tightening local business corridor tends to mean for property values in La Verne specifically. Request a personalized market consultation whenever you're ready to talk through it.