My pie in the sky dream would be for councils to buy high street shops, land and all, and rent them back with rent caps to small business owners. No more sky high business rates to worry about. Encourage small and medium size businesses to set up and grow their business up to a certain amount of turnover a year. Maybe that might reverse the trend in businesses abandoning the high street because there's no customers and customers abandoning the high street because the prices are sky high?

But who am I fooling? I live in Bristol and what we need is the council to fund building of a mega arena not even inside Bristol 🤷.

I'd be interested to see this broken down on whether the high street has been pedestrianised or not. There's high streets that are a busy road with shops, which I would avoid, and those that have been pedestrianised and are actually places where you can spend some time.

We need onerous vacancy taxes. Currently by my understanding, vacant property actually gets tax breaks.

It's been getting ridiculous around here.

Investors bought a lot of the commercial property a few years ago.
Rents went up a little, but the businesses could generally work out a deal they could afford.

Once the interest on lending went up, however, those investors are being squeezed.
What was £1000/m interest on a £1500/m rental is suddenly £3000/m. So they squeeze the businesses...Who understandably tell them it ain't going to happen.

One of these places closed recently near me. The shop went from full trading to everything closed in under a fortnight.
The "to let" page on the local commercial lettings site said that they were "aiming to find a similar artisanal tenant", or words to that effect.

So now it's empty, and a for sale board is up. No doubt at some point, it'll become our 29th phone repair shop.
(If anyone has good information on how those shops pop up, I'd be really interested. I've always assumed they're in for almost nothing, on a really short contract, so the landlord doesn't have to pay rates)

I would dearly love for the council to buy up commercial property, and give good deals to shops that add to a town.

Reminds me of this series "Turn Back Time" in which they took shops from the high street throughout the ages to show how they've disappeared, and that was filmed 10 years ago.

Link for the curious

Not from UK. Exactly what is a "high street"? Never heard this term before.

Wandering Turnip on YouTube does excellent videos about this

Remember it's not the landlords, it's the lack of parking