Hong Kong’s top shopping district is on the verge of a vacancy crisis

Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, home to the most expensive shopping street in the world in 2018, is becoming littered with empty storefronts as three months of pro-democracy protests compound a retail slowdown in the city from earlier in the year. The South China Morning Post reports that 102 of 1,087 shops in the district were vacant in August, according to data from Midland IC&I, a Hong Kong-based real-estate agency. The agency’s director, Tony Lo, predicted that the vacancy rate would rise through next year.