Zero Empty Spaces will turn the long-vacant Half Price Books at 2036 Shattuck Ave. into a temporary arts marketplace — a subsidized six-month deal, and the company's first project in California, in a downtown where the vacancy rate itself is disputed.

The Half Price Books at 2036 Shattuck Ave. in Downtown Berkeley — dark since the used-book chain closed the location last year — is set to reopen as an arts marketplace and gallery, the vacant-storefront operator Zero Empty Spaces said in an announcement last week reported by SFGATE. Local artists, makers and small businesses would sell handmade goods and art directly to the public in what the company and the Downtown Berkeley Association are pitching as a revival of one of the corridor's most visible empty windows, in the Addison Arts District.

Read past the release and it is a subsidized stopgap, not a signed tenant. Gordon Commercial Real Estate Services is providing the space at a discounted rate for an initial six months beginning in August, "while its long-term future is worked out," according to the announcement — meaning the arrangement carries no commitment past winter. It is also untested: Zero Empty Spaces describes itself as a national firm that typically fills vacant property with artist studios. The Berkeley marketplace is, by the company's own account, a new model for it — and its first project in California.

The activation lands in a downtown where the vacancy figure itself is contested. The city's economic dashboard put ground-floor commercial vacancy at 9.68% in the fourth quarter of 2025, down from 15.66% in 2021. But the Downtown Berkeley Association — the same business group helping facilitate this deal, alongside Visit Berkeley — has argued effective vacancy runs as high as 28% once storefronts tied to stalled development sites are counted. Arts and entertainment uses already occupy 15.34% of downtown ground-floor space, versus 4.46% citywide, so filling a marquee vacancy with more art is less a reinvention than a doubling-down on what downtown already is.

DBA chief executive John Canner said the group was proud to "transform one of Downtown's most visible vacant storefronts into a space that supports artists, encourages exploration, and brings new energy to the Addison Arts District."

What isn't settled is whether any of it outlasts the discount. The lease runs six months; neither the company nor the DBA has said what rent a permanent tenant would pay, or whether the marketplace's vendors would generate enough to become one. The date to watch is roughly February, when the subsidized term ends and 2036 Shattuck either signs a real tenant or goes dark again.