Bloom St.

The opportunity

• Australia's outer-suburban main streets are quietly failing.
• Vacancy rates in places like Frankston are climbing, foot traffic is thinning, and the longer a shopfront sits dark the faster the rest of the area follows.
• The standard market response, waiting for a full-time tenant at full-time rent, is structurally too slow for the speed at which these places are declining.

There is a much cheaper, much faster lever sitting right in front of us: put creative and emerging businesses into those empty tenancies now, on flexible terms, and let them do the work of making the strip worth visiting again.

This pitch is to fund Bloom St., the pilot of that lever in Frankston.

The problem we're solving

• Empty shops are contagious. One dark window depresses the value, rent, and footfall of every business next to it. Strips tip from "quiet" to "avoided" surprisingly fast.
• The economics are stuck. Landlords hold out for full-rate, long-lease tenants. Emerging creatives and young businesses can't afford full-rate, long-lease terms. So the space stays empty, often for years, while both sides lose.
• The cultural cost is real. The people most locked out are exactly the people who would make these places vibrant: young founders, artists, makers, first-time retailers, migrant entrepreneurs, community groups.
• Frankston in particular is a city the state keeps promising to revitalise. Big plans, slow delivery. Meanwhile the main street keeps losing tenants.

The solution: Bloom St.

Bloom St. is the working name for a simple, replicable activation model:

1. Negotiate activation licences with property owners on vacant shopfronts, terminable on 2 weeks' notice so landlords retain full flexibility to sign a long-term tenant at any time.
2. Place curated tenants into those spaces at deeply subsidised rent (~$150/week): young businesses, creative practitioners, community initiatives, pop-ups, makers.
3. Wrap it in proper infrastructure: public liability insurance, refundable bond, utilities, condition standards, light-touch curation. This is what makes it credible to landlords and councils, not a handshake.
4. Use Council as a guarantor / partner to de-risk the arrangement for property owners. (Christopher sits on the Frankston Arts Advisory Committee and will drive this.)
5. Document and measure everything: vacancies activated, businesses supported, foot traffic shifts, tenancies converted to permanent leases. The model becomes evidence, not anecdote.

The net effect: empty shops become lit, occupied, and interesting. The strip becomes more attractive to long-term tenants. The creatives inside get a runway they could never otherwise afford. Everyone wins, and the landlord keeps the option to take the space back at two weeks' notice.

Why this fits Tripple

Tripple backs capital that creates real-world change. Not abstract ESG, but practical interventions that move social and economic indicators. This program sits squarely in that thesis:

• Place & housing-adjacent impact. High street vacancy is the commercial cousin of the housing crisis: the same market failure of supply, access, and affordability playing out at retail scale. Activating these spaces is a small but tangible answer to "who gets to participate in the economy of a place?"
• Equity of access. The people who benefit most are the ones currently priced out of commercial space: emerging founders, artists, first-generation business owners, community groups. This is access to economic infrastructure, not charity.
• Outer-suburban focus. Frankston is not inner Melbourne. The cultural and capital attention that gets lavished on Fitzroy or Collingwood doesn't reach here. Tripple backing this signals that impact capital takes outer suburbs seriously.
• Leverage. A small amount of catalytic capital unlocks much larger value: landlord goodwill, council backing, in-kind contribution from tenants, and the compounding effect of an activated strip lifting every neighbour.
• Replicable. If this works in Frankston, the exact same playbook runs in Dandenong, Footscray, Geelong, Logan, Elizabeth, Penrith. The model, the licence template, the council-engagement pattern. All portable.

This model works. It's been proven overseas.

We're not inventing the mechanic. We're importing one that's been running in Europe for two decades.

Antikraak (Amsterdam, since early 2000s). Intermediaries place tenants in vacant buildings on cheap, flexible, short-notice licences. Owners get the space protected; tenants get affordable space. Now recognised in Dutch policy as a legitimate vacancy-reduction tool.[1][2]

Hypha Studios (London, UK-wide). Charity matching artists with vacant commercial property, with 40+ locations including Euston Tower, Fenchurch Street, Kentish Town, Hastings. Funded by the Rothschild Foundation; covered by the NYT as a "win-win loophole."[3][4][5]

Meanwhile Space (London). Social enterprise pioneering "meanwhile use" with councils, landlords, and Transport for London. The GLA has published formal policy on meanwhile use as a high-street revitalisation tool.[6][7]

The common pattern: a small, well-run intermediary, funded by philanthropic or public capital to carry the insurance, legal, and admin layer, unlocks dozens of vacant spaces at a time.

What's different about the Frankston version

• Outer-suburban, not inner-city. Antikraak and Hypha largely operate in dense, culturally hot cities. The harder (and more valuable) test is whether the model works in an outer suburb that doesn't already have creative gravity.
• Retail precinct focus. Specifically targeting shopfronts on a main street, not warehouses or office towers, so the activation directly lifts an entire commercial precinct.
• Council partnership built in. Using the Frankston Arts Advisory Committee position to bring Council in as guarantor from day one, rather than retrofitting municipal support later.
• Designed to scale across Australia. Built from the start as a playbook for other councils and funders to pick up, not a one-off.

The Bloom St. pilot

Scope: 2–4 shopfronts on Frankston's main retail strip, activated over 12 months under the Bloom St. banner.

Possible mechanics per tenancy:

• Rent:~$150/week to landlord (subsidised by program where needed)
• Bond: 3 months' rent, held refundable. Funded and administered by the program, not the tenant.
• Notice: 2 weeks, either side
• Insurance: full public liability cover in place before occupation. Carried by the program.
• Legal: licence agreement, landlord negotiation, and tenant onboarding handled by program-funded legal support
• Outgoings: electricity and utilities paid by tenant
• Condition: space returned as received
• Council backing sought as guarantor via the Frankston Arts Advisory Committee

What we'll measure:

• Vacant weeks eliminated
• Businesses / creatives supported (with demographic detail: age, background, first-time founder rate)
• Foot traffic delta on the strip
• Conversions to permanent tenancy
• Landlord and council willingness to renew / expand the program
• Cost per activated week. The unit economics of the model.

What we're asking Tripple for

A modest catalytic grant or programmatic investment to fund the connective tissue that makes the model possible: the things emerging tenants cannot carry themselves, and the things landlords need to see in place before they'll say yes.

• Public liability insurance covering every activated tenancy for the life of the pilot
• Bond pool & administration. The program puts up and manages the 3-month bond on each shopfront, so tenants aren't gated out by upfront capital.
• Legal support. Drafting the activation licence template, negotiating with landlords, handling variations and terminations cleanly.
• Rent subsidy pool for the pilot tenancies
• Light curation and tenant onboarding. Selecting tenants, briefing them, making sure the strip-level mix works.
• Measurement, documentation, and a public-facing case study at the end of year one

This is the unlock. Insurance, bond, and legal are exactly the barriers that keep this kind of activation from happening at scale today. Landlords won't entertain it without them, and emerging creatives can't afford them. Tripple funding this piece is what turns a good idea into a working program.

The outcome is a proven, documented, transferable model (Bloom St.) for activating dead retail strips using creative tenants, owned in the open, available for other councils, funders, and operators to pick up and run.

Next step

A 30-minute call to:

1. Pressure-test the model against Tripple's impact thesis
2. Scope the pilot size and grant structure
3. Agree on measurement, reporting, and what a year-one success looks like

Contact: chris@tuna.studio · 0415 694 309

About me

I'm Christopher Costuna, a Frankston-based advertising and innovation leader, and founder of Tuna, a product and communications consultancy working with clients including NAB, AGL, Adidas, Barwon Water, CoreLogic, and others across financial services, energy, defence, health, and utilities.

I sit on the Frankston Arts Advisory Committee and care about seeing outer-suburban main streets become active, creative, and commercially healthy again. This program is the practical version of that conviction. Turning vacant tenancies into something the whole strip, and a much wider set of people, benefit from.