More than half of the office buildings downtown are empty, and the ones that do have something only have a business in a handful of offices on a handful of floors.
Because of that, people started moving away because of lack of nearby jobs.
As people moved away, rents increased in both commercial and residential spaces to cover losses.
Library attendance and checkouts are way down.
Public transportation use is down.
Tax revenue in the city is down, which means less support for public services.
Landlords don't increase rents to "cover losses". That's not a real thing that happens. Rents are set at the market rate, with some variance and time lag for price discovery.
No, that's not how it works. You're just making things up. There's no such thing as a "silent understanding" with a bank. Either that's a covenant in the loan terms or it's not.
I spent 3 years renting a commercial property that subsidized the rest of the property locations. As soon as my business left, the building and rest of the tenants were gone within 3 months.
Cities wax and wane. A commenter a couple posts up in this chain (fwiw, they were arguing on the “there is a decline” side) shared a story with a 5% decrease. That’s not nothing, but it isn’t an extreme decline.
This largely isn't true. If you talk to people who work in nightlife and have for a while, they will tell you that patronage is down significantly over the past couple decades.
If you do actually go to a bar or club, you'll even notice nobody is dancing. People don't even dance anymore.
But if you don't want to believe me, we do actually have statistics. Young people are drinking less than ever and having less sex than ever. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but if people aren't fucking and drinking - why would they be going to bars? To play Scrabble?
What social venues? We don't have clubs anymore. There's no young men's club I can go to like my grandfathers.
Where I'm sitting, there are no social places, just corporate hellscapes. You're correct, mom and pop is gone. But it's replaced by big chains, who want you in and out and give nothing to their community.,
Restaurants, cafes, bars and night clubs, courses, all styles of workout places to name a few.
Personalized and interesting is the name of the name of the game. Big chains have been stagnant or even reducing for a while now here.
There’s also an endless list of non profit organizations where a good cause and the social interactions are the goal.
But I can very much see that the old school genderized social clubs are dying. That niche is dead with our less segregated modern generations, and it is good that it is.
