America’s Empty Downtowns
Near the university, things hum, but at the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, the streets are empty.
On Wednesday, a couple of friends and I went out for a bite to eat in downtown San Francisco. (I think it was near Chinatown, but my friend was leading me on a zigzagging walking tour and I might be off by a neighborhood.) It was a beautiful evening in an ostensibly bustling city. Yet as we walked around, the streets were sparsely peopled and cars passed sporadically. Jaywalking was a snap. At the restaurant, we were one of just three occupied tables. After a slice of cheesecake by famed, 88-year-old Sam Zanze, we stepped out into the night to discover a largely deserted city.
This seems typical in America in the autumn of 2021. In the past month, I’ve spent time in downtowns throughout the country, and they seem to range from sort-of normal (Chicago) to eerily post-apocalyptic (Minneapolis). I’ve gotten used to wandering into three-lane streets without even looking up—silence tells me no cars are around. Covid isn’t over by a long shot, but many parts of cities have returned to reasonable levels of activity. Traffic is getting bad again, bars and restaurants are open, and pedestrians dot the sidewalks. Nothing is fully back to pre-Covid levels; roads and restaurants seem to be running at about 80% of their 2019 averages. But they feel like cities again. In America’s downtowns, though, it feels much more mid-Covid.
This may be a big deal. Downtowns are focal points for cities. They form the core of our collective space—where we place parks, plazas, museums, and government offices, and where businesses locate private gathering spaces like hotels, stadiums, and offices. Businesses occupy the ground levels of soaring buildings, providing the throngs with meals, bottles of water, coffee, pints of beer, and souvenirs. These spaces were designed and built with crowds in mind. Together they form an urban ecosystem that works because enough people visit to support them.
For decades, the finite blocks forming urban cores contained a city’s most valuable real estate, fetching leases north of $50 a square foot in the swankiest neighborhoods. Yet this may be why downtowns were so vulnerable. As wealth coagulated at the top of skyscrapers, it fed a market for exclusive shopping districts, expensive restaurants, and luxe boutiques. I noticed how this skewed downtown Portland to older tastes. If you wanted to put on a jacket and sit down to a hundred-dollar meal at a French restaurant, you went downtown. You might catch a highbrow concert or lecture at the Schnitz. On the other hand, if you were after a $20 plate of something unusual by a cutting-edge chef, you went to the east side. Fifteen years ago, all the traffic was flowing into downtown from the outer neighborhoods. Now it flows into the eastside from the suburbs—and downtown. It’s not just Portland, either—call it the Brooklynization of American cities. Manhattan is for the uber-rich; Brooklyn (and lately Queens) is for families, young artists, and craftspeople.
The dynamic is different from the White flight of the 1950s and 60s. People aren’t leaving cities for the suburbs; they’re switching their cultural focus from downtowns to the neighborhoods. Part of this is the expense of downtown rents, but part of it is the triumph or re-urbanization. Those inner residential neighborhoods people fled generations ago are booming. They were revitalized by city planning in the 80s and 90s and now offer the cultural amenities that used to be the sole domain of downtown cores. People don’t have to go downtown anymore.
Desolate Minneapolis.
This observation is not especially beer-centric, but the tumult of geographic change always creates winners and losers. Railroad lines used to make or break a city. When planners cut freeways out of the poorest, often red-lined neighborhoods, they destroyed families and businesses. Even the process of suburbanization created a car culture dependent on fast food, cinexplexes, convenience stores, and big-box retailers. If people stay out of American downtowns, it will affect breweries and pubs located there—and elsewhere. Two years ago, a brewery might have considered taking on an expensive downtown lease for access to the well-heeled tourists and apartment-dwellers willing to pay a premium for a pint of beer. Now? I suspect breweries—and all retail businesses—are looking elsewhere.
Most of my adult lifetime downtowns have been shiny, clean, and fun. They’ve always been a bit artificial, but we social beings flowed into these hubs to see shows, get a meal, buy something nice, and mostly, to feel the exciting hum of other people doing the same thing. Now downtowns are listless and depressing, and many of the businesses are boarded up or on long-term hiatus. There’s less and less reason to visit them. I would argue the expense of downtowns and the businesses increasingly common in them were a consequence of the extreme wealth of the richest Americans. The $70 a square foot fetched in Manhattan makes it impossible for a new pizza-slice place to make it. When cities become nothing more than storefronts for the rich, they teeter on a narrow balance point. Did Covid just disrupt that balance? It’s hard to see landlords commanding the prices they did pre-Covid for years at a minimum. And if that’s all true, what comes next for America’s downtowns?
Interesting times ahead.