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This is a direct consequence of covid restrictions. When you close businesses and have office workers work 100% from home, the only people left downtown are the drug addicts and homeless. Add in months of BLM rioting to destroy some buildings and you’ve made a big dent. Defund the police rhetoric helped fuel crime as did not putting criminals in jail due to covidcapacity restrictions.
When businesses were allowed to re-open, white collars workers remained working at home which killed the lunch and happy hour crowds for restaurants. Workplaces also didn’t send workers to conferences in person which killed hotels and also took away valuable tourist dollars.
All of this was avoidable if we simply took measures to protect the most vulnerable and allowed everyone else to live normally.
The nice thing with cities is you can get annual memberships at a lot of institutions. When we were in Boston we had annual memberships to the Science Museum, Aquarium and the MFA. Instead of going to the science center every “couple of years,” we went almost every other week. Usually for these tickets going there twice a year makes up the price of the membership if you have several kids. Here in Seattle we have memberships to the zoo, aquarium and science center as well and use it regularly. And many of these passes can be used at Vancouver BC too. To me I find it very enriching for the kids and we are never wanting for things to do even in terrible weather. My experience with living in the burbs is that people just don’t utilize these resources to the same extent and it becomes a once every couple of years kind of thing. I often lend out my passes to suburban colleagues.
Again, I lived in downtown Cleveland for years. But I simply don't go there anymore without a very specific intent/purpose. My best friend lived there for 3 years and still works there, and he never goes anywhere downtown other than his office, and he only has to be in the office 2x a week.
You can't walk almost anywhere near Public Square and not smell urine. It's pervasive and quite unpleasant. I can shop, eat, and do all sorts of activities on the east, south and west sides of Cleveland without going within 10-15 miles of downtown. There's a reason so much stuff is available in the suburbs in so many cities. The whole world moves out, not just the boujie white people.
You can't walk almost anywhere near Public Square and not smell urine. It's pervasive and quite unpleasant. I can shop, eat, and do all sorts of activities on the east, south and west sides of Cleveland without going within 10-15 miles of downtown. There's a reason so much stuff is available in the suburbs in so many cities. The whole world moves out, not just the boujie white people.
It's just a very wasteful kind of development IMO, trying to replicate every amenity in the suburbs. Cleveland has some good bones. And it's not always possible replicating some of the larger city amenities in the suburbs no matter how hard people try and ends up diluting the experience for everyone.
Again, I lived in downtown Cleveland for years. But I simply don't go there anymore without a very specific intent/purpose. My best friend lived there for 3 years and still works there, and he never goes anywhere downtown other than his office, and he only has to be in the office 2x a week.
You can't walk almost anywhere near Public Square and not smell urine. It's pervasive and quite unpleasant. I can shop, eat, and do all sorts of activities on the east, south and west sides of Cleveland without going within 10-15 miles of downtown. There's a reason so much stuff is available in the suburbs in so many cities. The whole world moves out, not just the boujie white people.
The boujie white people are the only ones currently moving in to the cities. They try to clean the cities up and bring in woke enterprise and they ironically get blamed for all the problems. Revitalization is now actively discouraged in most cities, labeled gentrification.
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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Company I worked for planned on opening a large call center in downtown Louisville KY pre 2020 unrest. Now the plan is the open the call center on the Indiana side of the metro due to greater safety concerns in downtown Louisville. Amenities they valued like 4th Street Live are a shell of what they once were. I lived within a mile of downtown for 5 years in the 2Ks but no way I'd live there now. County went from 50 or so homicides to nearly 200 each year.
Since many office workers have become hybrid workers, the mom and pop shops need to do the same. They need to develop an electronic side of their business and become hybrid themselves. I know this is not possible for every single type of retail shop but certainly some can develop an online presence to offset declines in physical foot traffic.
Suburbia has a covid bump, but it's still dying. Suburbia is nothing without cars and cheap energy. Big cities may briefly gain as suburbs depopulate, then lose population to smaller communities and farms. Locally available food and water will determine the locations and limit the sizes of communities. Downtown mixed use land, with ground floor businesses and apartments above is a proven solution in many nations over centuries.
This is a direct consequence of covid restrictions. When you close businesses and have office workers work 100% from home, the only people left downtown are the drug addicts and homeless. Add in months of BLM rioting to destroy some buildings and you’ve made a big dent. Defund the police rhetoric helped fuel crime as did not putting criminals in jail due to covidcapacity restrictions.
When businesses were allowed to re-open, white collars workers remained working at home which killed the lunch and happy hour crowds for restaurants. Workplaces also didn’t send workers to conferences in person which killed hotels and also took away valuable tourist dollars.
All of this was avoidable if we simply took measures to protect the most vulnerable and allowed everyone else to live normally.
Yup. Regardless of whether or not you supported COVID restrictions, they did ultimately change the landscape of life to a degree. Because of them, remote/hybrid work has become an entrenched way of life, which has changed the heart and soul of downtown city life.
You will also not see any new skyscrapers, as no companies are going to invest in tall downtown buildings anymore.
This is a direct consequence of covid restrictions. When you close businesses and have office workers work 100% from home, the only people left downtown are the drug addicts and homeless. Add in months of BLM rioting to destroy some buildings and you’ve made a big dent. Defund the police rhetoric helped fuel crime as did not putting criminals in jail due to covidcapacity restrictions.
When businesses were allowed to re-open, white collars workers remained working at home which killed the lunch and happy hour crowds for restaurants. Workplaces also didn’t send workers to conferences in person which killed hotels and also took away valuable tourist dollars.
All of this was avoidable if we simply took measures to protect the most vulnerable and allowed everyone else to live normally.
Precisely. We made a big mistake responding to covid the way we did. BIG. We will be paying for it for years to come.
I'm convinced that covid made BLM worse. People were more stressed out, they reacted more violently.
In fact, without covid the 2020 rioting probably wouldn't even have happened. George Floyd was laid off from his job because of covid restrictions. As a result he was bumming around unemployed getting high, like a lot of people were. What else was there to do, workplaces were all CLOSED! If there had been no covid, he never would have been hanging around that store in Minneapolis in the middle of the day; he would have been at his job. He never would have had the encounter with Chauvin and would still be alive. No BLM riots in his name.
Downtown is only useful for Tribe games, the science center every couple years, maybe an occasional dinner in The Flats. Other than that, downtown Cleveland is 12 different kinds of awful. Period.
Last time I was downtown was for jury duty. We got a 2 hour lunch because of the judge's schedule, and I walked over to Tower City. When I was in the middle of Public Square, I got to witness a topless female crackhead trying to fight everyone within about a 15 foot radius of her, no police doing anything, and like three dozen people laughing, recording her on their phones, and egging her on to go break things. And that was the most positive part of that little walk. I went inside Tower City, which used to be awesome...now it looks like the Apocalypse happened, and the survivors all got together and decided they needed a a single Chinese food stand and a couple stores that sell BLM gear and phone bling. Other than that, just emptiness, destruction, rubble and depression. So I went over to the casino, which used to be the truly awesome Higbees of "A Christmas Story" fame, and now is a mostly empty temple to milking sad 80+ year olds out of their SS money.
Sorry, but downtown Cleveland is awful. And I say that as a 25 year resident who loves this town.
Take the aforementioned Agora. I have been to almost every world famous music nightclub in the US or Europe. The Whiskey, Roxy, Hammersmith Odeon, CBGB, Hammerjacks, you name it...minus Max's Kansas City, which was closed for good before I could get there. And I think the Agora is the best of them all. No doubt. My favorite club of all time other than DC's 9:30 Club, which is the club I grew up in. But the Agora's neighborhood is worse than CBGB's was, and the Bowery in the mid 70s was no joke awful. It's two crimes away from being a demilitarized zone. That whole area of East Cleveland is top ten worst neighborhoods in America. Now yeah, I think badass music clubs in fubar neighborhoods makes them cooler, but seriously....how much of Cleveland is like that? Way too much, which is why nobody goes downtown UNLESS they are seeing the Tribe, Browns or Cavs.
Can't blame anyone for never wanting to go downtown...and I lived on 12th and Superior for 4 years. I graduated from Cleveland State...twice. I worked downtown for 6 years. No stranger to that area, and right now, in 2022...it sucks. Period.
I spent every weekend at Hammerjacks in the early 90s when I lived in Towson.
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