I enjoy working from home. But I'm not going to deny that it has had a catastrophic impact on the downtown business and commercial districts in many small and medium-sized cities. Those places stuggled badly with lockdown in general and a lot still have not recovered from the sudden societal shift where so many people just stay at home in the suburbs instead of coming into the office. I don't know what the answer is, and I certainly don't want to return to the office. But the outlook is bleak for a lot cities.
The answer is that it sucks to own one of those businesses, but things change and disruption happens. The answer isn't "the city's entire white-collar workforce needs to migrate downtown and back every day to provide an artificial customer base for $17 burritos".
There is more benefit to a vibrant downtown city center than just "white collar" people visiting everyday. Bars, restaurants, cafes. People go to the post office, they go to salons. All of those things are gone now.
In exchange for people staying home, and going to their local suburb's Target and Walmart to buy a sandwich, or go to a Starbucks. Get their nails done in a local chain stripmall place.
Those things are gone now because the only reason people were doing them downtown is because they had to be there for work.
It's odd to suggest that people spending their money closer to home means shopping at large chain businesses, but spending downtown doesn't. Just because there isn't a Walmart in the city's corporate center doesn't mean you're patronizing Mom and Pop small businesses. You think that trendy gastropub with its gourmet hamburgers, cute waitresses that all share a suspiciously similar alt aesthetic, and tables full of people clad in business casual isn't a line item in some investment firm's portfolio?
Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
> Guess where the Mom and Pops are? They're in that "stripmall place" near your house.
That's not where they are though. You see it, too. Those stripmalls are all dead-dead-dead. The only business is at the shopping centers and megastores.
They are where I live. Guess it depends on the city.
I can tell you where they most definitely aren't, though: downtown. Anybody who can afford that real estate is not the little guy. If they appear to be, that just means great effort (and money) was expended to create that image.
Wouldn’t this be countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live? In my neighborhood a couple of small eateries have opened up for the wfh crowd. I can get a decent sandwich and some chips to go for a reasonable price within a 20min walk from my home.
Edit: coffee shops seems to be doing very well too
> countered by the economic boon of the grocery stores and other places that are open where people actually live
While I think it's true that a lot of businesses have shifted to being more neighborhood-local and not relying on "business hours" to be sustainable, the reality for most suburban economies are that shopping centers and chain megastores basically absorb all the business. Places like Target, Whole Foods, Walmart are the ones that are primarily benefiting from this overnight migration outside of city centers. But that's been going on for a long time, COVID just accelerated it.
The city and those business need to change to meet the shift. They are just being greedy and seem to want us workers to both support ourselves and bail them out.
Maybe those were just artificial constructs that cost everyone a lot of money and we just started to realize now?
“Hey let’s support these 30$ lunches at the food truck downtown.”
Maybe we are as a society better off without these massive concrete structures that are only occupied 8h / 24h a day and serve no other purpose? Maybe requiring less resources and infrastructure to get people to and from other concrete structures that they only inhabit during the other part of the day is a good thing kind of?
