Good morning. The pandemic tested and reshaped the hearts of American cities. |
 | | Downtown Chicago in August.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times |
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American downtowns are working to recover after the Covid pandemic upended their roles as business centers and community hubs. To find out how these efforts are going, Times reporters recently visited the downtown areas in Washington, D.C.; Hartford, Conn.; Salt Lake City; Seattle and elsewhere. They discovered that some are struggling while others have come back even stronger. I asked Mike Baker, who's based in Seattle and contributed to the project, about what they saw. |
German: I was struck by the emptiness in Cincinnati, where I live, during the height of the pandemic. Even today, the city can still feel much quieter than it did before Covid. Is this common across the country? |
Mike: There's definitely an eerie quiet. Some neighborhoods are well short of the vibrancy they had a few years ago. There are boarded-up windows. In some cities, there's this feeling of an empty sidewalk where you're used to having larger crowds. |
So people will come downtown and feel like there's nobody or very few people there. You lose the sense that this is a gathering place for the community. And that contributes to people not really wanting to come back. |
What did the pandemic bring? |
There are positive and negative trends out there. |
So many downtowns have embraced outdoor dining and expanded restaurant patios and have become more walking-friendly. A lot of midsize cities, like Salt Lake City, have seen explosive growth around new businesses and attractions downtown. Some cities have made investments to draw in more people, and they're actually seeing more visitors than they did before the pandemic. |
At the same time, major urban centers still have less commuter foot traffic than they did before the pandemic because so many people are still working from home. So some businesses don't have the traffic to survive. Some downtown neighborhoods are struggling with crime and homelessness. And housing affordability seems to be on everybody's mind at this point, especially here in Seattle. |
 | | Seattle last month.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times |
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Seattle seems like an interesting case, because Amazon is headquartered downtown yet is arguably deepening some downtowns' problems by making it easier to shop online instead of in person. |
Yeah. Even before the pandemic, Amazon's explosive growth heavily contributed to housing shortfalls in Seattle. Then all this infrastructure was built to support the tech workers at the South Lake Union neighborhood, where Amazon is. During the pandemic, many of these tech workers started working remotely, and all these businesses suddenly had very few people to serve. |
These are tech workers with good incomes who are no longer coming to that part of the city regularly. That's a huge setback. |
But Seattle might be better positioned than some cities. It has cruise ship terminals, which bring visitors from all over the country on summer weekends. There's a waterfront under development that connects the Pike Place Market up north down to football and baseball stadiums in the south. There's an expanding convention center and a new N.H.L. team that plays in the area. |
You mentioned crime and homelessness. How much are they playing a role in downtowns' problems? |
You certainly hear about both a lot from residents, visitors and business owners. |
I was in Oregon recently to report on the governor's race, and all the candidates were talking about how unsafe downtown Portland has become. Yet even there, the variation is remarkable: I could walk through the waterfront, and people were walking their dogs, jogging or just enjoying the scenery. But if you turn just a couple blocks from the waterfront into the Old Town neighborhood, you can see widespread homelessness, drug use. There are people lying motionless on the sidewalk or in the middle of the road. |
There is this tension. Officials talk about trying to build more affordable housing and provide more services for drug addiction and mental health, but that takes time. But there's a sense of urgency — that we need to do something to get people back downtown, and locals want quick solutions to homelessness. |
Considering those problems, are cities making progress on revitalizing downtowns? |
Some places are. One place I visited was Nampa, Idaho, a city of 100,000 people west of Boise. Years ago, the city had this really vibrant downtown with retail outlets that brought people from around the area. But then a mall was built on the edge of town. And then an even bigger mall was built farther away in Boise. Then Amazon came along, popularizing online shopping. And then the pandemic. |
The city started working to reverse the trends — to build a community gathering place. But instead of building back in the retail-focused style of the old downtown, today's efforts are more about restaurants than shops, and more emphasis on people living there instead of driving downtown. It's different, but it's about adapting to the changes and finding the right mix to make this spot appealing again. So far, it appears to be working. |
Mike Baker is a national correspondent based in Seattle. He was born in Canada, and his early memories of downtown Vancouver are largely defined by disappointing Canucks games. Before joining The Times, he worked at The Associated Press and The Seattle Times. |
 | | Mourners left flowers at the scene.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times |
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 | | Christopher Testani for The New York Times |
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Here's a clue from the Sunday crossword: |
47 Across: "The Merchant of Venice" character who favors wordplay |
Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — German |
Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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