elfs | It wasn't COVID or Hooligans. It was us, Karen. We killed downtown.

I made the mistake (it’s always a mistake) of responding to someone on Nextdoor who complained that “… all the businesses downtown are boarded up. It’s really sad.” Given that it’s Nextdoor, the usual suspects chimed in with “It was the lockdowns!” and “We need more police!” But I stand by my response:

Well, let me ask y’all a question: how many packages from Amazon arrived at your doorstep today? Every single one of those packages, multiplied across every single person in that neighborhood, is a dollar you didn’t spend downtown. Every single trip downtown negated by your not needing to go anywhere to have your desires fulfilled is one less opportunity those businesses had to capture your interest.

You can blame politicians or COVID or whatever, but the simple fact is that, economically, we decided our convenience was more important than our town centers. We do our bulk shopping at Wal-Mart or Costco or Target, we get our food delivered by DoorDash, and we get the rest of our lives supplied by Amazon. Collectively, we are responsible for the death of downtowns by the thousand little cuts of “a dollar saved here, an hour of driving saved there.”

And I don’t know Kent Station shopping center very well, but Renton Landing shopping center is unbelievably hostile to “loitering.” When I was a kid, you could spend all day at the mall with just a few bucks for lunch at the food court and quarters at the arcade. But there are no more arcades, and the cops hassle kids if they’re being kids, and there’s no place to sit that isn’t a bar or restaurant. It’s optimized to sell you stuff and then encourages you to get the hell out of there. Which, I suppose, is another one of those end results of a culture that values “save a dollar here, save an hour there” over, you know, actually having a community.