The Boomer’s Retail Wasteland
100 Years Later and Once Again Western cities have become single-use investment vehicles and living spaces for the wealthy, business elite, or those lucky enough to inherit property.
Why is there so much empty retail spaces in the Western major cities? Most would say on-line shopping. What if the bigger truth is that the people who would shop at these stores, no longer live close-enough to them. Here’s a photo of Lagos, Nigeria.
Looks a lot more fun than on-line shopping.
Lagos has a population of 8 to 18 million, depending on where you draw a line around the city. The average age is around 43 years old. On YouTube, one can watch miles and miles of retail business in Lagos from people who visit. (You can also watch miles and miles of empty stores from people like Louis Rossman in NYC, or Neil McCoy-Ward in England).
When I looked for the average age of New Yorkers all I found were statistical medians. That age is 36. The reason medians are used in the U.S. is they ignore the ugly tail ends of the age distributions — the declining young and increasing old.
More than 1 in 10 people in NYC is over the age of 65. In Lagos it’s 1 in 50.
For the sake argument, let’s say retail is dying mostly because of this demographic change. Older people shop less but they’re wealthier, have the property tax-codes in their favor, and bid up the prices of city neighborhoods.
Younger people are pushed out (unless they’re high-wage professionals).
If this is a trend, it began before the pandemic. The pandemic seems to have increased it by 25%. I use that number because it’s the increase in value of many homes in these retail challenged, but desirable neighborhoods.
What will happen after the pandemic? Why would stores open up when they were closing before the pandemic (a phenomenon that didn’t stop people from paying more and more for the condos above)?
True, there is some growth. I see more and more day-care centers opening up in these empty stores. There will always be restaurants. But what else?
If one judges Lagos to be the natural state of young people, who like to travel to shopping areas, then what does it mean if the city centers are geared towards the old segment of the population? What happens to the young?
For that matter, what happens to the middle-aged, who, in places like Lagos, run the businesses that serve the young?
There is no opportunity for retail in the Western cities for young and/or middle-aged people. By owning large amount of space, property owners write off their storefronts.
If a private individual owned only one or two stores I can’t see how they could let them go empty. They’d have to lease to someone just to pay the taxes. But again, the property owners can use the high margins on the condos above, or other stores, to pay the taxes for the empty space.
Young people would like those laws changed — if anything, to create more space for artists. None of their efforts have succeeded, far as I can tell.
Humans survive best through diversification. When they concentrate into one potato, or type of land-use, very bad things happen. Western cities have become single-use investment vehicles and living spaces for the wealthy, tech elite, or those lucky enough to inherit property.
Lagos looks like a joke. So did NYC at the turn of the Century. It’s in the history books for anyone who is interested. The future of Lagos is vibrant. The future of NYC is urban blight, albeit different from that of the 70s. In WWII the wealthy people of the cities sent their children to the country. Their expensive property was ultimately bombed to rubble.
Let me leave you with that.
