Why U.S. Nightlife Sucks

And why urban revitalization initiatives have failed to fix it.

A Night Market in San Francisco full of people, unlike its Downtown neighborhood. Photo Credit: Adam Pardee/Special to SFGATE

Note: Why Kamala Is Talking About Housing is now free to read.

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Many of my young friends with middle-class jobs from all over California and the East Coast have been moving to the Bay Area and settling in downtown Oakland. Their refrain is always the same: downtown is dead after 6 PM. Downtown Oakland went through a period of high-rise housing construction and grew by 7,300 people in twenty years. Nightlife had improved considerably since 2010 but it never got spectacularly vibrant, and now remote work and the decline of theaters is making its post-pandemic recovery slow.

Oakland is one of many cities suffering from the same problems many New Urbanism / pro-urban living initiatives have run into: vacant, or lackluster groundfloor retail, mixed-use housing construction not generating any foot traffic, and abandoned public spaces by 6 PM. Outside of places like Manhattan, certain college towns, or touristy areas like the Vegas Strip or French Quarter, New Orleans, American cities are generally dead of foot traffic and late-night business, even in dense areas.

I have a few theories as to why.

1 — Cars And Drinking Don’t Mix

The crusade against drunk driving has mostly been a successful and moral endeavor, but the byproduct is that people cannot drink and drive themselves home. It used to be a norm that after work, people hung out at bars to socialize and drove home drunk or buzzed. If they were in more urban environments they could take mass transit home or walk home. Lack of late night transit also suppresses nightlife, both for people desiring to stay out late and workers who need to go home after midnight. Even though we have taxis and rideshare now, these services are expensive and not practical to use on a nightly basis to sustain a vibrant commercial and entertainment area.

Our alcoholic consumption culture has become more automotive to where people would rather go to the store and buy a large quantity of beer than a bar, leading to the decline of bars as a profitable business model. It’s a missed opportunity for vibrant nightlife since alcohol consumption is steady over the years and for women is actually increasing. Young people’s desire for mass transit, disinterest in suburban living, and distaste for driving, hopefully will nudge market conditions to put bars and restaurants in car-lite locations, but there are public obstacles are making that difficult.

2 — Residential-Only Zoning Kills Neighborhood Entertainment

The origins of residential-only zoning in the United States (circa. 1914 in Los Angeles) was in high-class suburbs who thought the presence of all commercial activity lowered property values. Some of this was reaction to unruly saloons of the era but also Chinese-owned laundromats and grocery stores. Unlike in most countries, American neighborhoods are usually devoid of any commercial activity, which may seem peaceful but comes with a cost: American cities and suburbs are boring and inaccessible without cars, especially for seniors and young people. The post-WWII trend of removing commercial activities from neighborhoods and downtowns, and placing them in car-oriented malls caused tremendous damage to vibrancy and car-lite living that New Urbanism has yet to meaningfully reverse.

Cities outside of the U.S. and Canada also have fairly restrictive uses on commercial activity, but it’s not confined to one or two big roads, a mall, or a revitalizing downtown. In most cities, you can open a shop, a restaurant or a bar in most neighborhoods and properties. Regulations are usually aimed at prohibiting toxic land uses like factories or regulating how long bars remain open, but not a blanket commercial ban as we do here.

There’s a handful of cities where nightlife is vibrant regularly: most of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the core of Chicago, and a few old urban neighborhoods in San Francisco, New Orleans and DC. All these places have the same factors in common: the area is dense, economically diverse, decent transit options, and entertainment uses are liberally allowed. Some cities do accomplish redeveloping themselves into vibrant, walkable places like Miami’s South Beach or the Las Vegas’s Strip. But both successfully integrate intense amounts of commercial and entertainment alongside residential and lodging. Most of Vegas is genuinely ugly sprawl, but the Strip itself is quite popular among the seniors and retirees gambling there who don’t have to get in a car to get around.

3 — Limited Land Homogenizing Commercial Activity

Commercial zoning restricted to single-digit percentages of a city’s land makes demand for space highly competitive and prices out small businesses. High commercial rents in expensively-built, new apartment complexes tend to be vacant for longer periods of time because commercial leases often go as long as 10-years before a renewal so property owners are picky about who occupies commercial space. High rents and long leases favors more reliable businesses such as chain restaraunts where people eat out regularly.

I really hate glorifying the Japanese approach to land use because its weeb-ish, but the diversity of restaraunts and businesses they have, tucked well within residential neighborhoods is a model to aspire to. I wouldn’t attribute everything to zoning, but if my neighbor wants to open up a small restaraunt, they should be able to do so. Or a laundromat, an internet cafe, or a theater. This also saves on the cost of real estate by enabling our heavily property-owner society to not have to buy or rent more properties to conduct small business.

If you want to open a restaurant, you have to pay rent to a landlord with a 10-year lease far away from where you live and the community you may wish to serve. We assume that all businesses can and should only be accessed by driving, so their locations are unimportant provided plentiful parking is available. If the best places require car-ownership to access, young people won’t be patronizing them as much.

Urban planners proposes a solution to this by mandating ground-floor retail within every new apartment building, with mixed results. Many commercial uses that aren’t restaurants or offices aren’t practical at the bottom floor of a typical “five-over-one” apartment. Music venues for example will often not be in brand new retail space below a condo, whose construction is not suitable and whose commercial rents are way too high. Since cities zone all their new mixed-used development only onto existing commercial and industrial spaces because they’re too cowardly to allow them in residential areas, apartment and mixed-use construction crowds out music venues, theaters, and light-industrial activity, fueling the decline and homogenization of urban entertainment.

4 — Night Time Is Stigmatized

I can’t say this is a major contributor because it’s not as if safer cities have vibrant nightlife either. But the association of crime and drinking had encouraged cities to enforce curfews and revoke liquor licenses, liberally. When a 7-11 in my city kept having unruly patrons, the city revoked its liquor license pretty quickly. Many laws in the U.S. dictate how late bars, clubs and venues serve alcohol and stay open (in California it’s until 2 A.M.) The general response to ill-behaved people is to curtail activities rather than depend on law enforcement to keep the peace.

Failure to address safety problems after hours and just closing doors earlier fuels the insecurity of being out at night. Downtown American cities lack the density and commercial diversity to have a vibrant nightlife, which keeps streets empty and unpleasant. Vacant streets convince people that unsafe to go out at night, no matter how safe a city’s crime statistics say it is.

In my experience, Manhattan and Brooklyn are the safest places after 7 PM I have ever been to in any American city or rich, quaint suburb. Even the French Quarter was rocking with diverse energy at night, despite New Orleans’ overall high crime rates. A high concentration of people walking or being festive outside normalizes social activities after hours and destigmatizes the night. Some solutions to this are Night Markets, a popular activity in East Asian cities that now San Francisco and Vancouver are experimenting with. Downtown Oakland does a late-night art gallery once a month that brings tremendous foot traffic to the otherwise vacant downtown.

More U.S. cities should attempt Night Markets by closing main thoroughfares and destigmatizing both night and unsanctioned commercial activity. But it risks failing if U.S. law enforcement and the city’s social services can’t deter violence after hours. That’ll require foot patrols and being active in the activities and with organizers, not sitting around in a squad car.

5 — Cities Bulldozed Their Nightlife for Offices and Roadways

It’s largely forgotten but boring nightlife was intentional. American cities bulldozed dense areas with plentiful after-hours entertainment that were deemed seedy, such as bars, lounges, places with dancing, prostitution, gambling etc. and replaced them with boring office complexes. It was all the rave during the 1950s to early 1970s, known as urban renewal, and it succeeded at depopulating city centers.

Downtown Oakland did this and destroyed its one vibrant city center with an outdoor mall that has never been popular because it’s surrounded by office complexes for suburban commuters. For decades, downtown was a ghost town that served only as a junction to pass through and only showed signs of life during lunchtime. Now with remote work, many of these office-oriented downtowns are struggling to survive.

Urban areas are also congested with cars and regularly have wide streets and four-lanes or greater roads. The San Francisco Chronicle recently highlighted how dead a newly developed, higher-density area of downtown Oakland was. But having walked around here many times, it’s inundated with tremendous traffic noise and multi-lane roads designed to speed people through the neighborhood. It’s extremely unpleasant to eat outside or lounge in a place full of vehicle exhaust, horns and speeding cars. Failure to address the transportation problem makes New Urbanism more of a vertical suburb where people in high-rises dislike going outside. The most vibrant parts of Oakland outside of downtown notably have multi-lane car traffic reduced to one directional lane and wider sidewalks, making it more pleasant, quieter and safer on the sidewalks.

Most “revitalized” American downtowns are dead because they’ve been dead for decades. It’s just that people with higher incomes now live there to notice. In the long-run, inevitable population growth will increase vibrancy in our cities, but they can do it a lot faster than this. One of the few examples of vibrant, non-NYC areas in any American Metro is university towns. What do they have in common? A mostly non-driving population living close together with entertainment and commercial activity within walking or transit distance.

Urban planners and elected officials should take some notes.

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