Nobody wants to live in city centers anymore. It is too expensive, filled with car traffic and parking lots, and the restaurants and cafes are only open during business hours. Weekends you can barely even find a restroom, much less a place to sit down and enjoy a quiet moment. Cars have ruined them. Honking, loud exhausts, horrible thumping music coming from rattling trunks make the place horrible.<p>Until we get cars out of them, reduce parking minimums, and reduce restrictive zoning, city centers are just going to suck.
Getting rid of cars doesn't solve the societal problems at play; the people embody the problems. To see the future of these districts, look at Philadelphia's Kensington, but just add skyscrapers. As rural can go to suburbs, suburbs to urban, and urban can only go to decline, I have visions of vast wastelands of urban decay covering the USA.
Due to peculiarities, I've visited downtown Denver during weekdays and weekends many times over the last few months. Compared to pre-pandemic, weekdays are laid back, there's on street parking a lot of the time. Weekends there's no on street parking, restaurants appear to be full for brunch, and there's lots of pedestrians.<p>City of Denver did make lots of efforts to get people to live downtown for the last 20-30 years. The new lodo buildings behind Union Station are all "walkable city" type, with sidewalks and commerce on the ground floor.