[rabidrat]

Here's The Atlantic article I was talking about, "How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town" http://archive.is/PWOC2

And a NYTimes article similarly, "The Empty Storefronts of New York" https://archive.is/JnhDS

Basically rents are too high, so businesses won't rent because it won't be profitable. In 2018 when the NYT article was written, "about 20 percent of all retail space in Manhattan is currently vacant, compared with roughly 7 percent in 2016."

So maybe this is bimodal: you have "rich" areas like Manhattan and SF and Seattle, where rents stay high even with low occupancy (landlords sitting on empty properties and enjoying the free ride of increasing asset prices), and you have "poor" cities like Detroit, where no one wants it and you can't even give it away ("free" property still comes with liabilities like taxes and maintenance).