The Return of Urban Retail Deserts

City Journal ^ | 9/13/23 | Steven Malanga

[CFW]

The rising social disorder and crime of the 1970s and 1980s drove out not only hundreds of thousands of residents from New York City, but also many businesses. Within a few years, entire communities lacked basic amenities like supermarkets and drugstores; empty storefronts littered shopping districts. That started to change only when crime began falling in the 1990s and neighborhoods rebounded—first in New York and then in other big cities—prompting national retailers to begin setting up shop in places that they had once avoided. Thousands of stores and tens of thousands of jobs blossomed in New York alone thanks to this retail revival. But those gains are vanishing before our eyes as rising retail theft is driving a new era of closings.

It took decades for New York’s retailers to recover from the disorder and crime waves of the 1970s and 1980s. Entire districts lacked basic shopping choices, including Harlem, a community of more than 100,000 residents that didn’t have a single large-chain supermarket for more than 20 years. Once-flourishing shopping districts in the South Bronx and in neighborhoods like Bushwick in Brooklyn played host to boarded-up storefronts—vestiges of rioting and arson. National retail chains with the everyday stuff people wanted—Home Depot, Lowes, Target—shunned the city, leading to an exodus of dollars. One study in the early 1980s estimated that Queens residents alone spent half of their purchasing power, more than $1 billion a year back then, shopping in Nassau County. By the early 1990s, a consumer survey found that 56 percent of city residents left New York at least once a month to shop. Nearly 30 percent said they went specifically to buy at stores that didn’t exist in the city—an irony, considering that Gotham had once been considered one of the world’s great retail cities.

[Myrddin]

My treasure from that timeframe is an Atari 1040ST serial number 2. The person who sold it to me has serial number 1. I love the 68000. In a similar time frame, I purchased the bottom end Radio Shack Color Computer with 4k RAM. For $50 and a few minute of my labor, it was upgraded to 64k. I removed the factory ROM from the floppy disk controller and put a boot loader in for OS/9. The 6809 is my favorite 8-bit MCU. In the early days of the "CoCo", I wrote fast 6809 machine language drivers to do screen prints to color (ink jet) printers. 15 seconds for my code to print the screen. The Radio Shack delivered software for the same capability took 20 MINUTES.

I never had a TI 99-4, but I admired their graphics. A trip to a silicon valley electronics store netted the graphics chip used in the 99-4. I hand built a daughter board for my Heathkit H8 to interface the chips, then wrote all the graphics primitive libraries to drive it. Inside a week, I was doing 3D graphics plots in color with full Z axis support. It was Summer 1982. I couldn't afford a Mac Lisa, but I could compete with the graphics running HDOS or CP/M on my Z80 with 64k RAM.

[FrankRizzo890]

This is an entire post of awesome!