2006 - 2026: What are the most surprising changes to happen in major cities?

[craigs]

ChatGPT says:

Yes — in many countries, especially across North America and Europe, traditional nightlife has measurably declined over the last few decades. But the decline is uneven and depends on what you mean by “nightlife.”

Classic nightlife — bars, pubs, dance clubs, late-night districts — has generally weakened since roughly the 2000s, with the trend accelerating after the COVID-19 pandemic. Several overlapping structural changes are involved:

• fewer young people drinking heavily
• rising costs of going out
• housing and gentrification pressures on venues
• smartphones and home entertainment
• dating apps replacing some social functions of bars/clubs
• stricter regulation and licensing
• post-pandemic habit changes
• reduced late-night transit and 24-hour urban activity

The evidence is fairly strong. For example, the UK has lost thousands of pubs since 2000, and late-night venues are reportedly around 28% below pre-pandemic levels.

There has also been a major behavioral shift among younger adults. Surveys and industry reporting show Gen Z drinks less alcohol on average than prior generations, and many nightlife businesses built around alcohol sales are struggling because of it.

[muppet]

The nightime economy still employs 600,000 people in London -it's far from dead. However, it's no longer the biggest entertainment districts in the West.

Like other cities, it's diversified into new areas, rather than being concentrated in the centre.

This is Soho, one of 7 nightlife districts:

• Video Link


^The big difference nowadays is it looks like this only till 2am Thursday - Saturday (the clubs go till dawn), though it does start earlier now -there's a second rush hour, standing room only, at about 8pm through the centre. In the past it would have been 24hr, and just as crowded at 4am, every day of the week .

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by pj3000

Well, it is NYC after all.

But it's not that nightlife is non-existent... it's still very much around in cities such as Pittsburgh, Miami, Boston, Rochester, Buffalo, and DC (these happen to the major cities I'm in most frequently over the past 5 years)... but it's more that the nightlife has seemed to transform to "eveninglife".

There was a period of time where NYC was still in a hangover from the pandemic protocols and people were still going to dinner early, and ending nights early, etc., but we definitely seem to be past that now. But if you were looking for the nightlife in NYC in the places it existed a decade ago, then you might be missing it. Bushwick around Newtown Creek is today what the LES and Meatpacking were in the 2010s, while the LES feels pretty sleepy compared to what it was a decade ago.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by craigs

Now imagine the horror a time traveler from 1986 would experience. Nightlife in the US has, generally, been on the decline for decades. COVID really did hasten its demise, though.

Anyway, after 20 years in SF, I moved back to LA in 2021, so I can't speak about the changes here since 2006.

It's abysmal in SF. I would drive up to SF on a Friday or Saturday night to grab and drink or few and it was almost always dead. Much of what made cities so desirable for me as a twenty something is on life support.

[3rd&Brown]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Surprised to hear so many responses about nightlife in other cities. The nightlife scene in NYC has shifted to different areas of the city but it's very much still around.

Is it though?

Spots that used to reliably close at 4 now seem to close at 2. Spots that closed at 2 now close at midnight, so on and so forth.

The most depressing thing about NYC is trying to order takeout on Seamless or Grubhub after 10PM. Like, excuse me? It's crickets.

[niwell]

Nightlife here still seems to be going strong with lots of places open late as they can be (2am) and most weekends there are some that have an extended event pass till 4am. However the big difference is that it's going to cost you - things aren't cheap, even at "dive" bars. I remember back in 2006 I'd bring $40 cash and didn't really have to worry about getting more, though to be fair we usually had drinks at someone's place beforehand back then. With tip you're lucky to find a place that nets 4 drinks now, though they do exist.

During this time I've seen prices go up way more in US cities though. Used to be much cheaper travelling than Toronto but now seem quite a bit more expensive (save some 'shot and a beer' deals) even when not taking into account the exchange rate. Was in New Orleans earlier this year and it's quite the sticker shock compared to my first trip in 2012, when it seemed downright cheap.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

If you could bring someone from the year 2006 on a tour in 2026 of a city of your choice, which city, what has changed, and what would they be most surprised about?

2006 Paris and 2026 Paris is a bit like comparing San Diego and Tijuana. I think anyone from 2006 seeing Paris now would be in a state of shock. Unfortunately, like the frog in the pot of slowly rising water temperature, the Parisians of 2026 have become used to the dereliction and decrepitude of the city.

Pictures taken only in the past month in the very center of Paris by OliverTweet on X. The people of 2006 would have been shell shocked (I remember walking in the streets of Paris in 2010 at the height of the Global Financial Recession and thinking, gosh, this city looks so sleek, tidy and rich, like it's not even affected by the crisis). What a change now! The people of 2026 have become unsensitized. Now I understand better how Africans can tolerate such level of disruption and shambolism in their countries. When you see it everyday, you don't react to it anymore (except me and a minority of people, who can't stand it and will never accept it).



Champs-Elysées, right in front of luxury stores:



Near the Louvre:



Up-to-date with vaccination but not with trash collection:





Even in the rich neighborhoods (and no, there was no strike movement in the past month, it's just the usual situation now):



Permanently out-of-order for years now:



Absolutely not unusual (in fact I had to sit on a similar seat today):



New plantations (again, absolutely not unusual, just the new normal due to fallen standards and no supervision)...



Back in the days, there was a police brigade in charge of picking up tramps in the streets and taking them to dedicated centers in the suburbs. Not anymore.



And this one is my own picture. This tunnel was entirely cleaned and repainted for the Olympic Games in 2024. Barely a year and a half later, in one of the richest neighborhoods of Paris... No maintenance, no cleaning. The new normal in Paris.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by 3rd&Brown

Is it though?

Spots that used to reliably close at 4 now seem to close at 2. Spots that closed at 2 now close at midnight, so on and so forth.

The most depressing thing about NYC is trying to order takeout on Seamless or Grubhub after 10PM. Like, excuse me? It's crickets.

Same in Paris. Supermarkets that closed at 11pm before Covid now close at 10pm (and the employees have grabbed a further 15 minutes, because you know... so you have to enter the supermarket by 9:40pm at the latest, otherwise they don't let you in, and they yell at you at 9:45 to check out). And to think in Madrid the supermarkets stay open until midnight or 1am...

As for restaurants, same story. It used to be you could eat in Asian restaurants until 11:00-11:30pm, but not anymore. Even in the famous Asian area of Rue Sainte Anne, it's hard to find a place that will serve you after 10:30pm. I know a very good Chinese noodle place near the Champs-Elysées where they'll serve you still at 10:25, and let you eat your dinner until 11, but that's about as late as you can find in Paris (except for the 1 or 2 restaurants whose specialty is to stay open all night, but they tend to be expensive and serve traditional French courses, so I avoid them).

Gyms are also a sick joke (although they were already a sick jock before Covid, so Covid hasn't changed anything here). My gym, like most gyms in Paris, closes at 10:30pm on week days, and... at 7pm on Saturdays and Sundays!!!!!

In the suburbs and in the provinces there are many gyms that stay open all night, but in the City of Paris proper it's very rare. Go figure!

The only exception to the trend is the Métro. They close 1 hour later than they used to (1am on week days, 2am during weekends), but that's not all-night service like in NYC.

[JManc]

I was in Paris in 2018 last and it looked a LOT cleaner then. The current photos look like some city in the developing world. What a shame...

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by JManc

I was in Paris in 2018 last and it looked a LOT cleaner then. The current photos look like some city in the developing world. What a shame...

2018 was the beginning of the slippery slope. Things started to decline around 2015, and like in Hemingway's famous quote, at first gradually, and then suddenly. Things accelerated around 2018-2019, and have been in free-fall since.

The most puzzling thing is the French government feeling totally unconcerned about it. I know no other European country where the central government would accept such decrepitude in their capital city. Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate to disband the Greater London Council back in 1986 when London underwent the same decline and decrepitude, and put the city under the direct control of the British state. In France, except for a timid threat 2 or 3 years ago when the government said they would place the city under direct central government control if the Paris city council did not manage its budget better (the city council has accumulated 10 billion euros of debt in a few years), you'd be hard pressed to find any real concern among French ministers. The president lives isolated in his palace and probably does not even realize the magnitude of things. The prime minister has no majority in parliament, but more than that, I think it's a new generation of politicians who simply don't care about the image the capital city projects on visitors and foreigners. It's baffling.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by pj3000

Yeah, I think this is a MAJOR change to city life.

A 20-something time traveler from 2006 who set the time machine to Friday 5/8/2026 at 11:30 PM would be astounded at how lame we've become.

Yeah it's pretty much beyond belief. Every city had hundreds of bars that were open 7 nights a week until 2:30 or whatever the local closing time was, plus 24-hour places where legal. There were many 24-hour diners where wild mixes of shift workers and a region's eccentrics would convene overnight. There was a lot of chatter regarding the loss of these places on Substack earlier this year, under the umbrella of "Diner Goth". These places would be ripping from 2:30-4am. Some of them still had coin-operated juke boxes with wildly outdated music selections. A place in Covington, KY that was open continuously since like 1947 now closes every night at 9pm. They had a crazy antique juke box that operated a primitive animatronic band:
https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/anchor-grill-covington?select=BrqJVK8CLxkMb6jBSnECAA
You'd be in there at 2:45am and above the din of a packed dining room suddenly this band would "strike up" and play some ridiculous old-timey song. The YELP photo gallery for this place is amazing.

Also, cities have lost the original industrial site bars and clubs since those areas have generally gotten too expensive. There used to be really unique venues like The Masquerade in Atlanta and also tons of bars in basements.

Cities have also been overrun by pet dogs. My city built its first downtown dog park around 2011 and now there are tons of them, with developers including them in new complexes. Google the number of dogs in the United States over time and their population is exploding.

[AaronPGH]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Surprised to hear so many responses about nightlife in other cities. The nightlife scene in NYC has shifted to different areas of the city but it's very much still around.

Nightlife in NYC (mostly Brooklyn) out parties Berlin at this point. It's absurd the amount of round-the-clock stuff happening there. I have friends who go out on Friday and dont' stop until Monday. I love myself a rager weekend here and there but this is like every weekend for them. It's starting to feel a bit dark at times. It's wild to see that particular city go so hard when things have pulled back so much in so many cities.

[craigs]

Los Angeles stayed up late in my college years. I moved out almost immediately upon graduation in 2001, and moved back to LA in 2021, so I can't speak to LA nightlife in the interim years generally, nor 2006 specifically.

There is still plenty of nightlife here, let's be clear. While I am no longer in my clubbing years, the hubs and I do go out for drinks and dinner, and the occasional show or bar crawl. There are always lots of choices, and lots of people out. In my experience, however, mainstream LA nightlife is not open as late, nor is it as widespread, as it was 20 or 25 years ago. Restaurants and diners close earlier. There are far fewer 24-hour establishments. And while there is still plenty to do for night owls, they have to go farther to boogie than we did in prior decades.

All that said, I think the most striking measure of the decline in nocturnal activity is seen in the erasure of late-night and overnight non-hospitality establishments. For example, when I moved out of LA in 2001, there were still 24-hour Home Depots in both Hollywood and Marina del Rey. Nowadays, they both close at 10:00 p.m. Also, supermarkets close at night now. Per Google, I am six minutes from the only 24-hour supermarket in the Valley. That is wild.

[muppet]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

2018 was the beginning of the slippery slope. Things started to decline around 2015, and like in Hemingway's famous quote, at first gradually, and then suddenly. Things accelerated around 2018-2019, and have been in free-fall since.

The most puzzling thing is the French government feeling totally unconcerned about it. I know no other European country where the central government would accept such decrepitude in their capital city. Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate to disband the Greater London Council back in 1986 when London underwent the same decline and decrepitude, and put the city under the direct control of the British state. In France, except for a timid threat 2 or 3 years ago when the government said they would place the city under direct central government control if the Paris city council did not manage its budget better (the city council has accumulated 10 billion euros of debt in a few years), you'd be hard pressed to find any real concern among French ministers. The president lives isolated in his palace and probably does not even realize the magnitude of things. The prime minister has no majority in parliament, but more than that, I think it's a new generation of politicians who simply don't care about the image the capital city projects on visitors and foreigners. It's baffling.

The reason Maggie Thatcher got rid of the GLC was that it was anti-Thatcherite, it didn't believe in her free market policies and was an absolute thorn in her side, to where the power lay in the capital. Not because it wasn't doing its job -every city needs a mayor, for a reason. This allowed her to tax the poor and save the rich, as 1/8 of the city fell destitute.

Under the pretence she was merely making things efficient, every borough was set adrift and functioned like a fief, with no more citywide schemes. They often argued against each other. The result was a spike in crime, destitution, inequality and homelessness -I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s, when UK became known as the Sick Man of Europe -every time you came up for air, your nose was full of black bogeys I shit you not. The tube was a cesspit, and there were tent cities at Waterloo (you couldn't even cross Hungerford Bridge for the vagrants and druggies), Kings Cross was a red light zone, Elephant & Castle and Hackney were No Go zones for the crime. Soho was sleaze, with 600 sex shops and brothels ruled by Albanian gangs, and the East End was literally a ruin.

The Inner City ring -typical of the Western model at the time -was a ring of poverty around every core, before the affluent suburbs started. Basically they had their funds tied up with their own inhabitants, and started exporting their social issues, crime and destitution into the centre -once the issue crossed a borough line, it was no longer their problem. This resulted in people avoiding large parts of the centre, that began to spread.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by muppet

has built the massive bike network (increased 5x its former size),

Real (analog) bicycling is definitely down in American cities, having been replaced by electric scooters, electric bicycles, electric skateboards, electric unicycles, etc.

The dilemma for bicycling advocates is that people who bought electric scooters and bikes don't seem to care about bike lanes - they just get out in regular traffic like how "hardcore" analog bicyclists always have.

[muppet]

After the mayoralty was re-established London cleaned up the tube, built the extensions south of the river, and created the Overground network with 113 new stations, from taking over disused and freight lines. The litter got cleaned, homelessness disappeared, the Congestion Charge ended the traffic, and Elephant & Castle, Kings Cross and Waterloo became the major interchanges they were orginally meant to be. The crime epidemic got tackled, millions of trees were planted by donations, and the centre's defunct power station turned into the city's biggest attraction (Tate Modern). That was all done by the first mayor -the sea change was nothing short of spectacular.

End of the day, every city needs a mayor -someone who can put through unpopular decisions for the mid or long term, who can override self-serving actions, aswell as nimbys, and allocate funds for citywide projects, such as a clean up of the river, or a winning Olympic bid.

The current mayor, Sadiq Khan is the one who is allowing the highrises to get built despite the protests (albeit shelving ones that are cheap and ugly), is getting Oxford St pedestrianised despite the opposition of the local council, has built the massive bike network (increased 5x its former size), widened every pavement in the city by an extra lane, and created the School Streets and Quiet streets network, whereby cars are banned in daytime across hundreds of districts. He most controversially instated the Low Emissions Zone so no polluting vehicles enter, much to the vitriol of everyone who had to buy new cars or give them up -losing him millions of votes, but it got through.

500,000 new trees, 300 football pitches worth of restored habitats, price caps on the world's most expensive transport, plus delivering the new Elizabeth Line. He's seen in the biggest fall in crime so far, as he increased police numbers while tackling police rot -the homicide rate is now lower than Finland, Iceland, Tonga or New Zealand. He bought the city ahead of the carbon Net Zero target, to be hit in 4 years time, but is trying to tackle the housing crisis, as the builders refuse to build and keep the prices up.

He's the one who'll take on the death threats, the litigation, the media backlash and publish new laws. Despite being a socialist, he's currently fighting the most powerful trade unions which no one else could -notably train 'drivers' who open and close the doors, now earn more than surgeons while periodically striking for more -on £100-140K. They're on taxpayers money and why we have the most expensive transport costs in the world -the trains are on driverless technology otherwise.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by JManc

I was in Paris in 2018 last and it looked a LOT cleaner then. The current photos look like some city in the developing world. What a shame...

New Brisavoine is reliably full of shit. He just parrots right wing lies. I was in Paris in 2023 right after the garbage strikes and it was cleaner than he says it is now. It's easy to fact check him even using google streetview and he still goes on like his youtube algorithm is reality

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by muppet

The reason Maggie Thatcher got rid of the GLC was that it was anti-Thatcherite, it didn't believe in her free market policies and was an absolute thorn in her side, to where the power lay in the capital. Not because it wasn't doing its job -every city needs a mayor, for a reason. It allowed her to tax the poor and save the rich, as 1/8 of the city fell destitute.

London before Margaret Thatcher disbanded the Greater London Council. Even Paris hasn't reached that level yet.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by muppet

End of the day, every city needs a mayor -someone who can put through unpopular decisions for the mid or long term, who can override self-serving actions, aswell as nimbys, and allocate funds for citywide projects, such as a clean up of the river, or a winning Olympic bid.

Paris was much better managed when it had no mayor. In hindsight, reestablishing a mayor of Paris in 1977 was a catastrophic decision, creating a bunker of political power generating lots of corruption, and now mismanagement and spending billions in ill-thought and ideological schemes, while not doing the normal job of a city which is collecting trash, maintaining streets, parks, monuments.

Recently stones crashed from the façade of the St Roch church (17th century), due to lack of maintenance and restoration. All the historical churches are under the responsibility of the city (unlike Notre Dame which is under the responsibility of the national government), i.e. under the responsibility of an elected mayor since 1977. And they've never been in such a state of disrepair as now.





As for the Olympic bid, the city had nothing to do with it. If anything, the mayor was an impediment there (she was opposed to it in the beginning, and was a negative factor after it was awarded to Paris). It's the national government that won the Olympic bid and did all the job, which shows that when it matters, the national government recognizes that the Paris city hall is better being bypassed due to its negligence and mismanagement. But for everyday stuff such as trash collection or maintaining streets and parks, the national government just doesn't seem to care.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by biguc

and he still goes on like his youtube algorithm is reality

I don't need a 'Youtube algorithm'. I live here and have eyes to see.

It's been documented by international medias. For example here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/f...paris-now-turned-into-the-city-of-blight

But of course those who don't want to see (and there are many, including you it seems) will dismiss this as journalist sensationalism or whatnot.