Why US Nightlife Sucks

There's such a sad conflux of economic & opportunity problems that drive self-reinforcing doom loops.

Living in a concentrated vibrant space has gotten ever less accessible. So nightlife is further away, less appealing to just go do.

So nightlife has less locals you might start to form better connections with over time.

Younger generations face enormously scary economic prospects, low or intimidating opportunity in many ways, so they don't feel they have the surplus to go to nightlife.

And prices have soared; dive bars have folded left in right in many many cities. It feels like there's been such a march upmarket, that only people with lots of money are targeted for nightlife now.

Anecdata, but I've also seen a lot less live music than I used to. Local haunts used to have DJs spinning or bands pretty regularly, we used to have more local watering holes with music & dance, and that's kept being reduced in my opinion.

Drunk driving laws are different but driving shouldn't be required. It feels stupid to open my mouth &nsay it, there's certainly much danger, but biking out to a local bar, having some great music, and bicycling home is a pretty awesome.

It's an opportunity situation, in my view. The expense has gone up, being nearby vibrant spaces has gotten harder, and countless bars and venues have matched up up up market. It was always a bit of a crazy puzzle in my head to imagine so many people flocking to nightlife in the past, spending so much money, and in the shadow of that old pattern I find myself greatly missing this phenomenon (or it's availability) which felt so hard to rationalize out in my head.

I’ve seen a huge drop in the last 15 years. I was a bartender long ago. Made good money. When I talk with bartenders now, they say it’s way harder to make a living, people don’t stay out as late or go out as much anymore, less tips and even then inflation kinda jacked that up for people. All in all it sounds pretty tough and none of them seem to enjoy it.

I guess I also stopped going out too though. It was the people. I just grew to not like the us population in general in public spaces. So I went from an always out guy to over the last 10 years a never goes out guy. Hmm.

As the article says, very simple, Drunk Driving Laws. In the "old days (tm)", anything went in the US, back then it was mayhem on the roads, with hardly no penalties (if you were white).

The city where I grew up (~90,000 people), there were many night clubs and bars, almost one on every corner. People from outside the city would drive there for their night life.

Then the Laws were enforced and changed with very severe penalties. Now, just about all clubs and bars are gone. But, cafes seem to have become a thing in the center of town.

FWIW, I do not miss the "bar" days at all.

From two weeks ago, "This Is the No. 1 City in the U.S. for Nightlife — and No, It's Not Las Vegas, NYC, or Miami"

https://www.travelandleisure.com/austin-texas-best-american-...

> Cars And Drinking Don’t Mix

For better or for worse, the Midwest thinks very differently about this

> Nighttime is stigmatized

This is true in the rust belt, as many of the shootings etc that occur are after dark, often at 1-2am, near bars or outside of places that serve or sell alcohol (after hours joints or party stores)

It's all much simpler than this. Real estate development went for maximizing short-term profits and there was no zoning requirements to do otherwise. This and being driver-centric as a rule limits walkable neighborhood areas where nightlife would develop.

nightlife was so much more fun in the 1970's

Blame it on Netflix and other conveniences. People have just gotten too lazy to go out.

It's not difficult to reason why this happened, in my opinion.

People, by and large, lived in cities and were "fine" with smaller housing before the car made it possible to get a piece of the "American Dream™": a nice, 800 sq. ft. (now 1800 sq. ft) house with a yard and a fence. With no reason to use public transportation, cities defunded these efforts, stopped expanding their networks and upgraded their fleet a whole lot less. This put public transportation into a death spiral that we're still experiencing today.

Meanwhile, globalization was causing manufacturing jobs that made MANY, MANY, MANY cities within the US possible to go away. Most of the Midwest is still paying for this: old skyscrapers and other trappings of past wealth are abundant throughout the US.

While this was happening, stock markets prioritized growth above anything else. This lead to many companies adopting, in my opinion, maladaptive behaviors: growth through M&A, regardless of whether the M&A made sense, squeezing quality to improve margin, and, most importantly, finding ways to pay employees as little as they can get away with.

As a result, real wages have flatlined for many people while the cost of living skyrocketed.

Additionally, the Internet has made activities that made very social outings, like shopping or going to the theater, a lot cheaper to do at home, which is now, really far away from the city and is difficult to get to because "everyone" has cars, traffic is soul-crushing, and public transportation isn't viable. COVID combined with videoconferencing that doesn't sucked poured gasoline on this fire by making the last purpose of the city --- working together in a single place --- obsolete for many people.

Finally, there is ample data showing that younger people are not into drinking as much. Alcoholic beverage companies are spending a lot of money capitalizing on this: there is a non-alcoholic variant of every popular beer in the market, and non-alcoholic spirits are ramping up in a big way.

This will accelerate big time when marijuana becomes federally legalized; why get drunk and have huge hangovers when you can have just as good of a time with a gummy or chocolate bar with essentially no side effects the next day? This will accelerate further if semaglutides, which do a fantastic job of controlling satiety and have been known to cause drops in alcohol consumption, continues to demonstrate no serious long-term side effects.

It's difficult to overstate how heavily the hospitality industry depends on alcohol. This will be a nuclear bomb for this sector, and lots of jobs will be lost. The beer industry was the canary in the coal mine. Breweries without restaurants are suicide these days, and even these are struggling to stay afloat.

In short, cars + suburbs + dying cities + lower real wages + increasing costs + lack of public transportation + less demand for alcohol consumption = less nightlife + more "tribal" societies. I think this will also lead to increased depression and suicides (because we are a social species and suburbs make it very easy to be a recluse) and less child births (though I'm one to talk, as my wife and I are middle age and don't have kids)

  > Nighttime is stigmatized

I think this is a stronger factor than we give credit to. For example, I live in a very suburban, low crime, safe area. Crime mostly centering around property theft.

When I was younger, a few cities got together and decided to rip up the tracks and turn them into nature trails. Everyone ... except for a handful of homeowners who's homes backed up to the tracks ... loved the idea. I was a roommate to the child of one of those homeowners and ended up paying way more attention to the whole thing than I should have.

The fear was that it provided an excellent route for thieves (back patio sliding doors, dirt-bike accessible path) which would be used to "sneak in and sneak out", making off with their Hi-Fi/probably Packard Bell desktop. I can't remember what eventually calmed the homeowners down (some weren't, of course) but I believe a lot of it amounted to a commitment to enforcement of dusk-to-dawn usage rules and some poles to make it impossible to travel the trail by car (dirt bikes are still a problem).

I could understand the argument back then[0]; most cameras on businesses were dummies due to the cost of "real ones" (let alone maintenance), weren't night vision and "the cover of darkness", when most are sleeping, is more favorable to crime (and more likely to have a higher percentage of intoxicated individuals).

I was surprised at how well prepared the county was for the NIMBY response, though. I recall some stat that basically pointed out "there hasn't been a murder in a decade or any violent crime that wasn't domestic, under ten home burglaries (where they "entered a home", i.e. not an unlocked car in the driveway with an expensive stereo) but as they went on and on the message was clear "you're not going to be robbed."

The puzzling thing, for me, though was -- they had abandoned railroad tracks behind their house, before. They were very usable as footpaths, already, except that "your average township citizen" didn't do that. None of it was properly posted/signed/fenced and part of the motivation for converting it was that the county spent money on maintenance[1] for something abandoned.

As I've gotten older, many things have changed. $5 IR cameras, LED lights so pervasive in the town that what qualifies as "night" these days, just ... isn't. It had always been the case that "having people generally around" is a good crime deterrent. Nobody wants to get caught. And, of course, if you're on foot or on e-bike, these trails make for extremely convenient paths to local businesses (avoiding a mile or two in distance in some cases due to the way they cut through things) so they'd be very convenient to use any time if you're not traveling by car.

Also ... as I've gotten older, I've reflected on the reactions of those families freaking out about "having the county give you back yard access to a multi-county hiking trail" in an area where "being concerned about being a criminal victim in your home should be right up there with other things that aren't going to happen to you" and I realize that the only way those trails would ever be opened at night is if they were draped in cameras front to back and actively monitored. And, unfortunately, there's probably a plan to drape those trails in cameras and have them actively monitored. And they'll still keep them shut at night, especially since just a few years ago there was a brutal murder/assault of a young girl "in an area that hadn't seen something even close to that in half a century or so" (in daylight with people nearby).

[0] The date escapes me but may have been as far back as the late 90s

[1] Mostly handling major problems like downed trees; but I understand it was mowed or otherwise maintained in a manner that made it "already a concern for crime that hadn't crept up in a decade" due to some weed or beetle or something like that.