ABSTRACT
Americans for years tolerated the slow destruction of their downtown retail centers. Cheap gasoline carried urban dwellers to pretty new homes in the suburbs where they shopped in suburban shopping centers and ultimately in the air conditioned wonder of enclosed malls. Downtown, the lines on the retail sales charts fell along with the buildings and once busy shopping streets became rows of abandoned storefronts. I once walked endlessly in a Great Plains urban center through a desolate downtown interrupted only by a cluster of hotels and a convention center, the bleak product of a downtown urban renewal program.
