Bars, bowling alleys and movie theaters cost too much to run and visit. Americans have run out of places to hang out and we’re paying with our health

Before I was a reporter covering the death of American fun, I tried to run on saving it. In 2021, I ran for New York City Council in my home district of Astoria, Queens, on the slogan “Public Space for the Public Good”—a promise to wrestle back sidewalks, plazas, and streets from car storage and give them back to actual human beings. I wanted more open streets, more benches, more places where a neighbor could just sit down. I didn’t win, but I’ve never stopped noticing when a city takes away somewhere people used to gather, and lately, it feels like that’s happening everywhere at once.

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics back that feeling up. According to its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages—which counts business establishments by industry down to the county level going back to 1990—the U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001.

A 2025 study entitled “Uneven access to essential services and amenities: Geographic disparities in ‘third place’ availability across the United States from 2010 to 2021,” found the same pattern holds well beyond bars and bowling alleys. Using Census data, researchers tracked 12 categories of what sociologists call “third places”—among them coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants—and found widespread closures across every single category from 2019 to 2021, with the losses hitting hardest in rural areas and communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations.

Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study’s researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. “Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more,” she said. “Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening.” It’s a dynamic she’s watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.

Some of this is simply the economics of running a physical space getting harder. Finlay traces the wave of closures to forces that predate the pandemic: delayed effects of the Great Recession, an oversupply of malls, the rise of online retail, and consolidation among major chains.

“COVID certainly accelerated it,” she said. “I think something of a silver lining to all this is that people started to notice. These are often quite mundane, overlooked places—that local diner where people hang out, or that hole-in-the-wall bar that has regulars who’ve been going there for a long time.”

The math has only gotten less forgiving since. Restaurants have seen food costs rise 38% and labor costs 35% since 2019, and 45% of operators say they weren’t profitable in 2025, just as restaurant menu prices are up 31% since 2020. Bars are getting squeezed from........

© Fortune