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 the insurance side: liquor liability premiums have jumped 25% to 40% in some regions. Movie theaters face a similar squeeze from the real estate side: AMC alone carries more than $400 million in annual interest expense and $850 million in rent, a capital structure S&P Global Ratings has called “unsustainable” even as attendance recovers. When Cineworld filed for bankruptcy, it cited a nearly 30% rent increase per theater in that same 2019-to-2022 window.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, agrees the price of showing up has become its own barrier. She described her son’s experience trying to make friends after moving to San Francisco for an internship: a group dinner, a family-style bill split evenly, and he still left hungry. “‘It cost me $90 and I was just stressed about the money the whole time that I couldn’t even enjoy myself,'” he told her. What she’s hearing instead from students on her own college campus is a retreat toward cheaper, more physical alternatives—roller skating, line dancing, outdoor meetups. “Affordability is one,” she told Fortune, referring to reasons pushing people toward those substitutes.

A changing urban landscape

The city itself has changed shape around this too, and not always by accident. Finlay spent recent years studying what happens when a place that should function as a gathering spot doesn’t—or actively works against the people it’s supposed to serve, something researchers call a “disamenity.” “A disamenity for me is when a potentially therapeutic site either doesn’t support health and well-being or directly harms you,” she told Fortune.

“Maybe that’s because it’s unaffordable. Maybe that’s because there’s no seats—it’s just a small check-in counter or drive-through. Maybe it’s because there’s a giant parking lot outside that’s too hot, or the environment’s just off. People say the place is still isolating.” Sometimes the design is intentional: benches removed so people can’t loiter, tunnels sealed so no one can sleep in them, bike lanes routed around convenience rather than need.

I’ve seen this firsthand. Years ago, a business improvement district in New York was given a public bathroom by the city—free, on paper. But maintaining it fell entirely on the BID’s own budget. And unable to absorb the cost of maintenance, the “gift” was given back. An amenity became a disamenity the moment we couldn’t afford to maintain it, to keep the lights on and the door unlocked.

Chronic isolation is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day

The health stakes of all this are not abstract. Holt-Lunstad led a meta-analysis of 148 studies tracking millions of people over years and often decades, finding that chronic loneliness and isolation carry a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A later paper she co-authored formalized that comparison, benchmarking social isolation directly against smoking as a public health risk. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, which Holt-Lunstad helped author, put a number on the danger: people who are socially disconnected face up to a 29% higher risk of premature death.

“This isn’t just some interesting correlation,” she said. “We know the biological mechanisms, the behavioral mechanisms that account for these effects.” Her own national survey, Social Connection in America, found nearly three-quarters of Americans get together in person with people they care about, other than those they live with, just twice a month or less, and 67% report never participating in a club or organization at all.

“We have designed our world, our society, for efficiency and economic benefit, and not necessarily for the thriving and well-being of humans,” she said.

Third places are where much of that everyday, low-stakes connection used to happen by default. “It’s not just our close, intimate relationships that impact our mental, physical, cognitive health, but our broader network,” Holt-Lunstad said. “We need to be able to have those close, intimate ties, but also the acquaintances, the friends, the neighbors, the strangers—people that make you feel part of some kind of community, or something bigger, or even just part of humanity.” There’s even a dollar figure on the fallout: one estimate puts the cost of the loneliness epidemic to the U.S. economy at $406 billion a year, in lost productivity and health care spending alone.

It also means a lack of employment opportunities and economic development. “If you lose a few coffee shops, but you have 50 coffee shops in New York City in your local area, does that few matter?” Finlay said. “Versus if you’re in a rural area and you have three coffee shops closed—that’s going to be felt differently. Counting is a first step, but it doesn’t fully help us understand: do lives get better or worse when we lose or gain these particular sites?”

It’s a version of the same warning Harvard’s Robert Putnam issued a quarter-century ago in “Bowling Alone,” noting that Americans are now even less likely to join civic groups, unions, and churches than when the book was first published.

You diversify your stock portfolio, why not your relational portfolio?

Finlay also runs a longitudinal study of nearly 7,000 older Americans that began in April 2020, combining surveys with monthly and then annual journal-style writing. What she’s hearing echoes in her own observations. “People are more stressed,” she said. “They no longer browse the aisles, they no longer chit chat with someone. They’re rushing to get the groceries, whereas it used to be kind of a site to mingle informally, to see a neighbor, chat with someone behind the counter.” Researchers call this everyday contact “the science of small encounters,” tied to what Finlay described as “relational portfolio diversity”—a broader set of people a person interacts with daily, independent of close friendships or family. “That’s highly protective for health and well-being,” she said. “We’re losing some of that everyday contact.”

Finlay sees gentrification cutting the same way as rising costs elsewhere: it can bring in new services, but not necessarily to the people who were already there. Drawing on interviews conducted across the Twin Cities, where she’s based part of her research, Finlay described participants who said a revitalized neighborhood no longer felt built for them, with people saying they were followed in stores, or were told her they had to dress differently just to shop nearby.

But one kind of outing has held on, and Gen Z is choosing it specifically for dates: the movies. A date at the movies costs less than dinner, and conversation is optional. Fortune has reported that the average cost of a single date has climbed to $189, up more than 12% in a year, with nearly half of single Americans now saying dating isn’t financially worth it. Some are opting out entirely: what one Fortune story dubbed “solo-maxxing” is the trend of young adults rejecting $200 dates altogether in favor of staying single.

Holt-Lunstad has watched the price problem play out at home. She noted her son paid $30 to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and called movie tickets “not that cheap”—but next to his $90 group dinner, the theater still wins.

The bigger reason may not be about the price at all. In a study she ran with Eventbrite, Holt-Lunstad found that the gatherings most likely to build real connection are the interactive ones: dancing, roller skating, anything that asks something of the people there. A movie sits at the opposite end of that scale. “If you’re just sitting passively in an audience, not actually participating, that’s less so,” she said. For a first date, that passivity is the point. Two hours with nothing required of you produces something to talk about afterward, without any pressure to talk during. “Social anxiety can be a barrier to connection,” Holt-Lunstad said, “and so if there’s less pressure, that may be an entry point for creating connection that reduces the pressure to identify conversation topics.”

So Gen Z ends up in the same dark rooms Finlay has been watching close for years, for reasons that have less to do with loving movies than with everything else getting too expensive and too demanding. And what’s lost in that trade, Finlay argues, isn’t just convenience—it’s a harder-to-measure sense of possibility. “There’s some social infrastructure sites that are really pivotal to developing hope,” she said, “and a lot of sites that are diminishing hope.”