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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

North America public policy

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

By Catherina Gioino, News Editor

August 2, 2026, 5:00 AM ET

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 titled 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-thru. 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 coauthored 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.

Read more: America is running out of places to hang out as movie theaters, bars and diners drop to all-time low – Fortune

Continue/Read Original Article: America is running out of places to hang out as movie theaters, bars and diners drop to all-time low | Fortune