The Vancouver Sun reports that downtown Vancouver’s Hudson’s Bay Department Store, a unit in what has been one of Canada’s strongest national retailers is “mostly empty” and needs working elevators and escalators. But things may be worse in the US. Downtown department store closures have occurred in many US metropolitan areas, and especially on the West Coast. Seattle’s Bon Marche has now been closed two decades, Portland’s Meier and Frank, nearly a decade later and Macy’s Union Square in San Francisco is now slated for closing in increasingly desolate San Francisco.
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.
Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.
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