I don't know about most, but downtown Manhattan is very similar at night.

Some places like downtown Dallas are even more empty.

Most big cities after business hours are full of life, full of people out going to bars, clubs, other events, etc.

If you go outside in the downtown of most 200k+ cities, on any normal day, you’ll find lots of people there.

On the other hand, the residential suburbs will be dead.

This isn't true in the U.S. Downtowns all across the country are dead at night.

London is interesting, in that the square mile (financial district) while being very busy (even at night) during the week, due to workers drinking and socialising after office hours, is absolutely empty at weekends. On Sundays the streets are absolutely deserted, which makes it a great time to film apocalyptic zombie movies - see '28 Days Later' for an example.

Well, I can’t really compare – I’ve never been in the US.

But I’m gonna assume the relaxed zoning in the EU, and the resulting mix of commercial, residential, and offices, often even in the same building, leads to the people having a reason to go downtown.

Thats part of it, the other part is simple market economics. It is hard for the things that people want to do at night (clubs, art galleries, restaurants and bars) which are much lower margin businesses to compete with the large financial and governmental institutions that dominate places like the Chicago loop, lower Manhattan or downtown Dallas.

These leads to a pretty common pattern where just outside of the financial/governmental centers of US cities there exist neighborhoods that are mixes of residential, cafe's, nightlife, "creative businesses" or retail. For instance, the Chicago loop is literally surrounded by such places.

But the lack of activity in a financial district has very little correlation to the density of the city. Manhattan is obviously a walkable and dense place to live but lower manhattan (wall street) can feel down right empty after hours.

I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.

I don't think it's so much the financial uses pushing out restaurants and retail but rather housing that's being pushed out.

In Toronto the Financial District doesn't go completely dead, but the 4million square foot underground mall shuts down, and it's just a few ground level businesses that stay open. It's still more lively at night than the typical suburb, but not as bustling as the adjacent neighbourhoods or as the Financial District during the day when there 200,000 office workers there (vs just a few thousand tourists and residents within walking distance at night). From what I heard it's not as dead at night as the Chicago loop.

Relative to NYC, not that many people live in downtown Manhattan either, and there isn't that much stuff open there at night. I'm not sure what conclusions there are to draw from nightlife in the loop.

> I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.

I only visited cities which don’t really have high-margin businesses, so that’s maybe why I never noticed that.

People have been moving out of the urban core in U.S. cities for the last 50 years. This has hit mid-sized U.S. cities particularly hard. While enough businesses may have stayed behind to maintain a central business district, the residents chose to live elsewhere and commute in.

The St. Louis region, where I live, has nearly 3 million people (about half of which are inside the I-270/255 loop, for some context on a map), but only around 3000 residents in its primary Downtown neighborhood (and another 4000 or so in the adjacent Downtown West). These two neighborhoods have a population density that's lower than the city average (and much lower than in the most dense neighborhoods).

By the way, this actually represents a bit of a comeback for the neighborhood. There were only 800 residents Downtown in 2000. Warehouse-to-loft conversions became popular about 15 years ago, which has reversed the trend, at least for now.

"Urban core" has little to do with it. "The loop" in central downtown Chicago hosts pretty much nothing but large office buildings. It's dead after 6PM because nobody is there. Where are they? Other parts of the urban core of Chicago.

Sorry. "Urban core" is ill-defined enough to be almost meaningless and I was using it alternately to mean Downtown and to mean it in the sense you do, which was bound to cause confusion. I was trying to point out that the St. Louis Downtown isn't even dense by the standards of other places in its urban core (in the sense you mean).

That's my fault.