There was a period where you had a lot of white flight from urban centers in the US and a lot retail moved out to the suburbs as a result. Retail pretty much follows the consumers. I'm not sure retail could have (or had the incentive to) keep the consumers in the cities.

As anecdata, when I graduated from grad school in the mid-eighties, other than Manhattan financial people, pretty much no one I knew went to live in a major city. In Massachusetts, none of the computer industry jobs were in Boston any lony longer.