This may be hard to answer or almost irrelevant to those in car-centric or spread out/ rural areas, but has the loss of a single business or building in your area had a major impact on your community? I am not talking about job loss but more on a sociological level.

Before I lived here, back in the 80s, my neighborhood was an area that had stalled on a number of levels. On the one hand, since the 60s sometime, it was not a bad neighborhood to live in, but up until the very early 90s, 92-93, there were lots of abandoned buildings and not a lot of solid infrastructure, if that makes sense. If you needed a hospital, you were in excellent position. If you needed a full service grocery store or wanted something that was close to fine dining, forget it.

When I moved back to this city after a couple years in surburban Chicago the moves actually asked why I moved from such a nice neighborhood into a slum. It wasn't, but it was not far from that by car, and really even one block over there were two wino bars that would literally have people lying on the sidewalk out front, and a burnt out hotel (flophouse). This actually changed quite a lot the first year I was here.

Anyway, sometime in the 1980s a gym opened in my neighborhood and it was in a huge building, so a number of ancillary and other social service kinds of businesses also opened in the buildings, and by 1993 or so the neighboring building opened what would be a thriving coffee shop, and a books/magazines/gifts shop, and across the street a restaurant went in the first floor of an apartment building. You would meet anybody in the neighborhood in any one of those places. As the neighborhood evolved there was also a bunch of programming for kids in that building.

Fast forward to the late 20-teens and for various reasons the gym closed. (it was on seven interlocking levels, not at all universal access, things like that. Then the building sold. Because of the real estate it was bought by a developer and the building has been torn down.

So that particular sort of "real gym" is gone, people scattered to various branches of national gyms that have sprung up, there's no book/magazine/gift store (that had disappeared earlier). And while there are Starbucks and that sort of thing, now those are not particularly social places where you meet people you didn't go there with. It's people either with someone they walked in with or people on their tablets or phones. Although the neighborhood is actually getting more and more residential, there is actually no real neighborhood anymore.

Part of this is cultural change, but I think the loss of that physical building really killed the neighborhood as it was. In addition there was a long-time diner that was also sold so the site could be redeveloped. There were people that ate there every single day. Covid wiped out the diner that a lot of them migrated to, (not lack of business, lack of workers, they own two diners and only have enough reliable workers to keep one running). We also lost every fast food outlet in the vicinity. Not that I ate at McDonalds or Wendys more than about once a year, but I don't know that it's great that cheap food has been wiped off the map for people who live here.