More than half of the office buildings downtown are empty, and the ones that do have something only have a business in a handful of offices on a handful of floors.
Because of that, people started moving away because of lack of nearby jobs.
As people moved away, rents increased in both commercial and residential spaces to cover losses.
Library attendance and checkouts are way down.
Public transportation use is down.
Tax revenue in the city is down, which means less support for public services.
Landlords don't increase rents to "cover losses". That's not a real thing that happens. Rents are set at the market rate, with some variance and time lag for price discovery.
No, that's not how it works. You're just making things up. There's no such thing as a "silent understanding" with a bank. Either that's a covenant in the loan terms or it's not.
I spent 3 years renting a commercial property that subsidized the rest of the property locations. As soon as my business left, the building and rest of the tenants were gone within 3 months.
Cities wax and wane. A commenter a couple posts up in this chain (fwiw, they were arguing on the “there is a decline” side) shared a story with a 5% decrease. That’s not nothing, but it isn’t an extreme decline.
I am in a "top 20" US city and all of these things are in extreme decline.