Mine (pop. 8000) was in it's last throes when I was a young child, by the Bicentennial the vacant shops started, replaced initially by social services agencies. By the 1980s nearly all the commercial buildings had become offices, or say vacant, or were vanity shops for women's fashion that lasted maybe a year and then shuttered. Grocery stores survived but in fewer numbers, and all shifted to the outer edge of town, likewise restaurants, cafes, lunch counters all replaced by national fast food franchises. Beautiful old bank buildings sat empty, replaced by cheap boxes by the highway, with names that sounded like antidepressants or boner pills, parts of huge regional chains -- everyone who worked in a bank was a vice president. So did chain drug stores and a a Wal-Mart pop up on the outskirts (with the three old department stores closed, and only one clothing store survived, also on the edge of town.)
Old families whose members included mayors and governor and politicians and who had their names carved in limestone friezes, families who owned banks and the larger independent businesses shifted, too: from a downtown with several arteries of nice houses to just one, or one and a half. All sorts of ideas for coffee shops and river walks and outdoor markets were tried, but there was little market for them and all failed.
The better public buildings were repurposed multiple times. Once large windows with semicircular tops were stuccoed over leaving little strip windows for a bit of light and, maybe, air. The high school became a middle school became an elementary school. Despite a growing population only fast food joints and the hospital did not shrink.
That was the change that happens from the Late Sixties to the early Nineties. Now there are a handful of coffee shops in the downtown, but for a vehicular clientele, it looks a little more tody and maintained but still fucking bleak. There is not one store that couldn't be found (by the same name) in the next town and the town next to that. By the time I was in high school it's downward spiral was clear, though the lowness of its destination not.
It's just shit and sprawl and a handful of grand houses and historic buildings. In a town where every facade was cheaply rebuilt, multiple times, so that the few small relics of it's past are like three good teeth in a wrecked mouth. And yet real estate prices are wildly better than they should be, tbe town in prosperous by some measures but looks like bomb wreckage decades on
I haven't been there in a decade, but it's not better.