"Lease to assign" , "liquidation, everything must disappear" . In many medium-sized cities, the shop windows have austere looks. For more than thirty years, the development of peripheral areas has helped to devitalize city centers, particularly those of medium-sized municipalities.
The vacancy, that is to say the proportion of shops to be sold or rented, has grown steadily in city centers in recent years. While it affected 7% of businesses in 2012, it reached 12% in 2018, according to the Federation of Specialized Trade (Procos). In one in three average cities, the vacancy rate exceeds 15%. Conversely, the flow of customers welcomed to the shops has been declining steadily by more than 5% per year for the past five years.
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If the decline is very real, the development of peripheral businesses is not solely responsible for it. "What makes downtown commerce suffer is simply the fact that the inhabitants no longer live there ," notes
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