Earlier this week I read a semi-viral piece about store closures in downtown Charleston. The costs of running a storefront business in the city are becoming too great to bear and, at least according to one writer on Medium, now only chains and tourist traps can survive. This is really sad. I remember visiting Charleston five years ago and marveling at how vibrant and occupied it was, even during the winter of 2020 at the height of the pandemic.
Unlike so many other cities that saw their downtowns decimated by the lack of office workers, Charleston, which has long relied on tourism as its main industry, seemed to be thriving. After my visit to King Street, I did some quick research to see how it had remained so independent. I wondered if a local community development corporation owned buildings and curated the leases, but it didn’t seem like it. It just seemed like a wonderful, natural marvel.
But that miracle seems to be ending. A slew of issues stemming from a lack of affordable housing near downtown are all crushing Charleston. And unlike those cities that have seen their downtowns mostly bounce back with the return of office workers, there is no quick way for Charleston to get out of this mess.
Once Charleston’s independent businesses are gone, will the city be able to sustain its tourism industry? The article’s author, Peyton Steele, writes about why small businesses are critical to the city’s success:
Visitors don’t come here for chains. They don’t travel across the country to eat at the same places they could find at home. They come for culture, creativity, craftsmanship — for places that feel like Charleston. And the more those disappear, the less unique this city becomes.
We are already seeing the results: shorter visits, lower tourism spending, weaker word-of-mouth, fewer glowing reviews. Charleston can’t maintain its reputation on scenery alone. Without a thriving, original business community, the experience becomes forgettable. And when that happens, everyone loses — hotels, tour guides, real estate, even the city’s tax base.
If tourism won’t be enough to save retail, what will?
After the pandemic, cities struggled with several new patterns: People were coming into the office less frequently, and they were accomplishing more of their shopping and tasks online. In response to a lack of foot traffic from locals and commuters, many cities shifted focus to tourists. But now that strategy, too, may be in jeopardy as over-tourism leads to housing prices that make small business impossible and that in turn makes the city less attractive as a destination. Charleston’s woes may just be a canary in the coal mine.

To boot, we now have the unnecessary burden of tariffs and the economic slowdown they’re causing. Tariffs are going to make it that much harder for independent businesses to compete — not just with chain retail, but with online shopping. Tariffs are basically a tax on the physical world, and just one more thing that makes digital life comparatively more attractive. We haven’t felt their impact just yet, but we will.
So are downtowns and retail doomed if they can’t survive off traditional routines of office workers, tourists, or locals? No, but they’re going to need a new direction. Something that will work with the economic transition underway with AI. Something that can’t always be replaced with less expensive options online. Something that aligns with other civic strategies, such as fostering in-person activities and placemaking. The answer might be the hobby economy.
Work, live and hobby
For a long time, there’s been a discussion about growth of experiential retail — the Dick’s Sporting Goods with a climbing wall or batting cage, the Athleta with yoga classes, and the “competitive socializing” subset that includes things like indoor mini golf, ax throwing and escape rooms. Pop-ups and festivals also fall into this category. These concepts help pull people out of their homebound inertia, can enliven streetscapes, and importantly for the local economy, get people to open their wallets.
We’ve been assuming the reason that people like these experiential stores is because they are exciting enough to compete with online entertainment and distractions.
But I think they are evidence of something else bubbling up: the increased focus on hobby-centered life, particularly since 2020.

Many of these stores, festivals, and pop-ups are not about just buying a one-off item in a fun environment, they’re about going deeper into a hobby and connecting with others who share the same interest.
How is a hobby different than regular leisure? Hobbies are known as “productive leisure” or “serious leisure” by scholars and are defined by having at least the aspiration of skill and knowledge of how to do something, whether that’s fencing or crocheting a sweater.
Are hobbies AI-Proof?
My thinking about hobbies started when I listened to the latest episode of Timothy B. Lee’s podcast, AI Summer. Tim and his (now former) co-host talked about a bunch of scenarios for AI in the future. As AI changes the nature of work and how people spend their time, maybe (best-case scenario) time and money are more abundant.
Tim also made the really interesting point that people maintain interest in hobbies that haven’t changed much with technology, like chess. Even though the rules of chess are the same as they have been for hundreds of years, people continue to play the game and enjoy watching others play the game today.
This was the moment in the podcast that got me though. Tim said:
And so the future might be a world where [there’s] a ton of abundance, [and] most people kind of have kind of semi-professional hobbies where they spend a lot of time doing them and talking to other people to do them and competing to be better at them.
It would be lovely to think that hobbies might be one area of life that could be AI-resistant, given that they’re inherently about developing your own human skill at something. You might use AI to track your vitals, or to enhance your paintings, or to help you code something, but ultimately, AI cannot replace your ability to do a hobby since the inherent value of a hobby is the act of doing it.
Hobbies also resist being replaced by online distraction because they aren’t just pure leisure either. When describing cities in the past, folks like Richard Florida would talk about “live, work, and play” as the full complement of urban activity. The activities that would fall into the “play” bucket often included going out to a restaurant, seeing a movie, going shopping or going to a baseball game. Pure leisure. And while there’s definitely nothing wrong with pure leisure, it’s been one of the categories that’s just been upended by online shopping, streaming, and delivery. And in fact, eating meals is one of the categories that has increasingly taken place at home over the past 20 years.
Hobbies are a fit for all ages
In a 2022 Atlantic article, Julie Beck noted that hobbies took off during the pandemic:
One nonscientific survey found that 59 percent of Americans have picked up a new hobby during the pandemic. People baked so much that all the flour ran out. Lumber prices soared, thanks in part to a boom in home DIY projects.
Sure, there were other popular ways to spend time during the pandemic’s early days — playing Animal Crossing, organizing Zoom happy hours, watching Tiger King. But we all kind of knew that picking up a hobby was somehow better than those things.
Indeed, hobbies may fit in well with millennials’ optimization obsessed culture. Substack cultural commentator Anne Helen Petersen recently dedicated an issue of her newsletter to “millennial hobby energy”:
Millennial Hobby Energy is going from growing four dahlias to growing 500. It’s running a couch-to-5K and then suddenly you’re making plans for two marathons a year. It’s falling down a quilting rabbit hole on TikTok and waking up with $800 worth of fabric. It’s going golfing for the first time in a decade and suddenly you’re going on four guys’ trips and have a closet full of golf-specific rain gear.
Per the meme above, hobbies are often thought of as the domain of older adults who have more spare time. Middle-aged adults are often too busy with their families’ calendars to indulge in hobbies, but as Petersen notes, “intensive parenting” is actually quite akin to a hobby.
Last week, when I was outlining the tenets of millennial hobby energy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that so many of its impulses — to optimize, to aestheticize, to buy a bunch of stuff to feel like you’re doing it right, the performance of the hobby on social media, the tendency to make your hobby your entire personality, to equate “doing it on hard mode” as doing it right — also describe the set of bourgeois parenting practices identified as “intensive parenting.”

How hobbies could save places
As online shopping and delivery rids cities of a layer of pragmatic retail — pharmacies, clothing stores, furniture stores — and as tariffs and rising rents make selling stuff that much harder, stores that connect to people’s hobbies might be the ones set to thrive.
I imagine that cities like Charleston are truly seeing the downsides of a tourism economy, but I also think they’re seeing the end of the in-person, pure leisure economy, too.
In Petersen’s piece, she notes the economy that surrounds hobbies that often includes buying a lot of stuff — this is so true. Whether it’s golf or mahjong or kids’ crafts, I have seen how there are endless (and sometimes very creative) ways to spend money on hobbies.
So perhaps instead of selling clothes and tchotchkes, we’ll see more retailers that appeal to particular hobbies. Barnes & Noble is expanding by 60 stores in 2025 — that old hobby of reading is still powerful and is resulting in the success of independent bookstores as well.
But the hobby economy goes way beyond retail. It also includes private lessons to help people master their skills. Being a coach or a hobby instructure is likely a better economic rung than cashiers and store clerks, but it also doesn’t require a college degree.
Instead of pure leisure tourism, perhaps people will take more trips to participate in their hobby in a different location or with other people who share the same hobby.
But I’m most excited about how the hobby economy can support vibrant places. Already we see how hobbies enliven our public spaces and parks. But they can pair hobbies with other purposes — such as education or healthcare — too.
In Philadelphia, we’re awaiting the reopening of a renovated historic golf course. The golf course will have lots of places for golfers to play, but the first part of the campus that reopened was a Tiger Woods (TGR) Learning Lab that will house afterschool STEM programming for local kids. As cities think about their assets in terms of hobbies, they should consider how they can build in social infrastructure, with the hobby economy and the nonprofit component financially supporting each other and intertwining their stakeholders.
Finally, the hobby economy might be better for our health than the pure leisure economy. Numerous studies have shown that buying things doesn’t actually make us happier. But hobbies do! Research has demonstrated that particularly for people over 65, people who have hobbies have higher rates of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression. And if you listen to any of those parenting podcasts (hi, fellow intensive parents!) you know that hobbies are great for children. Particularly as cities think about how to address the equity gap, growing hobby economy might also be a way to support low-income children.
This spring, the infamous Hobby Lobby is coming to Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. Meanwhile, a new experiential version of classic French department store chain Printemps opened downtown just a few weeks ago, promising to make in-person shopping enjoyable and memorable. I hope both stores last a very long time. But if I had to choose, I’d bet on the hobby economy.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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