I think unfortunately this is a massive conflux of many negative rentseeking factors that creates a blackhole of mediocrity.

A lot of local restaurants in Seattle can't afford space rent, but then when they leave those spaces stay empty. The restaurants that do thrive are part of big multinational chains or have to serve the same slop as everywhere else because it's the cheapest. Combined with increasing consolidation, everything converges towards low quality shit.

Fixing this would require, like a lot of our self-inflicted problems, realizing that big corporations and consolidation is slowly strangling everything.