Apparently the public market is pretty nice

Have you not met a 21st Century American city before?

> "How was this allowed to happen?"

That's such an odd notion. Who was supposed to stop it? American cities have gotten shitty urban design because that's what the majority of the residents of those places demanded, either directly or unwittingly. But that's all a discussion better for /r/urbanplanning

Me thinks OP doesn’t get out much.

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There is a downtown area around the Arlburg ski shop

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I sometimes share the sentiment. Seems like the city has lost a bit of it's charm over the years

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You weren’t downtown then. Sounds like the North end of town just as you enter town. Downtown Wenatchee looks like this

There's that one Fred Meyer that only seems accessible via the highway. If you think of it as a really inconvenient rest area, it kind of makes sense.

That looks like a parking lot to me.

Yeah, so the area around Wenatchee is largely rural and the trains from Quincy and Waterville don’t run all that often. People need to get into town somehow.

That doesn't mean the main street needs to be a parking lot.

Strong Towns has a lot of research and material on how smaller towns like this can build more economically viable communities by avoiding this type of development. Particularly relevant here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/4/seven-key-differences

Ohme gardens is really pretty

Lived there for 7 years, didn’t bother me! Loved Caffe Mela! Live music to!

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More like because that’s what auto manufacturers lobbied for. America had a long and storied history of auto manufacturers squishing public transit

Yes, that's part of it.