I think what Hapi and Lex and Hattie are getting at about what the charm really was based on is very strongly pointed out. When all the places -local places that brought people into contact; the family owned stores or bars, the flavorfully slightly decrepit neighborhood clubs or bargain eateries- vanish then the ways that people were in order to interact in those places, the slightly challenging offnessess that more often had one identifying with the perpetrators of urban commercial behavior codes, schooled one in the ability to connect with streetworn neighborhood strangers, aprised one of the exact tenor of an entryway's potential menace, that kind of steep steep flavor of urbane comportments dwindles out. You're left with people pretending to be outlaws,soap opera stars,or expert consumers but who don't connect with one another, a population of uniformly impermanent normals that repopulate the area with a few standardized attitudes that no longer connect with how to be in this place but rather with how to occupy it or just pass through. The elderly woman in the schmatze who is the only one who has a key to the lock on the cyclone fence around the only empty lot left on this block seems like a public menace or alien to the young people who now walk past laughing at her inscrutable effort to make the lot a junk art gallery.
I'm not romanticizing the street this way. I'm pointing out how much less personable and how much more limited the humanness around here is.
This kind of reminds me of an idea someone told me about how a person's behavior is highly affected by the kind of space they occupy at the time -originally this was put to me about being in a subway car:-think about it, no one in there has a personallity, their minds become like the space of the car totally flavorless, quieted down, a sense-dampening space. You don't get people to act openly or unselfconsciously by giving them a big box store to be in. You don't get people to feel at home in a neighborhood where low rise apartments are being replaced by sterile antiseptic laughably priced rentals that guarantee a rapid turnover of tenants. People become less human in that environment, they aren't encouraged to be human in that environment. Humans are just processed by such spaces.