I've been running businesses in my city for 20+ years. I know all the people who own all the apartments, retail and office buildings in the downtown area. I've done business with them for years. The reason why their buildings are empty and boarded up now is because they no longer need the cash flow. They don't need to collect monthly rent checks to maintain their lifestyles like they did in the 80s, 90s and 00s. They have too much money to spend, so they invest it in these multimillion dollar properties that they are incentivized to price you out of because that makes the value go up even more, until some big developer comes along and buys it for an astronomical figure so they can tear it down and build something new with subsidies from the taxpayer.
It's a lie that "none of your problems is because someone else is a billionaire." Billionaires are the reason your rent goes up, the reason your 7-layer burrito goes up, the reason your city is boarded up. The commodification of real estate is why businesses are too expensive to run and everything is unaffordable. If you want to have an economy like the boomers had, you have to tax them like Eisenhower and JFK and Nixon did.
"The billionaires will leave" is another lie. There's nowhere to go. There's no American business that would be better off without the American consumer base and the American workforce. And if they did leave, THEY CAN'T TAKE THE BUILDINGS WITH THEM. Either they pay taxes on it or sell it to somebody who will, then the property is part of the community again and the economy is working again like it did for your parents and grandparents.