Issue 4 posed a specific question about Houston's Green Corridor: does World Cup infrastructure survive the tournament and serve genuine post-event recovery, or does it get mothballed the day the crowds leave? Five days after this issue publishes, that test starts running everywhere at once, not just in Houston.

The clearest candidate is Vancouver's Granville Street Pedestrian Zone, initiated by the Downtown Van BIA as a district-led street closure rather than a city permit granted for the tournament's duration. Restaurants and bars along the closure exceeded sales expectations throughout the group stage. Whether the closure becomes permanent is a decision Vancouver's city government and the BIA will need to make in the coming weeks, and it's the cleanest single test case anywhere in North America of whether a tournament-driven public space change outlives the tournament that created it.

Seattle presents a more complicated case. The Downtown Seattle Association's waterfront programming apparatus, built specifically for the tournament, drew the highest single-day foot traffic figures the district has recorded since it began measuring in 2019 (see BO-F-3). But programming infrastructure is different from a physical street closure: it can be scaled down quietly without anyone needing to make a formal decision to end it, which means Seattle's version of the permanence test is less visible and easier to fail without anyone noticing.

In Los Angeles, the DTLA Path of Progress improvements and, in Dallas, Deep Ellum's PID-funded infrastructure both present a third pattern worth tracking: infrastructure that got delivered through the district's own funding mechanism even where the city's parallel commitments did not materialize on schedule, a gap Plat Street documented in Issue 4. That infrastructure, because the district paid for it directly, is more likely to persist regardless of what the city decides, simply because nobody outside the district needs to approve keeping it.

The practical framework for any district manager assessing their own tournament-era investments: distinguish between infrastructure the district itself controls and paid for, which tends to persist by default, and programming or permits that depend on ongoing city cooperation, which tends to lapse unless someone actively decides to extend it.

Watch line: Vancouver's formal decision on Granville Street. It is the single cleanest test case available of whether a tournament-driven public space change becomes permanent.

Duplicate check: Extends Issue 4's Houston coverage from a single city to the broader field.