At nearly every campaign stop, the two candidates in the race, like many municipal politicians across the country, have vowed to make sure that economic growth in their city extends to neighborhoods that have felt left behind.

From Chicago to Detroit to Birmingham, Ala., the downtown-neighborhood debate is playing out in the wake of efforts by many cities to stem economic slides and population losses by heavily subsidizing development. City officials have managed to revamp parts of their urban landscapes, sparking the construction of new office towers, condominiums and upscale businesses such as yoga studios. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods — often those whose residents are mainly black or Hispanic — continue to lack basic amenities like grocery stores and restaurants.

Elected leaders are now being confronted with a critical question: How will they ensure that the whole city benefits from the downtown building booms that have soaked up so many tax dollars?

“The cities are a little out of balance: The well-to-do are doing quite well, but there are a lot of neighborhoods in which poverty, crime, bad schools and a bad life experience is still too prevalent,” said Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who advised his city’s newly elected mayor, Lori Lightfoot. “If the current people who are in power, the mayor and the aldermen in different cities, don’t show a responsiveness to these issues, they’re going to be defeated by reformers.”

In Kansas City, it seemed only natural two decades ago that elected leaders would focus heavily on downtown. Back then, the center of the city was widely considered a hollowed-out wasteland of wig stores, haunted houses and surface parking lots where very few people lived or opened businesses anymore.