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Every usage guide I've found says that "downtown [anywhere]" does not get capitalized. Yes, it does indicate a specific place, but that has nothing to do with capitalization. "Downtown" is simply a descriptor, an adjective, and as such it doesn't form a proper name phrase. (There are adjectives that form proper names, like "Old Sacramento", but ...
Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.In English, capitalization is primarily needed for proper names, acronyms, and for the first letter of a sentence. [a] Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
[e] They are additionally capitalized where they contain proper names: Przewalski's horse, California condor, and fair-maid-of-France. This applies to species and subspecies, as in the previous examples, as well as to general names for groups or types of organism: bird of prey , oak , great apes , Bryde's whales , livestock guardian dog ...
In summary, shortened forms of names for institutions are not capitalized unless they are "a shorter but still specific form", not just a single generic word. The material at MOS:INSTITUTIONS probably could be clarified on the question, as this isn't the first time the matter has come up.
On the contrary, United States does not include the article "The", because sentences such as "California is part of the United States" are written with a lowercase "the". These conditions are sometimes met if the Wikipedia article name is: the title of a work or publication (e.g., The Old Man and the Sea, or The New York Times), or
Capitalize only those prepositions that are five letters long or longer, are the first or last word of the title, are part of a phrasal verb (e.g., "Walk On" or "Give Up the Ghost"), or are the first word in a compound preposition (e.g., "Time Out of Mind", "Get Off of My Cloud").
Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized: The first and last word of the title (e.g. A Home to Go Back To) [f] Every adjective, adverb, noun, pronoun, and subordinating conjunction (Me, It, His, If, etc.) Every verb, including forms of to be (Be, Am, Is, Are, Being, Was, Were, Been)
WP:MOSCAPS currently specifies this for titles of people (my emphasis): When an unhyphenated compound title such as vice president or chief executive officer is capitalized (unless this is simply because it begins a sentence), each word begins with a capital letter: In 1974 Vice President Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States by Chief Justice Warren Burger This does not ...