The second part of the Times’s argument is that living in big, dense cities somehow makes people more vulnerable to the pandemic. So, logically, people will flee to be safe. In a sense, this is a warmed-over version of some old myths about the negative health implications of living in cities, the “teeming tenements breed disease” argument. As Todd Litman has neatly summarized, the health data are unambiguous: city living is associated with lower rates of morbidity and mortality; the kind of sedentary lifestyle propagated in suburbs, is actually bad for your health.

When it comes to the COVID-19 virus, if there is a problem of over-crowding, it seems to be largely confined to nursing homes, prisons and cruise ships or aircraft carriers, not cities.

As we look around the world there are plenty of places far denser than typical American cities that have largely dodged the coronavirus epidemic. Blogger Aaron Carr gives a nice synopsis of this observation.

New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, HK, Japan, Norway, Canada, + CA have a combined population of nearly 500m people, but 1,900 fewer COVID deaths than NYC. Density isn’t the problem. Failing to plan, prepare, and act early/aggressively is.

And, as we’ve pointed out in a detailed analysis comparing Vancouver, British Columbia with US cities, there’s little reason to believe that, even in North America, density drives the pandemic. Vancouver is the third most dense city on the continent, and has a low rate of reported cases.

Bloomberg’s Noah Smith makes that same point, and also notes that outbreaks have been common in suburbs:

California’s outbreak started in suburban Santa Clara county rather than San Francisco and is still more severe in the former. New York’s outbreak started in Westchester County, north of New York City. These epicenters are suburban areas that we don’t normally think of as being very dense. This suggests that social and professional networks, rather than random interactions on streets or in trains, are the main vectors by which diseases such as the coronavirus spread.

More specifically, a lot of people seem to think that one particular aspect of density—urban transit systems—contribute to the spread of the virus. There’s a working paper from MIT economist Jeffrey Harris that seems to imply a connection between transit ridership in New York City and the intensity of the pandemic in particular neighborhoods. Alon Levy and Salim Furth have already written comprehensive takedowns of this claim.

Writing at Pedestrian Observations, Levy notes that the paper’s only quantitative claim is based on a comparison of Manhattan with the rest of New York City, one which is fraught with problems because of differing income levels, travel patterns and other factors.

In an article published at Market Urbanism, Furth presents his own statistical analysis looking at the connection between car use and reported COVID-19 cases. He finds that in car-dependent portions of New York City (like Staten Island, and outlying neighborhoods in Queens), reported cases per capita are higher than they are in denser neighborhoods with higher levels of transit use. He concludes:

Taken together, the global trends, suburb versus city infection rates, and neighborhood trends within New York suggest that transit-dependent cities are easier to protect from viral infections even when the transit system remains open.

In the heat of the crisis, it’s easy for fear and misinformation to circulate. The claims that the city and urban living are a contributor to disease is based on an old set of anti-urban biases, that seem to have little basis in fact. Over time, as the pandemic wanes, its likely that a cooler and more fact-based view will prevail, and the baseless bias against cities will subside. It’s helpful in that sense to recall that the heyday of American urbanism was the decade of the Roaring Twenties which followed immediately after the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919.

Be optimistic about cities going forward

The epitaph of cities has been written many times. We were told that in the wake of 9/11 no one would want to live in dense areas for fear of terrorist attacks. We were told that the advent of the Internet and shopping would allow people to forego traveling to cities for jobs and goods, but the back-to-the-city movement has flourished and accelerated coincident with the widespread adoption of these technologies. Once again, we’re being told that a new fear will drive people to the suburbs or rural towns. Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, addressed this question head-on in a recent interview with Brandon Fuller of the Manhattan Institute.