What City Observatory this week
Our updated analysis of the prevalence of Covid-19 in US metro areas. It continues to be the case that the pandemic is most severe in the Northeast Corridor. The New York Metro area is the epicenter, as everyone knows, but far less noticed are the very high rates of reported cases per capita in all of the metro areas from Boston to Washington.
The Northeast corridor accounts for six of the eight hardest hit metro areas based on cases per 100,000, and alarmingly, the area continues to have the some of the highest rates of increase.
We have full details on all metro areas with a million or more population. The good news is that the curve is flattening. The rate of growth in newly reported cases continues to decline. Averaged over the last week, the daily growth rate in reported cases has declined to about 3.5 percent.
Must read
1. The Pandemic shows what cars have done to cities. Stay-at-home orders have dramatically reduced driving around the country. In the process, the pandemic has given us all a taste of what our communities would be like if they weren’t so completely given over to expediting car travel and priveleging those who are driving through a place over those who occupy it. Tom Vanderbilt
Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life pre-crisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York.
2. Don’t blame density for New York’s Covid-19 problems. Aaron Carr notes that its a politically convenient diversion for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to blame the city’s high density for the elevated rate of reported cases in New York. Carr marshalls a variety of statistics to show that both compared to other, far denser cities around the world, there’s little relationship between density and prevalence of Covid-19. The same also holds within New York: some of the least dense parts of the region have the highest number of cases per capita. Other dense places that reacted more quickly, like San Francisco, have seen a far smaller impact from the pandemic.
3. Why New York City’s density is a good thing for health. Writing at CityLab, Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas tackles the claim that density is somehow a bad thing for the health of a city’s residents. She notes that on the eve of the pandemic, the city reported an increase in the life expectancy of its residents to 81.2 years, an increase a full year over the past decade. The city has improved health for its residents in a variety of ways: car crashes, air pollution and crime are down. But its also the case that density, including the fact that New Yorkers walk a great deal more than most Americans, is a big contributor to better health. As Gelinas notes:
Even just basic exercise — walking home from the subway — keeps the average New Yorker healthier than most suburban Americans. Just 22 percent of adult New Yorkers are obese, according to the city’s health department, compared to the 42 percent rate for the U.S. as a whole, as reported by the CDC.
The high number of Covid cases and deaths in New York are particularly alarming, and unfortunately lead many to incorrect conclusions. It’s difficult, in the moment, to weigh all of the different aspects of city life objectively: imagine trying to convince people coming out of the first screening of “Jaws” to head straight to the beach. In the long run, though, its clear that cities make us healthier.
New Knowledge
In the News
Streetsblog quoted City Observatory director Joe Cortright in its article “We Shouldn’t Have To Say This: Expanding Sidewalks Does Not Spread COVID-19.”