The Coronavirus is Changing the Future of Home, Work, and Life
15th April 2020
Amid 20 years of fanfare about how big, dense cities are the future, the country had kept spreading out with nearly all population growth since 2010 occurring in the urban periphery and smaller cities. As a new study from Heartland Forward, where I am a senior fellow, demonstrates, both immigrants and millennials—the key groups behind urban growth—are increasingly moving to interior cities and even small towns.
The coronavirus, which has hit major American cities hardest so far, is likely to accelerate that trend.
Duh. Any urges I had to live in a dense city core in a high-rise apartment just evaporated. The woods are more and more inviting.
Both cases and deaths have been overwhelmingly concentrated so far in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Gotham has been the American epicenter; dense regions seem especially susceptible to pandemics. This has also been the case in Europe. Half of all COVID-19 cases in Spain for example have occurred in Madrid while the Milan region accounts for half of all cases in Italy and almost three-fifths of the deaths.
Not to mention that major metro areas are behavioral sinks and, not coincidentally, ruled by Democrats.