If I'm reading the key correctly, the influenza map has the colors backwards from what you'd expect, and the lighter colored states have higher death rates. So Mississippi and Alabama are still worst off, but there isn't a clear urban-rural divide elsewhere.
Also, Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and New Hampshire are among the best off places, and New York is worse than it’s neighbors. If that reversed color scheme is indeed right, it actually seems like maybe there has been a correlation.
Washington has both urban centers and large rural areas but 65% of people in Washington State live in Cities vs. 64% of people in New York State. Seattle isn't NYC but the state overall has a very urban population. More that 50% of the population lives in the Seattle Metro area for example while only 40% of people in NY state are part of the NYC metro area per the internet. So I think it still argues that being "urban" isn't well correlated with influenza death.
I would actually argue that the Washington vs. New York thing is also a good argument against being urban being a death nail in Covid. If you look at the maps of Covid deaths for 2020 and 2021 you can see that Washington does better in than in NY in both but is strikingly different for 2020 despite the fact that Covid cases were actually detected in the Seattle area before the first New York cases. So we were both areas with early cases, virtually no lead time to respond, and fairly equally urbanized populations. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm
In terms of Covid, I think there were some very specific policy differences between the area. In Seattle, after the first case was identified, the UW and King County public health departments defied CDC instructions and did Covid tests on all the flu samples they had collected over the last month. This included all the samples they had collected through an ongoing multi-year flu study that took samples from thousands of people who reported to their doctors with mild to moderate cold or flu symptoms so that Public health could track the previlance of specific flu strains over time in the area. This resulted in many early milder Covid cases being identified in Seattle that would have almost certainly gone undetected in NY.
In most cases, these people were already better but their contacts were traced and quarantined or isolated. That probably actually did slow some early transmission in and of itself. But it also made Covid feel much more real much earlier for folks here. One of my good friends was one of the people ID'd through the flu study (US patient #70) after what had appeared to be a moderate case of the flu. Because I had spent time with her during her infectious period, I was put into Quarantine in the last week of February of 2020 before the first Covid case had sever been diagnosed in New York. I spent that week downloading Zoom and figuring out how to operate my business and staff remotely and ordering a shit load of hand sanitizer online but it was clear we were going to engulfed by Covid in a few weeks. That wasn't that unique.
There were almost certainly Covid cases in New York for weeks before the first diagnosis but they clearly put less of an emphasis on early detection even though they knew Covid was in Seattle by late January and would inevitably be coming to New York. I think that left them more flat footed and their population less prepared.
Washington State declared a state of emergency weeks before New York State. Washington State closed schools earlier and put in place more strict bans on gatherings at the same time. (New York was still allowing gatherings of up to 500 while Washington State was limiting them to 250.)
New York actually closed all non-essential businesses earlier than Washington, in part because it was facing a full on health system meltdown. But Washington was earlier in setting up self-isolation requirement for exposures and closed all non-essential businesses just a week later even though our health system was still at capacity.
It actually makes an interesting test for how important early monitoring and early intervention helps since NY are actually both states with overall healthy populations. (New York actually has better hospital bed per capita than Washington which means that if we had gone along New York's path we would have been in really rough shape.)
But once you start looking at other state by state differences, I think you also need to consider overall population age, health, and access to medical care. In the case of Covid that got compounded by vaccine denial but I suspect given how the disease impacted different groups those underlying factors were likely huge.
Footnote 1 after "Age-Adjusted Death Rates" reads: "The number of deaths per 100,000 total population." So I think you're correct that it's a deeply counterintuitive color scheme.
It’s true that a larger fraction of what makes urban places desirable is indoors than rural places. But suburban places are basically 100% indoors. No one has sidewalk cafes or strollable boulevards or nice parks with outdoor amenities when everything is a 45 mph hellscape.
In the first couple months of shelter-in-place I was happy with my suburban house and I actually saw families in the streets walking and biking. But once things opened up in May, the suburbs were completely desolate, and I was lucky to move to Austin for six months of 2021, where there’s a lot more outdoor activities available than there are in Bryan/College Station.
I've gotten into arguments about suburbs before on slowboring, and I think that part of the issue is that "suburbs" really cover a wide range of areas. AFAIKT, a lot of suburb haters are talking about McMansion developments with zero sidewalks and business accessible without a car. But suburbs also include plenty of moderately dense towns (and, arguably, even cities*) with commercial centers. Different types of suburbs can provide very different experiences --- pandemic or not.
Idk have you been to the suburbs? Honestly one of the best things about it are the large sprawling parks with jogging trails. If you want to get Austin specific, places like Cedar Park and Round Rock are full of… well, parks. You just have to drive to them first. Lots of people don’t spend time but there are plenty of outdoor places in the suburbs, lots of chain restaurants like Panera have them, even if they aren’t as trendy as local mom and pop farm to table cafe.
I live in Bryan/College Station. It's possible that the Austin area suburbs are better about outdoor spaces than the places here, just as Austin itself is much better about outdoor space than places in Dallas or Houston. There's definite confounds, in that Austin is just a more interesting environment for outdoor space, with the creeks trickling out of the limestone hills, rather than the clay floodplain of the Brazos River.
Yeah. IDK. Kind of with Deep State here ... or maybe Chicago is super unique in having way better suburban amenities. I live wedged between the botanical gardens on one side of town and a ~ private Lake Michigan beach on the other. We walk to one at least once a week - way more in the summer. Where I lived in the city was a concrete jungle. I don't even know if there was a patch of real grass within 2 miles.
The problem is that often that "green" in suburbia comes in the form of grassy strips around parking lots, or between traffic lanes, which might make it look a little prettier on first glance, but doesn't actually end up making it any more pleasant to be around. You want parks and plazas with usable green areas, not just "green space" stuck between the cement.
I definitely don't endorse everything about what this guy says, but he makes a strong case that dense building with no green can often be much more tolerable than your average suburban space that is mostly green but pretty much unusable outside a car:
I see his point, but that hasn't been my experience anyway. Maybe I'm just good at choosing, but my current suburban neighborhood was basically cut out of a forest, such that I have to look carefully to even see other houses through the trees in my backyard. Not to mention there are at least a handful of parks, soccer fields, and hiking trails within 2-3 miles. I agree though that a suburb as he describes it would be awful.
People want green space, right? Of course, having that green space prevents people from living there who otherwise would. Freed from restrictions and regulations that artificially favor excess in either direction, developers will find the optimal proportion of green space to housing size to people living there.
His shtick is not so much build for the sake of building, but simply to *let* the people who want to build build.
That's how I also described Chicago when I was living in the area - 50 miles of concrete. I'm not an urban person anyway, but I felt like that city was especially oppressive.
Totally agree. The only caveat is lakefront living. That's a different experience - both in accessibility to the water / beaches and also building type (e.g., older apartments, smaller, expensive, huge HoAs). Not a fit for us in any way but a friend lives in this amazing co-op and I get the appeal.
"There’s not much of a point to living in a city if the offices are going to be closed and the restaurants and the museums are also going to be closed"
As a family that has rode out the entirety of the pandemic in DC, I would counter that living in a big city has been a blessing during COVID compared to exurban/rural areas. The inherent walkability of city infrastructure gave us tons of things to do outside without having to pile in the car and drive somewhere and worry about bathroom breaks in public. For us, we started walking 3-4 miles daily to get our kid out of the house after virtual learning and get exercise. My brother and sister in law who live in a typical exurban townhouse subdivision with no sidewalks connecting it outside of their small neighborhood had no comparable options.
Rowhouse porches are designed perfectly for social distancing, either from your neighbors next door on their porch, or from friends who stopped by to talk from the sidewalk.
Additionally on the social side, being in a city where overwhelmingly everyone took the virus seriously was a huge boost psychologically. Not having to worry very much about people licking doorknobs at Harris Teeter for freedom while grocery shopping or anti mask mandates from republican governors at schools has been a huge relief compared to what friends in redder areas deal with.
Agree with this take. I spent late March - August 2020 in DC and could walk everywhere, including decently stocked supermarkets and the farmers' market, where you could make a "reservation" to shop. Everyone was being careful.
Then I moved to the rural Midwest for family reasons. Yeah, you can go for a walk to nowhere, but that gets old quickly. Buying a decent assortment of groceries (since you're cooking virtually all of your own meals) requires a tremendous amount of driving, outside of the few months during which the markets are full of stuff. It's almost impossible to get services (electrician, plumber) when you need them, and pre-vaccines, if someone did miraculously show up, they probably wouldn't wear a mask. There were (and are still) quite a lot of anti-maskers/vaxers with confederate flags and "f*** Biden" stickers on their trucks. I'm not an ardent progressive, I just don't want everything to be about ideology; even here, it is.
I'm moving back east soon and can't wait, even though my living situation will be empirically much worse--smaller, worse ventilation, less nature, etc. But I won't have to be in the apartment (or a car) all of the time. Of course not everyone would make this choice, but life is full of tradeoffs, and these are ones I'm willing to make.
I don't think this is your best take. Rural areas are getting hit harder now because they refused to vaccinate - that's pretty obvious. I think if you could control properly for personal behavior you would find that rural areas are, in fact, dramatically less vulnerable to airborne disease spread. I bet the Starbucks in Kerrville is far less crowded than your typical Manhattan Starbucks and for some very simple reasons. The cost of real estate in a crowded urban area means you need more foot traffic for any given store to be viable.
You are right, though, that we should prioritize creating more housing units AND also lowering the cost per sq foot of housing units.
“Controlling for personal behavior” is ignoring half of what makes urban places and rural places different. The personal behavior is shaped by the space.
If someone is arguing that rural places are less vulnerable in a pandemic, I don't think they are going to be persuaded otherwise if you try to argue that they are full of idiots who won't get vaccinated. And even if you successfully demonstrate that rural areas will have more covid-risky behavior because people adjust their behavior to an equivalent risk level, you have essentially already conceded the point. In a rural town you can live much closer to your normal lifestyle without covid blowing up compared to NYC.
Yeah, I was thinking basically the same thing. Suppose that in place A, nobody gets vaccinated and everyone disobeys the rules, and in place B, everyone gets vaccinated and obeys. You observe that way more people die in place A. Clearly, restrictions in A are too lax. However, this doesn't mean that the *optimal* restrictions in place A are just as strict as those in place B.
When is someone going to calculate the age adjusted mortality for Covid. It would probably make sense urban cities look a little bit worse.
I actually calculated the over 65 mortality rate for NY, Texas, LA and Florida. NY was worse by a decent amount. Sorry, I did it at work last week and I’m finally working off work today, so I don’t have numbers handy.
But starting this summer, I think the mortality rate is more a function of vaccine status. 1/2 the 30 to 39 years olds who died from Covid in Idaho, died in September.
Anyway, bigger houses are great, but I think Matt underestimates the value of having a yard.
My brother just moved into a single family house for the first time in his life. Him and his wife are blown away by all the things they were missing that they didn’t realize. The quiet of not sharing walls. Letting dog be able to run free in yard. Grilling. Sitting in the sun half naked.
I get density. And there are definitely improvements. I just really question what proportion of the population wants to live in really really dense cities.
So here is an irony in South America. In many cities here, the middle class live in tall apartments buildings whereas the working class live in more dense single and double story houses. I asked my engineer friend, and he said it was because of security. The apartments building had private security and grounds.
Personally I am in favor of row houses with backyards. Or Charleston style houses on narrow lots.
Anyway, glancing through the comments, I think you will find everyone justifies their preferred living situation.
Personally my ideal would be an apartment or condo in a downtown city for parts of the year. And then cabin in the woods for summers and weekends. Sort of close to what I have now.
I would like to live in NYC for a year. Just to experience it.
Luckily my job allows me to live anywhere. Unluckily, kids keep us tied to Boise.
There are outliers -- Mississippi on the high side; VT, HI, ME on the low side. Every other state is basically random. Note that, for all the vitriol thrown at Florida (my state, so I am attuned to the criticisms more than most), it ranks right in the middle of the pack at #23 out of 50 states.
These "rankings" will likely change over time, as the states with more unvaccinated people rise, but I think people overestimate the benefits of state or local interventions. But in an uncontrollable situation, lots of people naturally gravitate to anything they can control.
This is basically where my wife and I are at, as well, in terms of preferred living situation. We bought out house for a family of four, but there's a large age gap between my two kids, with one of them in high school and the other just starting school, so assuming the older one moves out in a few years, there is going to be about 10 years where we have *kind of* too much house for a family of three, and then shortly after, far too much house for just the two of us. We're already kicking the idea around of moving to Chicago (or at least for part of the year) once our youngest is grown. We are both sort of urban-oriented, we both attended college in downtown Chicago, but we like having space for our kids to run around.
Re: fences, We bought our house about 3.5 years back, and I tend to be pretty cheap when it comes to spending money on home renovations, but we popped a fence in about a year and a half ago and it may be the least regrettable purchase of my entire adult life. Like you said, the ability to just pop the dog in the yard for a bit, or go out back with my kids and not worry about one of them bolting away from the house when I'm not looking is great.
What has occurred to me while writing this is that the discourse around this topic frequently positions the debate as something like this: there is a tradeoff between living in a high-density city, with nice cultural attractions, stuff to see and do, and decent public transportation versus living in the suburbs with a too-big house and a quieter sort of lifestyle.
But there are lots of people who live in high-density apartment buildings in the suburbs, without any of the attendant benefits of living in the city! And frankly, it kind of sucks.
Before we bought our house, we lived in three different apartment buildings across 11 years. The first one was like 500 units spread across two buildings, the second one was like 250 units in a seven story building, and the last was in a 10-unit building. Maybe if you live in a centralized urban area you can rationalize the tradeoffs, but if you have spent a large amount of time living in apartment, most of the people dream about buying a house and getting some elbow room between them and their neighbors, and I'd like to see this group of people explored a little more.
I always wonder about people that talk about cultural amenities in cities. How many times can you go to see a play or a museum? My brother used to live two blocks from the beach, and he barely went there.
I suspect that most people like to feel like they live next to cultural amenities, but rarely use them.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see the advantages of living in the city.
You are absolutely right though about apartment buildings in the suburbs.
My wife and I were briefly empty-nesters two or three years ago, and considered trading in our house, but the price is it already started to balloon, and the housing inventory in Boise Idaho was ridiculously small. What good is it making a profit if you can find a place to live.
I guess I shouldn’t complain, I actually have the best of both worlds. A nice safe single family house in a quiet neighborhood. The foothills are literally a block away. And downtown Boise, which is pretty cool, there’s only up 10 minute drive. We can ride our bikes there in 25 to 30 minutes along the Green Belt.
The museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and whatnot are pretty cool; we rotate through two annual memberships as our kid gets bigger and use them to the hilt.
Likewise, an opera, two classical concerts, and a few ballets a year are nice.
But the big three for us are:
The availability and variety of food; ethnic grocers, pop-up farmer’s markets, open-air market districts, and restaurants.
Access to traditionally “rural” leisure activities in or near the city anyway.
Lessened need to drive everywhere. We both drive enough for work, being able to walk to the grocery store, bike to lunch, or take the bus downtown is a wonderful break.
The not-driving thing is the biggest attraction for me. I hate driving and generally being in a car. I love being able to walk almost anywhere and not having to join a gym or set aside time for “exercise.” Food is also a big deal though.
I didn't like drive either. For me, I solved that problem by getting a remote job. Driving to the store and for various errands is all I really need to do now and it's so much better. So I learned that driving is OK, it's commuting for work that sucks.
If I could walk to everything non-work (including seeing friends) I wouldn't mind driving to work. The worst is having to drive to social events, especially because that travel often happens when I'm tired and not totally sober.
I encourage you to try your NYC-for-a-year experiment at some point! I had my epiphany while working in London/Brussels for a while in the early 2000s. It was the first time I didn't have, or need, access to a car for anything, and it was magical...
I agree about fine arts amenities (museums, symphony etc.) being an overrated reason to live in a city for most people. David's comments get much closer to what I like about urban living.
But the nicest thing for me is just being around a lot of people and activity when I walk around the neighborhood. Particularly during COVID, I spent a bit of time in the suburbs and I felt much more isolated there, despite having much more elbow room for myself.
It also totally matters a lot where in a city you are. I've lived in areas of Boston that I would hate to be in now, with a dog and kid. But now I live on a fantastic bike path in Somerville, 3 minute walk to the nearest playground and basketball court. If I was closer than the current 10 minute walk to the nearest big park it'd be perfect for us.
All that said, there are obviously great things about suburban and rural living too (especially around dog ownership...)
Most of it is stuff for single or no-kid people. Especially if I was single the idea of living where I do now seems awful.
But the biggest thing, in my opinion, is food. It was definitely nice just popping outside or stopping on the way home for Filipino Burgers, taco trucks, or whatever when i lived in LA. Coming up with what to eat every day and then actually having to cook it is a big chore in comparison
I think there are a couple things that make the amenities attractive.
One is that high density increases the viability of a lot of niche products, which means there’s just more stuff to do. If a business (whether that’s a type of restaurant or an activity or a product category) can only support one location per 500,000 nearby people, Boise might not have one and Manhattan would likely have 3 or more. NYC has Ukrainian restaurants and roller derby leagues and roving outdoor theater shows and curling clubs and stores specializing in vintage posters and whatever else your heart desires, which is great if you’re into any of those things.
The other is that, even if the experiences aren’t used that frequently, they’re better than elsewhere, and that’s worth something. Even if you only go to the museum a couple times a year, it’s an improvement if your local museum is the Met. Similarly with food, the median restaurant in NYC is pretty darn good, and the best ones are through the roof, so even if you eat out the same amount, you end up with a better eating experience. (Though this isn’t universal; I currently live in London and the median restaurant here is pretty mediocre.)
This is all true. But, you could also say... its possible to bicycle in New York City, but its not as safe as in Boise. Or, you can go hiking, but you need to drive further, and its not as good. Etc...
We do have NYC beat on Basque food though... largest Basque population outside of Spain.
Anyway... 25% of the population lives in Urban settings (though many of them are in single family home versions of urban settings). I wonder what percentage want to live in Urban settings?
Museums and the like are great, but here where I live in LA what's truly awesome is the weather. I mean, I could play tennis and golf every day. If I wanted to. Which I don't. So I never ever do. But I could. If I wanted to.
(Actually, the museums in LA are awesome. Just did the fantastic Getty Villa the other day; doing Armand Hammer today. The movie Academy museum just opened and the George Lucas tchotchke museum will open soon.)
The thing about a yard (and also a house) is you have to take care of it, and unless it's small (as in your row house example) the opportunity cost can be high. This is especially true if you are a "knowledge worker" (like me and my husband) so you have few useful skills. I can manage a garden, and used to love doing so. Now I want more time to do other things.
I share your "ideal" and that's what I thought I was doing with my house near a lake in Michigan. Problem is, it's much too far away from my downtown apartment. We just made the 12-hour drive last weekend and it's painful. It would be great if our lake house were closer, but it would have been much more expensive. Now I'm thinking it would be nice to just Airbnb in a variety of pastoral settings while maintaining an urban base.
After effectively living in apartments in large or medium size cities, from college until last year (just about 20yrs, whew!), Finally bought the medium size single family home on an unusually large and wooded city lot. Let me tell you about property maintenance! It's pure expenditure in terms of time and money. Now it looks pretty decent, it feels great to have a place of your own, and gives me lots of podcast listening time, put the pure cost/ opportunity cost is no joke. This coming from a guy who actually enjoys most of these tasks, and grew up doing them all anyway In our suburban / rural area, but sometimes I feel like I I am dedicating my life to this house and property, which is not always what I want to be doing...
Serious question. How would you use that time? Or, to be more specific, how do you fantasize you would use that time, verse how would you really use that time?
I’ve noticed that a lot of people pick a living situation is, based on an idea of what they want to do. But as human beings, many of us are lazy and when we have time, don’t actually do what we fantasize about.
It’s why there are thousands and thousands of RVs parked in storage yards across the country. I’m going to guess maybe one out of every 10 gets use more than a week a year.
I definitely feel you though on wondering whether your work life balance is correct. I’ve been feeling that way for a while.
That's a great question, and I ask it a lot. Answer: I work too much as I fear for my ability to provide for my family and our retirement even though I objectively am doing very well in a stable high demand job. I feel like I started my "real" career about 5 years late (vs my peer group, much later vs general) and I'm playing catch up now.
It is somewhat difficult to disentangle my free time this year versus prior years because of COVID, and also general life-timeing. Specifically, covid increased my work time demands meaningfully (healthcare). It also decreased one of our major hobbies which was travel associated with my wife's work. Also wife had major year-long work project (unassociated w/ covid) that really tied her up until this summer... So who knows, sometimes I actually think the yard work has given me something productive to do vs sitting in an apartment dining something dumb (like day trading, being online too much or drinking too much).
It's always interesting to look at the total cost of ownership of the house versus prior apartment just a mile away. Apartment was about $2,500 per month (rent, ins, util, maint), The house has probably been ~$5000/mo, including contractor expenses for repairs and upgrades, $3000 without those "optional" or first-year costs.
There’s a lot of people, that actually enjoy working on their house. As far as yard goes, we pay this 15-year-old kid from the block to mow it and edge it. $20 a week. Bargain.
You were spot on about the distance of your Lakehouse though. When I bought my cabin last year, I drew a circle, and it had to be within 3 Hours drives. Any more than that, and you just won’t take the time to use it.
AirBnB seems like a good alternative, but there is nothing like owning something.
The last couple weeks, I’ve been looking at some property on a lake in Oregon. But it’s 4 1/2 to 5 hours away. I haven’t decided yet. I might buy it just as an investment.
People in Boise tend to own houses up on the lake in McCall Idaho, but it is gotten so expensive there.
I totally get that! I used to love working in the garden, figuring out what to do with the house, even doing little repairs etc. I'm glad I had the house experience (though my detached house was also in a city, Washington DC). I just reached the point at which I want to do other things, including travel to other places and exploring beautiful landscapes for which I am not responsible.
I used to actually see a lot of plays in NYC--the last-minute discount tickets are great--and attend a lot of policy lectures, book readings, etc. Here by the lake--I'm one street away from Lake Michigan--I spend little time at the beach (I'm researching coastal policy and erosion, I am NOT a normal beach person). I do hike the trails I can walk or bike to (there are a few) but I dread getting in the car. I thought I was ready to "slow down," but having tried it I actually hate it (as does my husband, kind of to my surprise).
Actually NYC (it’s a long story but we used to split time between DC and NYC, now my husband works fully remotely so we don’t need a DC place). I am from Michigan and am a middle-aged person with family responsibilities, so having a place here made some sense. We also thought it could be a good retirement place.
Having spent so much time here, though, I now see that I don’t actually want to retire, probably ever, but certainly not in a small town without good medical options; I don’t want the responsibility of a house (even a great, small one); and (TMI warning) that being physically closer to relatives doesn’t mean I can somehow make bad situations less bad. This last one was the hardest to process.
You aren’t alone, and realizing that I never wanna retire.
What I would like to do is to go part time. Luckily my company offers that. We can become seasonal employees where we only work during the high demand times.
I’m thinking about going to seasonal in about five years.
Also I rarely make the drive. We’ve been here since last summer and are going back to the city for the winter. Will probably sell the house in a year or two.
One solution to the lack of yard problem in cities are parks! Sure they have less privacy than yards, but they have other advantages. So build more apartments and build more parks. Everyone wins. Well except the people who don't like parks over yards, but that's what suburbs are for anyways.
Living in a city would be my preference, but housing costs, schools, and the need to find room for a family of 5 plus 3 cats and 2 dogs keep us in the burbs for now. Once the kids are gone we plan to get a small place in the Colorado mountains and spend 1/2 the year traveling.
The lack of accountability to Brett Stephens pumping out one terrible take touches on the core of America's broken politics. Powerful people are wrong over and over and suffer no consequences.
I think Matt is underplaying how much this was a terrible take even in the moment. Yes it's true there were probably some liberal leaning people in June who were still operating under the mistaken notion that COVID was uniquely an "urban" issue (I suspect it was also an attempt to make the book more marketable; try to take advantage of the front and center issue of the moment and insert into the book any way possible).
I know it's almost a banal observation to say Brett is terrible at his job, but it really needs to emphasized that his takes are just awful even without hindsight.
I think the more sinister take is that Brett is good at his job, and that it isn't his job to write good takes. His job is to offer a conservative voice in the NYT. If conservatives takes are routinely divorced from reality, that's reality's problem, not the NYT's.
Pretty sure they just hired Bret Stephen's because David Brooks was riding on everyone's last nerve. It worked; people barely ever complain about Brooks anymore.
I think a lot of this analysis is incomplete because Covid deaths are highly correlated with age. Therefore, you need to compare using age-adjusted numbers. For example, this:
Secondly, a lot of deaths took place in institutional elder care settings. I can’t find state-by-state data, but globally about 1/3 of covid deaths happened in elder care facilities alone. Again, age and population vulnerability is driving that, not urbanization.
There was way too little focus on inspecting nursing homes and making sure that any deficiencies were fixed. That could have significantly lowered the death toll in many states. One of the reasons Washington state had a relatively low death rate despite having the first identified outbreak is that they did exactly this.
Nov-Dec 2020, here in Colorado, Covid broke through the extensive protocols that were put in place in many facilities around the state, killing many residents. I'm the legal guardian for my sister who lives in a memory care facility here - she got covid but was asymptomatic. Other residents of her facility weren't so lucky and 9 died.
This was before vaccines became available and I honestly don't know what else her facility could have done. It's just very difficult to keep an airborne pathogen away from vulnerable populations.
In Asian countries they have a lot more high-rises made up of large units. Not just 3+ bedrooms, but also more common space than 3-br units in America tend to have, like a big living room, big balcony, maybe even multiple floors. I don't see why we can't do the same thing here, or even more so.
I think the state of rural healthcare also probably played a role. A lot of rural hospital have closed since the financial crisis of 2008. That means people have to travel further. There’s also a continual shortage of healthcare workers in rural areas. That means that often times healt problems don’t get diagnosed until they’re more severe and a less healthy population is more likely to have a higher Covid death rate. Primary care doctors have been been quite successful at convincing reluctant patients to get vaccinated. But if there’s a shortage of primary care doctors that type of persuasion is less likely to happen. Rural areas tend to be older (that will raise the crude death rate) and so people tend to have more health problems
In retrospect I would just be very hesitant to attribute COVID death tolls to much beyond random chance, except for the countries that managed to actually suppress the virus by doing lockdowns then keeping case levels close to zero by having closed or heavily restricted borders.
The New Yorker had a lengthy article about how Seattle's response was much better than New York's and this saved a lot of lives. This may be true but Washington didn't really start any pandemic policy until 3/1, community spread was present in the Seattle area starting in mid-January. If spread in Washington had been close to NY levels from 1/20-3/1, the pandemic would have been out of control. Same in California, where there was an identified community spread death on 2/7. Beyond differential vaccine rates I really think you have to squint to see the impact of policy on Covid (this is why everyone was so eager to praise desantis, florida just got lucky with for a while IMO).
I think you're right that official rules and regulations didn't matter too much. But there's surely *some* explanation for why northern New England, and the northern half of the West Coast, did so much better than everywhere else in the country.
I was re-reading some of the communitarian literature of the 1980s and 1990s — both the philosophical (Sandel etc.) and the sociological strains (Putnam etc.)— the other day. One thing that struck me: the sort of places the communitarians should have liked (thick social identities, tradition, rootedness, associational life built around the church) have done terribly, while the more urban, rootless, places have done much better. This really shows up on a post June 2020 county map.
Is that actually right? Certainly historically, small towns had more communitarian identity than big cities. But I think these days a lot of former small towns have become “suburbs of nowhere”, and as Will Wilkinson has noted, rural culture has become a kind of homogenized generic southern identity rather than being distinctive by place. I would want a bit more detailed study to be sure whether there is in fact a correlation of remaining communitarianness and covid.
My hunch (but it’s no more than that) is that places that scored high in Putnam’s Bowling Alone have not done well with handling Covid. But you are, I think, right to suggest we need to unpack “communitarian identity,” “small town America,” and “Covid death rates.” I’m a big fan of Will’s stuff.
When the economic rationale for a place no longer exists, and the government is not actively working to create a new one for it, it will go away. Look at Cairo, IL.
I'd wager that it will have zero people within another 20 years.
That's what the "economic dislocation" narrative leaves out. It's not the economic decline, it's the demographic devastation that leads to hopelessness. And that hopelessness breeds anger, which breeds cruelty, even when the people themselves aren't cruel.
When I see senseless cruelty for its own sake, it's almost always coming from the GOP's upper-middle class suburban supporters, not the poor rural ones.
I bet the communitarians would blame everything on the decline over time of rooted associational institutions in those places. The small town cannot fail; it can only be failed.
"Sparse places have dense spaces" wrote Matt and I'd add that those dense places are where most people live. According to wikipedia 80% of Americans live in urban areas and suburbs and even outside of that, population is concentrated. No numbers here but have a look at the map of Bloomfield NM (more or less a randomly drawn, somewhere in the west) and it seems to me that most of its 8000 pop. live in an area of less than a km² between Honeylocust street in the NW and Creamer in the SE. I mean, even in a village in an empty state, most people chose to live close together.
And while supermarket aisles are wider, cinema leg space larger and indoor dining less crammed in the country side compared to NYC, they are nowhere close to the 6ft distancing that we'd need.
I can’t read Bret’s oped but April 24th, 2020, there were zero cases in nowhere,Iowa. But it was shutdown just the same. I can see where that was frustrating to people. But we didn’t quarantine New York. They all drove to Maine, Atlanta, etc.
This is a somewhat different point. Spread mitigation measures should have been location specific. CDC did not provide the data and methodologies to do this and state governments regulated (or anti-regulated) on a state wide or too coarse-grained basis.
Right. There was that map showing all the cell phone location data and it’s basically a bunch of people fleeing NYC metro area for everywhere else in the country. Spreading the virus, no doubt.
Scroll down for a bit to see the map of where New Yorkers went as of May 2020.
"The phone data shows New Yorkers primarily went to surrounding counties — east into Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties, west to Monroe County in Pennsylvania, south to Monmouth County in New Jersey, north to Westchester County, northeast to Fairfield County in Connecticut and farther afield in all directions. Palm Beach County, in South Florida, was among the top locations for displaced New Yorkers."
Also, Trumpist policy-makers were happy to let COVID spread, take little or no action on improving testing, and not manage PPE distribution and production when they thought it was a blue state problem. "That's their problem", your old classmate said.
If I'm reading the key correctly, the influenza map has the colors backwards from what you'd expect, and the lighter colored states have higher death rates. So Mississippi and Alabama are still worst off, but there isn't a clear urban-rural divide elsewhere.
That is my read as well. All part of the CDC's robust public communications operation.
Yea, I'm not sure in what context "dried-blood crimson" means something other than "lots of death here".
Also, Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and New Hampshire are among the best off places, and New York is worse than it’s neighbors. If that reversed color scheme is indeed right, it actually seems like maybe there has been a correlation.
Washington has both urban centers and large rural areas but 65% of people in Washington State live in Cities vs. 64% of people in New York State. Seattle isn't NYC but the state overall has a very urban population. More that 50% of the population lives in the Seattle Metro area for example while only 40% of people in NY state are part of the NYC metro area per the internet. So I think it still argues that being "urban" isn't well correlated with influenza death.
I would actually argue that the Washington vs. New York thing is also a good argument against being urban being a death nail in Covid. If you look at the maps of Covid deaths for 2020 and 2021 you can see that Washington does better in than in NY in both but is strikingly different for 2020 despite the fact that Covid cases were actually detected in the Seattle area before the first New York cases. So we were both areas with early cases, virtually no lead time to respond, and fairly equally urbanized populations. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm
In terms of Covid, I think there were some very specific policy differences between the area. In Seattle, after the first case was identified, the UW and King County public health departments defied CDC instructions and did Covid tests on all the flu samples they had collected over the last month. This included all the samples they had collected through an ongoing multi-year flu study that took samples from thousands of people who reported to their doctors with mild to moderate cold or flu symptoms so that Public health could track the previlance of specific flu strains over time in the area. This resulted in many early milder Covid cases being identified in Seattle that would have almost certainly gone undetected in NY.
In most cases, these people were already better but their contacts were traced and quarantined or isolated. That probably actually did slow some early transmission in and of itself. But it also made Covid feel much more real much earlier for folks here. One of my good friends was one of the people ID'd through the flu study (US patient #70) after what had appeared to be a moderate case of the flu. Because I had spent time with her during her infectious period, I was put into Quarantine in the last week of February of 2020 before the first Covid case had sever been diagnosed in New York. I spent that week downloading Zoom and figuring out how to operate my business and staff remotely and ordering a shit load of hand sanitizer online but it was clear we were going to engulfed by Covid in a few weeks. That wasn't that unique.
There were almost certainly Covid cases in New York for weeks before the first diagnosis but they clearly put less of an emphasis on early detection even though they knew Covid was in Seattle by late January and would inevitably be coming to New York. I think that left them more flat footed and their population less prepared.
Washington State declared a state of emergency weeks before New York State. Washington State closed schools earlier and put in place more strict bans on gatherings at the same time. (New York was still allowing gatherings of up to 500 while Washington State was limiting them to 250.)
New York actually closed all non-essential businesses earlier than Washington, in part because it was facing a full on health system meltdown. But Washington was earlier in setting up self-isolation requirement for exposures and closed all non-essential businesses just a week later even though our health system was still at capacity.
It actually makes an interesting test for how important early monitoring and early intervention helps since NY are actually both states with overall healthy populations. (New York actually has better hospital bed per capita than Washington which means that if we had gone along New York's path we would have been in really rough shape.)
But once you start looking at other state by state differences, I think you also need to consider overall population age, health, and access to medical care. In the case of Covid that got compounded by vaccine denial but I suspect given how the disease impacted different groups those underlying factors were likely huge.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've put up a correction.
Yes. The color key is not intuitive.
It's perfectly natural. Imagine the colors are black odyssey radiation of some temperature. Higher temps corresponding with more deaths.
I assumed the rates were "1 out of [x] thousand" or whatever, but maybe that's wrong.
I mean, I have no real idea, it's not labeled. I assumed bigger numbers equals more deaths.
You can find the map here by selecting year 2019 under Filters:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/flu_pneumonia_mortality/flu_pneumonia.htm
Footnote 1 after "Age-Adjusted Death Rates" reads: "The number of deaths per 100,000 total population." So I think you're correct that it's a deeply counterintuitive color scheme.
Thanks for finding that! I wonder who okayed that color scheme.
Good question!
It’s true that a larger fraction of what makes urban places desirable is indoors than rural places. But suburban places are basically 100% indoors. No one has sidewalk cafes or strollable boulevards or nice parks with outdoor amenities when everything is a 45 mph hellscape.
In the first couple months of shelter-in-place I was happy with my suburban house and I actually saw families in the streets walking and biking. But once things opened up in May, the suburbs were completely desolate, and I was lucky to move to Austin for six months of 2021, where there’s a lot more outdoor activities available than there are in Bryan/College Station.
I've gotten into arguments about suburbs before on slowboring, and I think that part of the issue is that "suburbs" really cover a wide range of areas. AFAIKT, a lot of suburb haters are talking about McMansion developments with zero sidewalks and business accessible without a car. But suburbs also include plenty of moderately dense towns (and, arguably, even cities*) with commercial centers. Different types of suburbs can provide very different experiences --- pandemic or not.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/how-to-define-american-suburbs
Yes, I think this is very right.
"Suburbs that don't suck."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Idk have you been to the suburbs? Honestly one of the best things about it are the large sprawling parks with jogging trails. If you want to get Austin specific, places like Cedar Park and Round Rock are full of… well, parks. You just have to drive to them first. Lots of people don’t spend time but there are plenty of outdoor places in the suburbs, lots of chain restaurants like Panera have them, even if they aren’t as trendy as local mom and pop farm to table cafe.
I live in Bryan/College Station. It's possible that the Austin area suburbs are better about outdoor spaces than the places here, just as Austin itself is much better about outdoor space than places in Dallas or Houston. There's definite confounds, in that Austin is just a more interesting environment for outdoor space, with the creeks trickling out of the limestone hills, rather than the clay floodplain of the Brazos River.
Yeah. IDK. Kind of with Deep State here ... or maybe Chicago is super unique in having way better suburban amenities. I live wedged between the botanical gardens on one side of town and a ~ private Lake Michigan beach on the other. We walk to one at least once a week - way more in the summer. Where I lived in the city was a concrete jungle. I don't even know if there was a patch of real grass within 2 miles.
I must admit that this is what bothers me about MY ‘s build build build shtick. You need tons of green to make that cement barely tolerable.
The problem is that often that "green" in suburbia comes in the form of grassy strips around parking lots, or between traffic lanes, which might make it look a little prettier on first glance, but doesn't actually end up making it any more pleasant to be around. You want parks and plazas with usable green areas, not just "green space" stuck between the cement.
I definitely don't endorse everything about what this guy says, but he makes a strong case that dense building with no green can often be much more tolerable than your average suburban space that is mostly green but pretty much unusable outside a car:
https://newworldeconomics.com/place-and-non-place/
I see his point, but that hasn't been my experience anyway. Maybe I'm just good at choosing, but my current suburban neighborhood was basically cut out of a forest, such that I have to look carefully to even see other houses through the trees in my backyard. Not to mention there are at least a handful of parks, soccer fields, and hiking trails within 2-3 miles. I agree though that a suburb as he describes it would be awful.
People want green space, right? Of course, having that green space prevents people from living there who otherwise would. Freed from restrictions and regulations that artificially favor excess in either direction, developers will find the optimal proportion of green space to housing size to people living there.
His shtick is not so much build for the sake of building, but simply to *let* the people who want to build build.
That's how I also described Chicago when I was living in the area - 50 miles of concrete. I'm not an urban person anyway, but I felt like that city was especially oppressive.
Totally agree. The only caveat is lakefront living. That's a different experience - both in accessibility to the water / beaches and also building type (e.g., older apartments, smaller, expensive, huge HoAs). Not a fit for us in any way but a friend lives in this amazing co-op and I get the appeal.
"There’s not much of a point to living in a city if the offices are going to be closed and the restaurants and the museums are also going to be closed"
As a family that has rode out the entirety of the pandemic in DC, I would counter that living in a big city has been a blessing during COVID compared to exurban/rural areas. The inherent walkability of city infrastructure gave us tons of things to do outside without having to pile in the car and drive somewhere and worry about bathroom breaks in public. For us, we started walking 3-4 miles daily to get our kid out of the house after virtual learning and get exercise. My brother and sister in law who live in a typical exurban townhouse subdivision with no sidewalks connecting it outside of their small neighborhood had no comparable options.
Rowhouse porches are designed perfectly for social distancing, either from your neighbors next door on their porch, or from friends who stopped by to talk from the sidewalk.
Additionally on the social side, being in a city where overwhelmingly everyone took the virus seriously was a huge boost psychologically. Not having to worry very much about people licking doorknobs at Harris Teeter for freedom while grocery shopping or anti mask mandates from republican governors at schools has been a huge relief compared to what friends in redder areas deal with.
row houses are different than elevator apartments
Agree with this take. I spent late March - August 2020 in DC and could walk everywhere, including decently stocked supermarkets and the farmers' market, where you could make a "reservation" to shop. Everyone was being careful.
Then I moved to the rural Midwest for family reasons. Yeah, you can go for a walk to nowhere, but that gets old quickly. Buying a decent assortment of groceries (since you're cooking virtually all of your own meals) requires a tremendous amount of driving, outside of the few months during which the markets are full of stuff. It's almost impossible to get services (electrician, plumber) when you need them, and pre-vaccines, if someone did miraculously show up, they probably wouldn't wear a mask. There were (and are still) quite a lot of anti-maskers/vaxers with confederate flags and "f*** Biden" stickers on their trucks. I'm not an ardent progressive, I just don't want everything to be about ideology; even here, it is.
I'm moving back east soon and can't wait, even though my living situation will be empirically much worse--smaller, worse ventilation, less nature, etc. But I won't have to be in the apartment (or a car) all of the time. Of course not everyone would make this choice, but life is full of tradeoffs, and these are ones I'm willing to make.
I don't think this is your best take. Rural areas are getting hit harder now because they refused to vaccinate - that's pretty obvious. I think if you could control properly for personal behavior you would find that rural areas are, in fact, dramatically less vulnerable to airborne disease spread. I bet the Starbucks in Kerrville is far less crowded than your typical Manhattan Starbucks and for some very simple reasons. The cost of real estate in a crowded urban area means you need more foot traffic for any given store to be viable.
You are right, though, that we should prioritize creating more housing units AND also lowering the cost per sq foot of housing units.
“Controlling for personal behavior” is ignoring half of what makes urban places and rural places different. The personal behavior is shaped by the space.
If someone is arguing that rural places are less vulnerable in a pandemic, I don't think they are going to be persuaded otherwise if you try to argue that they are full of idiots who won't get vaccinated. And even if you successfully demonstrate that rural areas will have more covid-risky behavior because people adjust their behavior to an equivalent risk level, you have essentially already conceded the point. In a rural town you can live much closer to your normal lifestyle without covid blowing up compared to NYC.
Yeah, I was thinking basically the same thing. Suppose that in place A, nobody gets vaccinated and everyone disobeys the rules, and in place B, everyone gets vaccinated and obeys. You observe that way more people die in place A. Clearly, restrictions in A are too lax. However, this doesn't mean that the *optimal* restrictions in place A are just as strict as those in place B.
Yea, I suspect behavior is self-correcting for this, in a way.
Too many confounding factors to make these sorts of judgments.
When is someone going to calculate the age adjusted mortality for Covid. It would probably make sense urban cities look a little bit worse.
I actually calculated the over 65 mortality rate for NY, Texas, LA and Florida. NY was worse by a decent amount. Sorry, I did it at work last week and I’m finally working off work today, so I don’t have numbers handy.
But starting this summer, I think the mortality rate is more a function of vaccine status. 1/2 the 30 to 39 years olds who died from Covid in Idaho, died in September.
Anyway, bigger houses are great, but I think Matt underestimates the value of having a yard.
My brother just moved into a single family house for the first time in his life. Him and his wife are blown away by all the things they were missing that they didn’t realize. The quiet of not sharing walls. Letting dog be able to run free in yard. Grilling. Sitting in the sun half naked.
I get density. And there are definitely improvements. I just really question what proportion of the population wants to live in really really dense cities.
So here is an irony in South America. In many cities here, the middle class live in tall apartments buildings whereas the working class live in more dense single and double story houses. I asked my engineer friend, and he said it was because of security. The apartments building had private security and grounds.
Personally I am in favor of row houses with backyards. Or Charleston style houses on narrow lots.
Anyway, glancing through the comments, I think you will find everyone justifies their preferred living situation.
Personally my ideal would be an apartment or condo in a downtown city for parts of the year. And then cabin in the woods for summers and weekends. Sort of close to what I have now.
I would like to live in NYC for a year. Just to experience it.
Luckily my job allows me to live anywhere. Unluckily, kids keep us tied to Boise.
Oh, and here are age adjusted numbers:
https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-adjusted-covid-deaths/
Thank you for posting this.
There are outliers -- Mississippi on the high side; VT, HI, ME on the low side. Every other state is basically random. Note that, for all the vitriol thrown at Florida (my state, so I am attuned to the criticisms more than most), it ranks right in the middle of the pack at #23 out of 50 states.
These "rankings" will likely change over time, as the states with more unvaccinated people rise, but I think people overestimate the benefits of state or local interventions. But in an uncontrollable situation, lots of people naturally gravitate to anything they can control.
You rock!
This is basically where my wife and I are at, as well, in terms of preferred living situation. We bought out house for a family of four, but there's a large age gap between my two kids, with one of them in high school and the other just starting school, so assuming the older one moves out in a few years, there is going to be about 10 years where we have *kind of* too much house for a family of three, and then shortly after, far too much house for just the two of us. We're already kicking the idea around of moving to Chicago (or at least for part of the year) once our youngest is grown. We are both sort of urban-oriented, we both attended college in downtown Chicago, but we like having space for our kids to run around.
Re: fences, We bought our house about 3.5 years back, and I tend to be pretty cheap when it comes to spending money on home renovations, but we popped a fence in about a year and a half ago and it may be the least regrettable purchase of my entire adult life. Like you said, the ability to just pop the dog in the yard for a bit, or go out back with my kids and not worry about one of them bolting away from the house when I'm not looking is great.
What has occurred to me while writing this is that the discourse around this topic frequently positions the debate as something like this: there is a tradeoff between living in a high-density city, with nice cultural attractions, stuff to see and do, and decent public transportation versus living in the suburbs with a too-big house and a quieter sort of lifestyle.
But there are lots of people who live in high-density apartment buildings in the suburbs, without any of the attendant benefits of living in the city! And frankly, it kind of sucks.
Before we bought our house, we lived in three different apartment buildings across 11 years. The first one was like 500 units spread across two buildings, the second one was like 250 units in a seven story building, and the last was in a 10-unit building. Maybe if you live in a centralized urban area you can rationalize the tradeoffs, but if you have spent a large amount of time living in apartment, most of the people dream about buying a house and getting some elbow room between them and their neighbors, and I'd like to see this group of people explored a little more.
I always wonder about people that talk about cultural amenities in cities. How many times can you go to see a play or a museum? My brother used to live two blocks from the beach, and he barely went there.
I suspect that most people like to feel like they live next to cultural amenities, but rarely use them.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see the advantages of living in the city.
You are absolutely right though about apartment buildings in the suburbs.
My wife and I were briefly empty-nesters two or three years ago, and considered trading in our house, but the price is it already started to balloon, and the housing inventory in Boise Idaho was ridiculously small. What good is it making a profit if you can find a place to live.
I guess I shouldn’t complain, I actually have the best of both worlds. A nice safe single family house in a quiet neighborhood. The foothills are literally a block away. And downtown Boise, which is pretty cool, there’s only up 10 minute drive. We can ride our bikes there in 25 to 30 minutes along the Green Belt.
The museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and whatnot are pretty cool; we rotate through two annual memberships as our kid gets bigger and use them to the hilt.
Likewise, an opera, two classical concerts, and a few ballets a year are nice.
But the big three for us are:
The availability and variety of food; ethnic grocers, pop-up farmer’s markets, open-air market districts, and restaurants.
Access to traditionally “rural” leisure activities in or near the city anyway.
Lessened need to drive everywhere. We both drive enough for work, being able to walk to the grocery store, bike to lunch, or take the bus downtown is a wonderful break.
The not-driving thing is the biggest attraction for me. I hate driving and generally being in a car. I love being able to walk almost anywhere and not having to join a gym or set aside time for “exercise.” Food is also a big deal though.
I didn't like drive either. For me, I solved that problem by getting a remote job. Driving to the store and for various errands is all I really need to do now and it's so much better. So I learned that driving is OK, it's commuting for work that sucks.
I get it! But I hate driving to the store and errands too. :^)
If I could walk to everything non-work (including seeing friends) I wouldn't mind driving to work. The worst is having to drive to social events, especially because that travel often happens when I'm tired and not totally sober.
I have a weird sort of remote job. It’s 100% travel. My carpool is 100% driving to airport. When at home it’s all me time. No work from home.
This is what I would like.
I encourage you to try your NYC-for-a-year experiment at some point! I had my epiphany while working in London/Brussels for a while in the early 2000s. It was the first time I didn't have, or need, access to a car for anything, and it was magical...
I agree about fine arts amenities (museums, symphony etc.) being an overrated reason to live in a city for most people. David's comments get much closer to what I like about urban living.
But the nicest thing for me is just being around a lot of people and activity when I walk around the neighborhood. Particularly during COVID, I spent a bit of time in the suburbs and I felt much more isolated there, despite having much more elbow room for myself.
It also totally matters a lot where in a city you are. I've lived in areas of Boston that I would hate to be in now, with a dog and kid. But now I live on a fantastic bike path in Somerville, 3 minute walk to the nearest playground and basketball court. If I was closer than the current 10 minute walk to the nearest big park it'd be perfect for us.
All that said, there are obviously great things about suburban and rural living too (especially around dog ownership...)
Most of it is stuff for single or no-kid people. Especially if I was single the idea of living where I do now seems awful.
But the biggest thing, in my opinion, is food. It was definitely nice just popping outside or stopping on the way home for Filipino Burgers, taco trucks, or whatever when i lived in LA. Coming up with what to eat every day and then actually having to cook it is a big chore in comparison
I hate cooking... but my wife always picks up food on her way home. And Boise has plenty of good food. Especially tacos.
I think there are a couple things that make the amenities attractive.
One is that high density increases the viability of a lot of niche products, which means there’s just more stuff to do. If a business (whether that’s a type of restaurant or an activity or a product category) can only support one location per 500,000 nearby people, Boise might not have one and Manhattan would likely have 3 or more. NYC has Ukrainian restaurants and roller derby leagues and roving outdoor theater shows and curling clubs and stores specializing in vintage posters and whatever else your heart desires, which is great if you’re into any of those things.
The other is that, even if the experiences aren’t used that frequently, they’re better than elsewhere, and that’s worth something. Even if you only go to the museum a couple times a year, it’s an improvement if your local museum is the Met. Similarly with food, the median restaurant in NYC is pretty darn good, and the best ones are through the roof, so even if you eat out the same amount, you end up with a better eating experience. (Though this isn’t universal; I currently live in London and the median restaurant here is pretty mediocre.)
This is all true. But, you could also say... its possible to bicycle in New York City, but its not as safe as in Boise. Or, you can go hiking, but you need to drive further, and its not as good. Etc...
We do have NYC beat on Basque food though... largest Basque population outside of Spain.
Anyway... 25% of the population lives in Urban settings (though many of them are in single family home versions of urban settings). I wonder what percentage want to live in Urban settings?
Is it actually true that it's safer to bike in Boise than NYC, though? A lot of midsize cities are terrible to ride in.
It's probably safer to ride in Paris than Boise, for example.
The cultural amenities I'd like if I lived in a city would be bakeries and cafes in walking distance.
So Europe and South America.
Museums and the like are great, but here where I live in LA what's truly awesome is the weather. I mean, I could play tennis and golf every day. If I wanted to. Which I don't. So I never ever do. But I could. If I wanted to.
(Actually, the museums in LA are awesome. Just did the fantastic Getty Villa the other day; doing Armand Hammer today. The movie Academy museum just opened and the George Lucas tchotchke museum will open soon.)
I grew up in Downey.
The thing about a yard (and also a house) is you have to take care of it, and unless it's small (as in your row house example) the opportunity cost can be high. This is especially true if you are a "knowledge worker" (like me and my husband) so you have few useful skills. I can manage a garden, and used to love doing so. Now I want more time to do other things.
I share your "ideal" and that's what I thought I was doing with my house near a lake in Michigan. Problem is, it's much too far away from my downtown apartment. We just made the 12-hour drive last weekend and it's painful. It would be great if our lake house were closer, but it would have been much more expensive. Now I'm thinking it would be nice to just Airbnb in a variety of pastoral settings while maintaining an urban base.
After effectively living in apartments in large or medium size cities, from college until last year (just about 20yrs, whew!), Finally bought the medium size single family home on an unusually large and wooded city lot. Let me tell you about property maintenance! It's pure expenditure in terms of time and money. Now it looks pretty decent, it feels great to have a place of your own, and gives me lots of podcast listening time, put the pure cost/ opportunity cost is no joke. This coming from a guy who actually enjoys most of these tasks, and grew up doing them all anyway In our suburban / rural area, but sometimes I feel like I I am dedicating my life to this house and property, which is not always what I want to be doing...
Serious question. How would you use that time? Or, to be more specific, how do you fantasize you would use that time, verse how would you really use that time?
I’ve noticed that a lot of people pick a living situation is, based on an idea of what they want to do. But as human beings, many of us are lazy and when we have time, don’t actually do what we fantasize about.
It’s why there are thousands and thousands of RVs parked in storage yards across the country. I’m going to guess maybe one out of every 10 gets use more than a week a year.
I definitely feel you though on wondering whether your work life balance is correct. I’ve been feeling that way for a while.
That's a great question, and I ask it a lot. Answer: I work too much as I fear for my ability to provide for my family and our retirement even though I objectively am doing very well in a stable high demand job. I feel like I started my "real" career about 5 years late (vs my peer group, much later vs general) and I'm playing catch up now.
It is somewhat difficult to disentangle my free time this year versus prior years because of COVID, and also general life-timeing. Specifically, covid increased my work time demands meaningfully (healthcare). It also decreased one of our major hobbies which was travel associated with my wife's work. Also wife had major year-long work project (unassociated w/ covid) that really tied her up until this summer... So who knows, sometimes I actually think the yard work has given me something productive to do vs sitting in an apartment dining something dumb (like day trading, being online too much or drinking too much).
It's always interesting to look at the total cost of ownership of the house versus prior apartment just a mile away. Apartment was about $2,500 per month (rent, ins, util, maint), The house has probably been ~$5000/mo, including contractor expenses for repairs and upgrades, $3000 without those "optional" or first-year costs.
You don't seem to have yet discovered the further joys of "I'm sick of this room and I'm going to gut it!" followed by "What have I done?"
Lol.
Ha, not yet... but bigger renovation plans coming soon!
(I specifically did not buy a fixer-upper.... but the jokes on me I guess)
It’s a man thing. You aren’t alone.
Lol. I’m in the middle of that with my cabin. Gutted it with big plans. Now not enough time to un-guy it.
My basement!
There’s a lot of people, that actually enjoy working on their house. As far as yard goes, we pay this 15-year-old kid from the block to mow it and edge it. $20 a week. Bargain.
You were spot on about the distance of your Lakehouse though. When I bought my cabin last year, I drew a circle, and it had to be within 3 Hours drives. Any more than that, and you just won’t take the time to use it.
AirBnB seems like a good alternative, but there is nothing like owning something.
The last couple weeks, I’ve been looking at some property on a lake in Oregon. But it’s 4 1/2 to 5 hours away. I haven’t decided yet. I might buy it just as an investment.
People in Boise tend to own houses up on the lake in McCall Idaho, but it is gotten so expensive there.
I totally get that! I used to love working in the garden, figuring out what to do with the house, even doing little repairs etc. I'm glad I had the house experience (though my detached house was also in a city, Washington DC). I just reached the point at which I want to do other things, including travel to other places and exploring beautiful landscapes for which I am not responsible.
I used to actually see a lot of plays in NYC--the last-minute discount tickets are great--and attend a lot of policy lectures, book readings, etc. Here by the lake--I'm one street away from Lake Michigan--I spend little time at the beach (I'm researching coastal policy and erosion, I am NOT a normal beach person). I do hike the trails I can walk or bike to (there are a few) but I dread getting in the car. I thought I was ready to "slow down," but having tried it I actually hate it (as does my husband, kind of to my surprise).
Wait, do I understand correctly that you willingly make the drive from downtown *DC* to a Lake Michigan lakehouse?
Not Chicago, Detroit, or Indianapolis?
Actually NYC (it’s a long story but we used to split time between DC and NYC, now my husband works fully remotely so we don’t need a DC place). I am from Michigan and am a middle-aged person with family responsibilities, so having a place here made some sense. We also thought it could be a good retirement place.
Having spent so much time here, though, I now see that I don’t actually want to retire, probably ever, but certainly not in a small town without good medical options; I don’t want the responsibility of a house (even a great, small one); and (TMI warning) that being physically closer to relatives doesn’t mean I can somehow make bad situations less bad. This last one was the hardest to process.
You aren’t alone, and realizing that I never wanna retire.
What I would like to do is to go part time. Luckily my company offers that. We can become seasonal employees where we only work during the high demand times.
I’m thinking about going to seasonal in about five years.
Also I rarely make the drive. We’ve been here since last summer and are going back to the city for the winter. Will probably sell the house in a year or two.
One solution to the lack of yard problem in cities are parks! Sure they have less privacy than yards, but they have other advantages. So build more apartments and build more parks. Everyone wins. Well except the people who don't like parks over yards, but that's what suburbs are for anyways.
"The quiet of not sharing walls." -- This is #1 on my list. I've had too many awful shared-wall (and floor and ceiling) experiences.
Living in a city would be my preference, but housing costs, schools, and the need to find room for a family of 5 plus 3 cats and 2 dogs keep us in the burbs for now. Once the kids are gone we plan to get a small place in the Colorado mountains and spend 1/2 the year traveling.
Sounds like a plan I might like.
The lack of accountability to Brett Stephens pumping out one terrible take touches on the core of America's broken politics. Powerful people are wrong over and over and suffer no consequences.
I think Matt is underplaying how much this was a terrible take even in the moment. Yes it's true there were probably some liberal leaning people in June who were still operating under the mistaken notion that COVID was uniquely an "urban" issue (I suspect it was also an attempt to make the book more marketable; try to take advantage of the front and center issue of the moment and insert into the book any way possible).
But getting back to Brett, in April, 2020 it was abundantly clear COVID was spreading and would continue to spread to rural areas; especially if they didn't take any proper mitigation measures. Case in point, this is from April 8th, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-rural-america-cases.html
I know it's almost a banal observation to say Brett is terrible at his job, but it really needs to emphasized that his takes are just awful even without hindsight.
I think the more sinister take is that Brett is good at his job, and that it isn't his job to write good takes. His job is to offer a conservative voice in the NYT. If conservatives takes are routinely divorced from reality, that's reality's problem, not the NYT's.
Pretty sure they just hired Bret Stephen's because David Brooks was riding on everyone's last nerve. It worked; people barely ever complain about Brooks anymore.
I think a lot of this analysis is incomplete because Covid deaths are highly correlated with age. Therefore, you need to compare using age-adjusted numbers. For example, this:
https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-adjusted-covid-deaths/
Secondly, a lot of deaths took place in institutional elder care settings. I can’t find state-by-state data, but globally about 1/3 of covid deaths happened in elder care facilities alone. Again, age and population vulnerability is driving that, not urbanization.
There was way too little focus on inspecting nursing homes and making sure that any deficiencies were fixed. That could have significantly lowered the death toll in many states. One of the reasons Washington state had a relatively low death rate despite having the first identified outbreak is that they did exactly this.
Nov-Dec 2020, here in Colorado, Covid broke through the extensive protocols that were put in place in many facilities around the state, killing many residents. I'm the legal guardian for my sister who lives in a memory care facility here - she got covid but was asymptomatic. Other residents of her facility weren't so lucky and 9 died.
This was before vaccines became available and I honestly don't know what else her facility could have done. It's just very difficult to keep an airborne pathogen away from vulnerable populations.
In Asian countries they have a lot more high-rises made up of large units. Not just 3+ bedrooms, but also more common space than 3-br units in America tend to have, like a big living room, big balcony, maybe even multiple floors. I don't see why we can't do the same thing here, or even more so.
I think the state of rural healthcare also probably played a role. A lot of rural hospital have closed since the financial crisis of 2008. That means people have to travel further. There’s also a continual shortage of healthcare workers in rural areas. That means that often times healt problems don’t get diagnosed until they’re more severe and a less healthy population is more likely to have a higher Covid death rate. Primary care doctors have been been quite successful at convincing reluctant patients to get vaccinated. But if there’s a shortage of primary care doctors that type of persuasion is less likely to happen. Rural areas tend to be older (that will raise the crude death rate) and so people tend to have more health problems
While the Urban plague may be a myth, I'm sure it doesn't feel that way to the good people of Jacksonville, FL.
Even though Jacksonville is urban, the surrounding communities in South Georgia and north Florida were hit just as hard.
(It's a joke about Urban Meyer, the head coach of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars, who's in the midst of some personal scandals)
Remember, we're all in this together. Even rural places like Nebraska are here to ease your pain.
In retrospect I would just be very hesitant to attribute COVID death tolls to much beyond random chance, except for the countries that managed to actually suppress the virus by doing lockdowns then keeping case levels close to zero by having closed or heavily restricted borders.
The New Yorker had a lengthy article about how Seattle's response was much better than New York's and this saved a lot of lives. This may be true but Washington didn't really start any pandemic policy until 3/1, community spread was present in the Seattle area starting in mid-January. If spread in Washington had been close to NY levels from 1/20-3/1, the pandemic would have been out of control. Same in California, where there was an identified community spread death on 2/7. Beyond differential vaccine rates I really think you have to squint to see the impact of policy on Covid (this is why everyone was so eager to praise desantis, florida just got lucky with for a while IMO).
Eh, there's pretty solid data that getting vaccinated helps a lot...
sorry should have been clear that obviously having high vaccine rates is not luck.
I think you're right that official rules and regulations didn't matter too much. But there's surely *some* explanation for why northern New England, and the northern half of the West Coast, did so much better than everywhere else in the country.
I admit, I didn't realize Kerrville had a Starbucks. No doubt, that wasn't the take you were looking for, but there it is.
I was re-reading some of the communitarian literature of the 1980s and 1990s — both the philosophical (Sandel etc.) and the sociological strains (Putnam etc.)— the other day. One thing that struck me: the sort of places the communitarians should have liked (thick social identities, tradition, rootedness, associational life built around the church) have done terribly, while the more urban, rootless, places have done much better. This really shows up on a post June 2020 county map.
Is that actually right? Certainly historically, small towns had more communitarian identity than big cities. But I think these days a lot of former small towns have become “suburbs of nowhere”, and as Will Wilkinson has noted, rural culture has become a kind of homogenized generic southern identity rather than being distinctive by place. I would want a bit more detailed study to be sure whether there is in fact a correlation of remaining communitarianness and covid.
My hunch (but it’s no more than that) is that places that scored high in Putnam’s Bowling Alone have not done well with handling Covid. But you are, I think, right to suggest we need to unpack “communitarian identity,” “small town America,” and “Covid death rates.” I’m a big fan of Will’s stuff.
When the economic rationale for a place no longer exists, and the government is not actively working to create a new one for it, it will go away. Look at Cairo, IL.
I'd wager that it will have zero people within another 20 years.
I drive through Cairo a once or thrice a year and it's such a sad place to be. I can't imagine what it's like to grow up there.
That's what the "economic dislocation" narrative leaves out. It's not the economic decline, it's the demographic devastation that leads to hopelessness. And that hopelessness breeds anger, which breeds cruelty, even when the people themselves aren't cruel.
When I see senseless cruelty for its own sake, it's almost always coming from the GOP's upper-middle class suburban supporters, not the poor rural ones.
I bet the communitarians would blame everything on the decline over time of rooted associational institutions in those places. The small town cannot fail; it can only be failed.
"Sparse places have dense spaces" wrote Matt and I'd add that those dense places are where most people live. According to wikipedia 80% of Americans live in urban areas and suburbs and even outside of that, population is concentrated. No numbers here but have a look at the map of Bloomfield NM (more or less a randomly drawn, somewhere in the west) and it seems to me that most of its 8000 pop. live in an area of less than a km² between Honeylocust street in the NW and Creamer in the SE. I mean, even in a village in an empty state, most people chose to live close together.
And while supermarket aisles are wider, cinema leg space larger and indoor dining less crammed in the country side compared to NYC, they are nowhere close to the 6ft distancing that we'd need.
I can’t read Bret’s oped but April 24th, 2020, there were zero cases in nowhere,Iowa. But it was shutdown just the same. I can see where that was frustrating to people. But we didn’t quarantine New York. They all drove to Maine, Atlanta, etc.
This is a somewhat different point. Spread mitigation measures should have been location specific. CDC did not provide the data and methodologies to do this and state governments regulated (or anti-regulated) on a state wide or too coarse-grained basis.
Right. There was that map showing all the cell phone location data and it’s basically a bunch of people fleeing NYC metro area for everywhere else in the country. Spreading the virus, no doubt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/upshot/who-left-new-york-coronavirus.html
Scroll down for a bit to see the map of where New Yorkers went as of May 2020.
"The phone data shows New Yorkers primarily went to surrounding counties — east into Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties, west to Monroe County in Pennsylvania, south to Monmouth County in New Jersey, north to Westchester County, northeast to Fairfield County in Connecticut and farther afield in all directions. Palm Beach County, in South Florida, was among the top locations for displaced New Yorkers."
Also, Trumpist policy-makers were happy to let COVID spread, take little or no action on improving testing, and not manage PPE distribution and production when they thought it was a blue state problem. "That's their problem", your old classmate said.