"A Starbucks in Kerrville is just the same as a Starbucks in suburban New Jersey and not particularly different from an urban Starbucks in New York or D.C."
Eh, I don't really agree with this. A Starbucks in New York has like a fifth the volume of one in a suburb. Those things are huge. Also they will have more people inside usually. Suburb Starbucks does a lot of drive thru service as well.
I think that death mitigation rates due to medical improvements over time are over-rated. In any case, it's clear that the true death rate at the start of the pandemic were hugely underestimated, with estimates becoming better over time.
Regarding the disturbingly high death rates in the South over the past 6 months, race might also be a factor, not just partisan politics
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 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 it is probably true that reducing indoor crowding will have higher costs for urban areas than rural areas there are ways to minimize those costs. For one, focus on what it is we want to do: minimize the number of virus particles that are transmitted from one mouth and nose to another. This means masking, UVed ventilation, and maybe capacity/time limits, not total closure of "non-essential" venues. Ideally, (not that we could ever get to the ideal) people would not have any personal reluctance to go out and interact in a well-regulated environment.
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.
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.
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.
The issue that I have with big (high square footage) units is that they are expensive. In Newton, MA, the size of new housing is going up (5-6 BRs and 5-6 BAs in a house) while number of people in a household is going down. So at least in some places like this, larger units are not helping the overcrowding issue. In a city like this it will be important not only to allow more units on a lot but to deal with the issue of size as well, as we deal with housing and climate issues.
Right. About 3/4's of Newton is zoned for single family only. So those are huge houses for one family. We're working on allowing more multifamily in the city -- especially near our transit stops.
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."
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.
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.
“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.
CDC numbers for covid infection rates per capita make your point even better; the only dense state in the top 10 is Rhode Island.
You do overlook two other "livability" downsides that urban areas had in this pandemic, though: lack of backyards and reliance on public transit. NYC may be walkable, but my best friend lives there and was unable to leave his 1BR in Queens for three weeks. Most people here in Montana had big yards to enjoy. And while NYC is walkable, nobody actually walks that far. They rely on busses and subways for longer trips, both of which are covid traps. But here in Montana, if you wanted to get out if town, or just needed to get across town for whatever reason, you probably had a car.
I think this overstates the real risks of using public transit and not being able to leave an apartment for 3 weeks is just mistakenly strict regulation.
I think things were very different in the acute phase (March-May 2020) and the later phases. I was happy with my suburban home during the acute phase. But for the rest of the time, there has been basically *nothing* to do here, while I spent six months in Austin and had great outdoor activities available and could walk everywhere.
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.
"A Starbucks in Kerrville is just the same as a Starbucks in suburban New Jersey and not particularly different from an urban Starbucks in New York or D.C."
Eh, I don't really agree with this. A Starbucks in New York has like a fifth the volume of one in a suburb. Those things are huge. Also they will have more people inside usually. Suburb Starbucks does a lot of drive thru service as well.
Why is the Covid map "since June 2020"? Any particular reason for leaving out the first few months of the pandemic?
I think that death mitigation rates due to medical improvements over time are over-rated. In any case, it's clear that the true death rate at the start of the pandemic were hugely underestimated, with estimates becoming better over time.
Regarding the disturbingly high death rates in the South over the past 6 months, race might also be a factor, not just partisan politics
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.
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 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
100 years ago the life expectancy gap was as high as 10 years, with urbanites getting the worse end of the deal.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743429/
https://www.nber.org/papers/h0134
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ehr.12964
While it is probably true that reducing indoor crowding will have higher costs for urban areas than rural areas there are ways to minimize those costs. For one, focus on what it is we want to do: minimize the number of virus particles that are transmitted from one mouth and nose to another. This means masking, UVed ventilation, and maybe capacity/time limits, not total closure of "non-essential" venues. Ideally, (not that we could ever get to the ideal) people would not have any personal reluctance to go out and interact in a well-regulated environment.
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
"Suburbs that don't suck."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Yes, I think this is very right.
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.
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.
The issue that I have with big (high square footage) units is that they are expensive. In Newton, MA, the size of new housing is going up (5-6 BRs and 5-6 BAs in a house) while number of people in a household is going down. So at least in some places like this, larger units are not helping the overcrowding issue. In a city like this it will be important not only to allow more units on a lot but to deal with the issue of size as well, as we deal with housing and climate issues.
But that's not increasing number of units in a house, right? Increasing # of BRs is not the same as increasing # of units.
Does Newton allow building of 4-plexes on one of these plots or is zoning discouraging that? (I'm not familiar with Newton's zoning)
Right. About 3/4's of Newton is zoned for single family only. So those are huge houses for one family. We're working on allowing more multifamily in the city -- especially near our transit stops.
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."
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.
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.
“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.
CDC numbers for covid infection rates per capita make your point even better; the only dense state in the top 10 is Rhode Island.
You do overlook two other "livability" downsides that urban areas had in this pandemic, though: lack of backyards and reliance on public transit. NYC may be walkable, but my best friend lives there and was unable to leave his 1BR in Queens for three weeks. Most people here in Montana had big yards to enjoy. And while NYC is walkable, nobody actually walks that far. They rely on busses and subways for longer trips, both of which are covid traps. But here in Montana, if you wanted to get out if town, or just needed to get across town for whatever reason, you probably had a car.
I think this overstates the real risks of using public transit and not being able to leave an apartment for 3 weeks is just mistakenly strict regulation.
I think things were very different in the acute phase (March-May 2020) and the later phases. I was happy with my suburban home during the acute phase. But for the rest of the time, there has been basically *nothing* to do here, while I spent six months in Austin and had great outdoor activities available and could walk everywhere.
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.
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.
Based on the ongoing references to Kerrville I can only conclude that Matt has been hanging out with my grandparents.