The COVID-19 pandemic will be shaping how we live, work and learn about the world long after the last lockdown ends and toilet paper hoarding is done, accelerating shifts that were already underway including the dispersion of population out of the nation’s densest urban areas and the long-standing trend away from mass transit and office concentration towards flatter and often home-based employment.
Amid 20 years of fanfare about how big, dense cities are the future, the country had kept spreading out with nearly all population growth since 2010 occurring in the urban periphery and smaller cities. As a new study from Heartland Forward, where I am a senior fellow, demonstrates, both immigrants and millennials—the key groups behind urban growth—are increasingly moving to interior cities and even small towns.
There is no reason for people to live in dense urban centers, crowded into tiny apartments with sky-high rents. The Internet has made neighbors and friend out of people thousands of miles away from each other. And the dense pack of humanity of the urban center has made them virulent breeding grounds for not just crime, but also disease and death.
Both cases and deaths have been overwhelmingly concentrated so far in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Gotham has been the American epicenter; dense regions seem especially susceptible to pandemics. This has also been the case in Europe. Half of all COVID-19 cases in Spain for example have occurred in Madrid while the Milan region accounts for half of all cases in Italy and almost three-fifths of the deaths.
