Density isn’t destiny in fight against Covid-19

As a Manhattan resident, I’ll be the first to admit that New York City in general and Manhattan in particular are not optimally designed for social distancing. People here tend to get around not in their own automobiles but on foot or by bus, subway, taxi or ride-share. We buy our groceries mostly not in giant wide-aisled supermarkets but in cramped little stores. We live cheek-by-jowl in apartment buildings, with elevators usually too small to accommodate the 6-foot rule. Most of us don’t have our own outdoor spaces, meaning that walking the dog or just getting some fresh air requires venturing out in public. And surely Manhattan is the only place in the US where having your own washing machine is such a luxury that even lots of people in the top 10% of income distribution don’t (not because they can’t afford it but because their buildings ban them for fear of overtaxing ancient plumbing).
I am skeptical of the argument, though, that density equals danger in this age of Covid-19. For one thing, a bunch of East Asian cities even more densely populated than New York have successfully withstood the initial onslaught of the disease, indicating that well-conceived and well-executed public-health measures can more than counteract the disadvantages posed by millions of people living on top of one another.
For another, New York City’s density is so anomalous in the US context that its trials hardly tell much of anything about which other areas of the country are best equipped to fight off a pandemic.
What inspired this thought was actually not one of the many essays published lately heralding what anti-urban urbanist Joel Kotkin called a “coming age of dispersion” accelerated by the coronavirus. No, what got me wondering what kind of density does matter in a pandemic was a throwaway line in an otherwise perfectly fine Washington Post article about the apparent success of social distancing efforts in slowing the spread of Covid-19 in the states of California and Washington:
Some lessons of social distancing from West Coast cities also could be geographically and economically unique. They’ve got a fraction of the population density of many East Coast areas.
Really? The San Francisco and Los Angeles metropolitan areas are the most densely populated in the nation after metro New York. If you just divide population by land area, metro Los Angeles, which consists of Los Angeles and Orange counties, was only 7% less densely packed as of the 2010 Census than metro New York, which consists of too many counties in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to list here, some of which are pretty empty. In order to give a better sense of the density actually experienced by the average resident of a metropolitan area, the Census Bureau in 2012 published estimates that took the density of each census tract in a metro area, then
averaged those densities weighted by the population of each tract. By that more sophisticated standard, metro New York was two-and-a-half times denser than metro San Francisco and Los Angeles, but those two were still significantly denser than other East Coast metros such as Boston, Philadelphia and Washington (and both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas have surely become even more densely populated since 2010, as most new development there has consisted of apartment buildings going up near downtowns and suburban commercial districts).
The explanation for this perhaps surprising finding is that while the major cities of the West Coast aren’t necessarily denser than their East Coast counterparts, their suburbs are. The metropolises of coastal California in particular are squeezed between mountains on one side and water on the other, meaning suburban land has always been at a premium. The San Francisco metro area has the country’s smallest median lot size for single-family homes, at 0.13 acres, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Birmingham, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, have the biggest, at 0.75 acres. In general, it is the metropolitan areas of the South that have the lowest population densities.
Does this make them safer in a pandemic? Well, it does give more room for the dog to run around, but beyond that it seems like there are diminishing returns to so much land. Once you’ve got some private outdoor space, a building entrance you don’t have to share with others and your very own laundry room (just imagine!), added space doesn’t really gain you much protection from
infectious disease unless you’re capable of growing all the food and toilet paper you need on site.
Closer-together houses also make it easier to check up on neighbors who might need help, plus the high cost of maintaining basic infrastructure for sprawling suburbs can cut into local government budgets for emergency services, public health efforts and the like.
—Bloomberg

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”