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The “everybody left Manhattan” argument (updated 5-15 to reflect recent data)
The COVID-19 epidemic has led to a lot of argument about the role of urban form; defenders of the Sprawl Faith argue that New York’s high infection and fatality rate is proof that transit and density are bad, bad, bad. On the other hand, urbanists point out that within the New York metro area, there is no correlation between transit use and COVID-19. Manhattan is the most dense and transit-oriented part of the metro area, and yet every outer borough, including car-dependent Staten Island, has higher death and infection rates. In fact, three suburban counties (Nassau, Rockland, and Westchester) are also worse off than Manhattan. Two more (Suffolk and Orange) have higher infection rates but slightly lower death rates. So it seems obvious that density and transit have been blamed a bit too much by some people. But this argument has led to a counterargument: that all the Manhattan statistics are useless because most Manhattanites are rich people who fled the city, so of course there are few records of Manhattan infections. This argument contains a grain of truth. In fact, more people did leave Manhattan than the outer boroughs: according to a New York Times story based oha few estimates based on monitoring smartphones, between 13 and 19 percent. But the gap between Manhattan and the outer boroughs is far greater. Currently, Manhattan’s COVID-19 death rate is 11.7 per 10,000 residents. By contrast, the Bronx’s death rate is 21.3 per 100,000- 82 percent higher. The Queens death rate is 20.6 per 100,000- 76 percent higher. Brooklyn’s death rate is 17.9- 53 percent higher. It could be argued that even if borough-wide data is still useful, neighborhood COVID-19 data is not, because some Manhattan neighborhoods lost far more than 20 percent of their population. For example, the neighborhood that has […]
