Tag Archive for: coronavirus

Trust the Science: The Blue State Surge is Real

For months the conventional wisdom among Democrats, amplified by their obliging claque in the media, was that lockdowns played an essential role in containing COVID-19. The great heroes, in addition to Anthony Fauci, were hardline governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California’s Gavin Newsom and, most of all, New York’s Andrew Cuomo.

Yet now, more than a year later, the lockdown states—starting with New York and New Jersey—are again leading the nation in coronavirus infections and deaths per capita.

By contrast, some of the states with Republican governors who were routinely castigated for unlocking things and supposedly killing their residents, most notably Florida, Georgia and Texas, did indeed suffer an increase in fatalities last summer. But since then, even after opening their economies, these states continue to suffer fatality rates per capita well below those of the locked-down Northeastern states and about equal to California, which has maintained one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns.

What emerge from these trends are some clear issues with transmission that transcend lockdowns, mask mandates and other punitive measures. However justified, such actions have not addressed the fundamental reasons why some geographies and populations have suffered so much more than others. That’s to say that while the blue state governors aren’t necessarily to blame for the surges their states are experiencing, it’s clear that the economically and personally disruptive measures did not have the expected impact.

What did make a big difference, it turns out, is not so much the severity of lockdowns but pre-existing conditions. The likely cause here can be best identified as “exposure density” brought on by crowded housing, transit, and office environments.

That helps explain why, after New York City’s suburbs were hit hard in the first wave, the current surge has hit the outer boroughs, where a much higher share of workers have had little choice but to continue taking the subway or other transit.

Nationwide, urban exposure to the pandemic also reflects their greater inequality. Higher rates of poverty and overcrowded housing accentuate the worst effects of the pandemic, which tore through impoverished parts of New York, Houston, Los Angeles County, Chicago’s poor south side, and similar areas. The Bronx, for example, has suffered an 80 percent worse death rate than denser yet wealthier Manhattan, while Brooklyn’s rate is 50 percent worse than Manhattan’s.

This can be seen also in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, whose sunshine-blessed and auto-dominated society suffered a fatality rate 60 percent below that of transit-oriented metro New York. Yet while fatality rates have been very low in affluent areas with fewer crowded households, such as west Los Angeles and Irvine, they have been much higher in areas like east and south Los Angeles. In Orange County, the fatality rate in affluent, single family dominated Irvine is 22 per 100,000 compared with 195 in neighboring Santa Ana, which is heavily Hispanic, poor and suffers crowded housing conditions.

This is an international phenomenon seen across the world’s great urban areas. During the first lockdown, almost 20 percent of the Parisian population fled to the countryside, accelerating an escapist trend that had been underway for years: the core city of Paris has lost 700,000 residents (nearly 25 percent of its population) since 1954, while millions of new inhabitants have swelled the suburban population. Meanwhile, the densely packed Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, a place synonymous there with inner ring suburban poverty, had a staggering 130 percent excess mortality rate when the virus first hit last year.

Read the rest of this piece at The Daily Beast.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo credit: Matryx via Pixabay under CC0 1.0 License.

Chicago & Positioning: Becoming The Next Middle Class Hub

In this episode of the Feudal Future podcast, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky talk with Pete Saunders about how Chicago can better position itself to become the next middle class hub.

Coronavirus and the Office Apocalypse

“We shall never deal with the complex problems of large units and differentiated groups unless at the same time we rebuild and revitalize the small unit. We must begin at the beginning; it is here where all life, even in big communities and organizations, starts.”
— Lewis Mumford

What if they reopened the office and nobody came? This scenario is not as far-fetched as many believe. The office may not be dead, but its post-COVID future, particularly in big cities, may look more like a medieval-style arrangement than the buzzing, super dense science fiction vision from The Jetsons.

Read more

Joel Kotkin talks with Madeleine Brand About the Future of Cities

By: Madeleine Brand
On: KCRW

People have been fleeing cities for months, reports show. A new NPR and Harvard poll out today shows the pandemic’s financial toll on America’s four largest cities: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston. In LA, more than half of all households report serious financial problems. Black and Latino communities are disproportionately affected nationwide.

KCRW talks about the future of cities with Joel Kotkin, a professor and fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, and author of “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.” Also in the conversation is Annalee Newitz, a science writer and the author of the forthcoming book “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.”

The important thing is to understand that these trends existed before the pandemic. Over the last three-four years, LA, Chicago, New York all lost population. Migration has been moving a) to suburbs, b) to some smaller, more affordable cities. So I think we had a trend that was already developing that is now accelerating.
— Joel Kotkin

Related pieces:

Is the Big Cities Boom Over?

The Twilight of Great American Cities — how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting outmigration from large cities to smaller communities

Joel Kotkin talks with City Journal About California’s Neo-Feudal Future

By: Brian C. Anderson
On: City Journal’s 10 Blocks podcast

Joel Kotkin joins Brian Anderson to discuss California’s “increasingly feudal” political and economic order, the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on the state’s lower- and middle-class residents, what Joe Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris means for the Democratic ticket and U.S. politics, and Kotkin’s new book—The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. Read more

Joel Kotkin talks with Dan Proft About How Race Politics Burns Out

By: Dan Proft
On: Omny

Joel Kotkin joined the Dan Proft to talk about his essay — How Race Politics Burns Out. They cover today’s racial identity politics, and how they have failed to improve the conditions on the ground for the vast majority of historically disadvantaged groups like African-Americans.

Joel and Dan also discuss his other recent pieces — Kamala’s America and The Heartland’s Revival Read more

Triumph of the Oligarchs

A new class of overlords are making their bid for world domination.

The Coronavirus has trammeled the prospects of most Americans, particularly low-income workers. But for one small group, the pandemic has proved something like manna from heaven. Already ascendant beforehand, the tech oligarchy—a relatively small number of companies, venture, and private equity funds—are riding the current crisis to unprecedented dominion over our ever-weakening Republic. Read more