Urban Issues

Once widely seen in the media as “the next great transit city”, the Los Angeles area’s rapid transit boom was turning to a bust — and well before the Covid19 crisis. As we can see below, transit ridership in greater Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban region, has been declining for years, and things are not likely to get much better with the impact of the pandemic.  read more »

When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered — Ibn Khaldun, 14^th Century Arab historian  read more »

In what could turn out to be a “dry run” for the post-COVID19 era, net domestic migration has strongly shifted away from the larger metropolitan areas, to smaller areas. This “sea-change” has occurred since 2015, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates. Domestic migration is reported by the Census Bureau when a resident or household moves from one US county to another (No migration below the county level is reported in Census Bureau population estimates).  read more »

The pandemic has brought panic to the once-confident ranks of urbanists promoting city density.  read more »

The glory of cities is to serve as places of interaction between people and economies. Yet throughout history—from Roman times to the present—this advantage has also entailed exposure to deadly contagions.  read more »

The last thing this polarized Republic needs is, well, more polarization, but that is what we are contracting from the pandemic. Americans, irrespective of region, broadly want the same things, such as safety, a return to normalcy, and an end to dependence on China for medical supplies, but they differ in the depth of their experiences with the pandemic.  read more »

As we wrote in Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown, Youngstown’s story is America’s story, and that city offers a useful case study for anyone trying to imagine American life after the pandemic. No doubt, coronavirus is a natural disaster that is more contagious, widespread, and deadly than the economic disaster of deindustrialization.  read more »

What are the odds that the coronavirus will recede on its own during the spring because of warmer temperatures or a higher ultraviolet (UV) index? This has been a question from the beginning.

There has been some research in support of the idea that the warmer season would force the virus to retreat. And there has been other research that concluded that the virus would retreat but not disappear, that it would survive in the southern hemisphere and that it could then stage a comeback in the northern hemisphere in the fall when cooler temperatures return.  read more »

The latest US Census Bureau metropolitan area population estimates (for 2019) were largely lost in the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.  read more »

Even before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, America, like most higher-income countries, was already heading toward a neo-feudal future: massive inequality, ever-greater concentrations of power, and increasingly widespread embrace of a uniform (albeit secular) religion. The pandemic, all too reminiscent of the great plagues of the Middle Ages, seems destined to accelerate this process.  read more »