Virus finds fertile ground in urban areas once prized

The New York Times

Even before the coronavirus, Nina Brajovic wasn’t so sure about her life in New York. As a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, she spent most weeks out of town traveling for work. She often wondered whether she could do her same job for cheaper — and more easily — while based in her hometown, Pittsburgh.

Over the past month, she has gotten a sneak peek of that life, moving back in with her parents to avoid the wall-to-wall density of New York and working out of her childhood bedroom. She is now savoring life’s slowness, eating her father’s soup and watching movies on an L-shaped couch with her mom.

“Part of it feels like, why am I even living in New York?” said Brajovic, 24, who pays $1,860 in rent each month for her share of an apartment with two roommates in Manhattan. “Why am I always paying all of this rent?”

With her lease up for renewal, she is contemplating whether to make the move more permanent.

“I have no idea what I am going to do,” Brajovic said. “But it is a thought in my mind: the potential of not going back.”

The pandemic has been particularly devastating to America’s biggest cities, as the virus has found fertile ground in the density that is otherwise prized. And it comes as the country’s major urban centers were already losing their appeal for many Americans, as skyrocketing rents and changes in the labor market have pushed the country’s youngest adults to suburbs and smaller cities often far from the coasts.

The country’s three largest metropolitan areas, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, all lost population in the past several years, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. In all, growth in the country’s major metropolitan areas fell by nearly half over the course of the past decade, Frey found.

Now, as local leaders contemplate how to reopen, the future of life in America’s biggest, most dense cities is unclear. Mayors are already warning of precipitous drops in tax revenue from joblessness. And with vast numbers of professionals now working remotely, some may reconsider whether they need to live in the middle of a big city after all.

Before the pandemic, millennials and older members of Generation Z were already increasingly choosing smaller metro areas like Tucson, Arizona; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Columbus, Ohio, according to Frey. Also growing were exurbs and newer suburbs outside large cities.

Cities boomed in the 1990s after two decades of stagnation, lifted by new waves of immigration and vibrant economic growth that attracted newcomers.

But by the mid-2010s, the growth slowed. Big cities had become expensive, with rents far out of the range of middle-income Americans. The economy was changing too: Low-wage jobs, after adjusting for the local cost of living, paid about the same everywhere.

Then the virus hit, sharpening questions of affordability and lifestyle. Some argue it could accelerate the trend that was already underway.

Still, financial uncertainty could also make it less likely for someone to move.

“Moving is stressful, it’s expensive, and this is not the time when people are eager to take big risks,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist for Indeed, a job search site.

What’s more, recessions, at least in recent history, have been good for cities. The most recent population surge in some of the largest metro areas came in the wake of the Great Recession, when people lost their homes in overbuilt suburbs.

But a pandemic makes the equation different and hard to predict.

Ed Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University and author of “Triumph of the City,” said watching the virus rip through cities was like going back in time.

“Cities were killing fields for centuries because of contagious disease,” he said, noting that the life expectancy of a baby born in a city in 1900 was seven years less than one born in a rural area.

That gap disappeared by the 1920s with the advent of modern water and sewer systems.

Over time, density became a boon — economically, socially, intellectually.