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California saw dense housing near transit as its future. What now?

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SAN FRANCISCO — As Californians grow accustomed to 6-foot social distancing, the coronavirus could have a chilling effect on the state's efforts to build more apartments near public transportation to solve its housing crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders have championed urban housing as a way to address the ever-rising cost of living in California. They prefer that approach over continuing the state's legacy of expanding freeways and suburbs that take advantage of California's vast geography — which has led to emissions pollution and neighborhoods in wildfire zones.

The Democrats' argument had been gaining traction, especially among younger residents desperate for cheaper housing and less inured to car ownership. It was also a weapon in Newsom's fight against homelessness, a sore subject that for months incurred the wrath of President Donald Trump.

But the coronavirus will likely stand in the way of that momentum. Opponents of infill and transit-oriented development are blaming population density as a primary factor behind the pandemic's spread in urban areas, largely based on New York City's exponential increase in coronavirus cases and deaths. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded as much this week when explaining why the virus has been found in 15 times as many New Yorkers as Californians so far.

"We have one of the most dense, close environments in the country," he said Wednesday. "And that's why the virus communicated the way it did. Our closeness makes us vulnerable."

Americans on social media are expressing a newfound appreciation for suburban homes and cars. Buses and trains are empty as residents stay home and work remotely.

"I think it's absolutely going to impact people's appetite for housing density," said Susan Kirsch, founder of the group Livable California, which has led the Capitol fight against building high-density projects. Kirsch is skeptical of the Newsom-embraced estimate that California needs 3.5 million additional housing units by 2025.

Even in a pre-coronavirus world, California's housing shift faced challenges. Cities and counties used to controlling their growth plans resented the state telling them to build upward instead of outward. Low-income residents feared a wave of condo gentrification that would force them to the outermost suburbs with long commutes.

For two years, battle lines have been drawn over bills by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat. His proposals would have forced local governments to allow more housing near transit stations and office buildings, but they died under intense opposition.

California still has 30-odd bills attempting to boost housing production, including a new one by Wiener that would allow more duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes based on the size of a city. Newsom declared in his State of the State address last month he wants more housing construction "especially near transit and downtowns."

The landscape changed overnight, however. Wiener said he fully expects opponents to invoke the coronavirus.

"Of course people will abuse the coronavirus pandemic for other political goals," Wiener said. "Some of the anti-housing activists, there's an undertone that it's somehow unhealthy to live in a dense urban environment. I'm confident they'll latch onto this."

While the outbreak in New York City has grabbed headlines and generated articles pinning the blame on urban density and predicting population shifts to the suburbs and exurbs, Wiener points to the relative success of crowded cities like Singapore and Hong Kong in curbing the virus' spread.

"This contagion is not about whether you live in a densely populated area or a less densely populated area; it's about whether you have a good public health response to a pandemic, and Hong Kong and Singapore had a fantastic response," Wiener said. "The U.S. did not. It's not because of density or lack of density, it's because they did a good job and we did a bad job."

Experts say viruses unquestionably spread more easily in denser areas, but it's too simplistic to draw a direct correlation between population density and the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus. The largely suburban Santa Clara County and New Rochelle, N.Y., have also been among the nation's hardest-hit regions.

"Density is a really important factor, but it needs to be unpacked," said Benjamin Dalziel, a biology and math professor at Oregon State University who authored a study in 2018 that found large cities sustain seasonal flu pandemics for longer amounts of time and with a steadier rate of spread, while less dense cities see spikier rates of transmission that can strain health care systems' capacity.

"I don't think density is either bad or good; I can't wrap my head around that notion of things," he said.

While New York has been the epicenter of the outbreak so far, the patchy testing there and nationwide makes it much harder to tell whether New York has more cases than it should be expected to have for its size and how much worse it's doing than other areas.

"Because we don't have widespread testing, we can't truly know what those case rates are and we can't truly compare urban centers to urban centers, what might be happening in New York compared to San Francisco," said Kathryn Conlon, an environmental epidemiologist at University of California, Davis. "Their testing capabilities might be different, so it's challenging to really compare apples to apples there."

Housing density advocates also have New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's relatively slow response to the pandemic as ammunition.

"Two weeks ago, the mayor of New York City was insisting people still go to restaurants, still go to clubs, still go to the gym," said Matt Lewis, spokesperson for California YIMBY, which is backing Wiener's bill and a host of others that would encourage more affordable housing. "That's a failure of governance."

Epidemiologists agree New York shouldn't be taken as a referendum on urban centers' vulnerability to the virus. The early spread of the disease in New York City "says little about the effectiveness of strong public health interventions of the kind that were imposed in Wuhan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore," said Stanford University epidemiologist Steven Goodman. "These show that social distancing can indeed be effective, along with other epidemic suppression measures, even in crowded urban centers."

Building industry advocates in California say viral pandemics will take their place among the state's other multifarious threats, including wildfire and the ever-present risk of earthquakes.

"California's set up so every single potential risk under the sun exists somewhere in the state," said Dan Dunmoyer, president and CEO of the California Building Industry Association. "You push people out of the wildland into the urban lands, you have the biggest seismic risk possible. ... You go back to the urban areas, you've got Covid. The way we look at it is, you just have to build smart."

Adapting to the coronavirus could include new plumbing and HVAC designs that minimize the transfer of disease, said Scott Wetch, a lobbyist who represents building trades unions. He pointed out that one phase of the 2003 SARS coronavirus epidemic was traced to a Hong Kong apartment complex where plumbing allowed virus-laden droplets in bathroom drains to recirculate through apartments.

"We can build denser housing and should, and do it in a safe way as long as we don't denigrate the building standards," he said. "Denser living conditions are going to present a better opportunity for spread and that's what we've seen in New York City and that's why New York City's numbers are 10 times the numbers of the country as a whole, but I don't think you can just turn a blind eye to the impact of climate change."





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Big cities have encouraged "cliff dwelling" for a long time. Now the push to affordable housing further encourages that. I would say any study of epidemiology shows high densities contribute to infectious disease spread. This never was a topic for seasonal flu deaths - it was a basic public health regimen to limit the spread. As big pharma eventually finds a preventative vaccine, the density concern will pass. People have been taught to rely on the benevolence of big city democrat giveaways to adopt a new living standard. My .02


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Interesting article but it won’t stop “the machine “.

What will happen is a rise in the value of surburban housing.


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The Coming Age of Dispersion

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As of this writing, the long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic remain uncertain. But one possible consequence is an acceleration of the end of the megacity era. In its place, we may now be witnessing the outlines of a new, and necessary, dispersion of population, not only in the wide open spaces of North America and Australia, but even in the megacities of the developing world. Much of this has been driven by high housing prices and growing social disorder in our core cities, as well as the steady rise of online commerce and remote working, now the fastest growing means of “commuting” in the United States.

Pandemics naturally thrive in large multicultural cities, where people live “cheek by jowl” and travel to and from other countries is a fact of international tourism and commerce. Europe’s rapidly advancing infection rate is, to some extent, the product of its weak border controls, one of the EU’s greatest accomplishments. Across the continent, cities have become the primary centers of infection. Half of all COVID-19 cases in Spain, for example, have occurred in Madrid while the Milan region, with its cosmopolitan population and economy, accounts for half of all cases in Italy and almost three-fifths of the deaths.

In the US, known cases and deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Seattle area, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Gotham, with six percent of the US population, now accounts by itself for nearly half of the 18,000 cases in the country. Even the New York Times, a consistent booster for packing people into small spaces, now acknowledges that the city’s high densities are responsible for its much higher rate of infection even than relatively dense but far more dispersed areas like Los Angeles, which is equally diverse and global but still consists largely of single family houses.

In places like New York, crowded mass transit systems remain essential to many commuters, while suburban, exurban, and small-town residents get around in the sanctuary of their private cars. These patterns can be seen in a new report by the mid-American think tank Heartland Forward (where I am a senior fellow), which shows how relatively slight the impact has been outside of a few large urban centers on the coasts. Rural areas around the world have been largely spared, at least for now. The North American hinterlands, according to health professionals, benefit from less crowding and unwanted human contact.

Living in dispersion may not save you from contagion, but being away from people, driving around in your own car, and having neighbors you know, does have its advantages in times like these. Even the urban cognoscenti have figured this out—much as their Renaissance predecessors did during typhus and bubonic plague outbreaks, wealthy New Yorkers today are retreating to their country homes where they struggle with the locals over depleted supplies of essentials.

Back to the Dark Ages?

In classical times, plagues devastated Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. Along with barbarian invasions, they reduced the population of the Eternal City from 1.2 million at its height to barely 30,000 by the sixth century. Outside Europe, pandemics devastated cities such as Cairo, Canton, and Harbin. Following the conquest of the New World, the indigenous population suffered massive casualties from exposure to European diseases like smallpox.

In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when urban populations began to resurge, particularly in Italy, dense trading cities suffered the worst outbreaks. In contrast, as historian William McNeill has noted, the impact of pestilence was far less in rural, backward reaches of Poland or other parts of central Europe.1 Urban pestilence made a comeback during the industrial revolution, when the masses suffered from what Lewis Mumford has called “hygienic poverty.” The emerging big cities in the New World were no better off. Due to pestilence and inadequate heath care, New York’s infant mortality rates doubled between 1810 and 1870.2

Cities in Europe and America had gradually cleaned up by the later parts of the 19th century. Urban reformers, “sewer socialists,” and social democratic governments across Europe improved sanitation and water delivery systems, and expanded parks. Equally critical, Western cities began a conscious “un-bunching” of the population through the introduction of streetcars, subways, passenger trains, and eventually freeways. Radicals and conservatives alike welcomed the British visionary Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” ideal, which sought to offer the majority the option of resettling in the more hygienic hinterlands.

Over the ensuing century, developers became adept at building cities—even in the tropics—but it seems clear they have not been able to stop the revival of old hygiene problems. This is particularly true in China, which has undergone extraordinarily rapid urbanization. Behind the impressive setting of China’s high-rise cities, many urban residents, particularly some of the 200 million migrant workers, live in overcrowded neighborhoods with poor sanitation and drinking water.

Many of these workers, notes author Li Sun, work in dangerous jobs, but have little or no access to healthcare. Even before COVID-19, the inhabitants of highly industrialized cities like Wuhan suffered shorter lifespans than those in the countryside. Dirty conditions, and particularly the “wet markets” common in these cities, have been identified for well over a decade as the breeding grounds for respiratory ailments such as MERS, Swine Flu, and the 2003 SARS outbreak.

More recently, even once clean Western cities are passively developing ways to incubate pestilence. Homeless encampments are on the rise throughout Europe, but the problem is most acute in American cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. These informal settlements attract rats and all sorts of diseases, some of which, such as typhus, are distinctly medieval and arguably far more dangerous than COVID-19.

The fading megacity

Once held up as a grand ideal, the megacity is increasingly losing its appeal as a way of life. Chinese science fiction writers—increasingly the last redoubt of independent thought in that increasingly totalitarian country—envision an urban future that is, for most, squalid and divided by class. There are already deep divisions between those who hold urban residence permits, hukou, and those relegated to an inferior, unprotected status. Hao Jingfang’s novella, Folding Beijing, for example, portrays a megacity sharply divided between the elite, the middle ranks, and a vast underclass living mainly by recycling the waste generated from the city.3

During my last visit to Beijing, Communist Party officials shared their concerns about how these divides could undermine social stability. They have already essentially banned new migration into cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and encourage migrants to move to the less crowded interior or even back to rural villages. Given the dictatorial nature of the regime, it’s not shocking that growth is already shifting to “second tier cities” including some in the interior. In far more chaotic India, the Modi government also supports an ongoing shift to smaller cities, and even a push for revitalization of rural villages. This reflects a growing concern among Indian researchers that the much ballyhooed “shining India,” concentrated in large urban centers, increasingly resembles the orbiting world portrayed in the science fiction movie Elysium—hermetically sealed from the vast majority of the population.

Even without government assistance, and often in the face of opposition from planners, dispersion has continued to characterize Western cities. This pattern is well-established throughout Europe, Canada, and Australia and is particularly evident in the United States where, since 2010, nearly all population growth has occurred in the urban periphery and smaller cities. As a new study from Heartland Forward demonstrates, both immigrants and millennials—the key groups behind urban growth—are increasingly moving to interior cities and even small towns. This is true even in San Francisco where nearly half of millennials described themselves as “likely” to leave the City by the Bay, a dramatic shift from a decade earlier, due in large part to insanely high housing prices and deteriorating conditions on the streets.

Indeed, as Richard Florida has noted, the bulk of the new growth of the “creative class”—the well-educated millennials critical to the urban renaissance—is “shifting away from superstar cities.” The rise in the migration of such prized workers is now two to three times faster in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Grand Rapids, MI than in regions around New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C.

The growing dispersion of work

Over the past decade, much of the US media and academia have embraced the notion that the future belongs to the high tax, high regulation economies clustered on the east and west coasts. These trends undermine the notion, promoted by writers like Neil Irwin of the Times, that cities like New York have “the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

This is increasingly not the case. New technologies make it increasingly easy for companies to work away from dense megacities, sparking a process that one British writer has described as “counter-urbanization.” For firms connected by the Internet, it makes sense to locate in suburban regions and smaller towns that are generally safer, cleaner, and less expensive. Rather than concentrate in big cities, notes economist Jed Kolko, the share of the economy controlled by the five largest metros has declined over the past quarter-century.

This trend was picking up even before the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, Austin, Salt Lake City, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Phoenix, as well as smaller cities like Madison, WI, and Boise, grew their tech sector twice as quickly as hubs like New York or Los Angeles. There are growing signs that even Silicon Valley is dispersing, evidenced by Lyft’s move of many key operations to Nashville, Uber’s move to establish its second-largest office in Dallas-Fort Worth, and Apple’s placing of its second-largest facility in the suburbs north of Austin.

Similar patterns can be seen in Europe, according to a recent study by economists Nima Sanandaji and Stefan Fölster. Lower costs, less crowding, and, in some places, fewer disruptions from migrants and government regulators have created an ideal environment for fledgling tech firms as well as firms from elsewhere interested in placing tech operations in Europe. Tech growth, they note, is now taking place in more remote places like Bratislava, which now has the highest percentage of workers in what they define as “the brain sector” of any European city; other rising stars include former Soviet-dominated cities such as Prague, Bucharest, and Budapest.

The transformative role of technology

The pandemic, which is forcing more people to work remotely, will simply enhance an already existing trend. In the United States, transit use in most cities is stagnant or even down while telecommuting has grown rapidly, up 140 percent since 2005. Work at home, according to the census, now exceeds transit usage nationwide, and accounts for a greater part of the workforce in greater Los Angeles, North America’s second largest urban area. In Europe, the percentage working at home has grown from 7.7 percent in 2008 to nearly 10 percent now. In Australia, where distance is often an issue, telecommuting has increased over the last 15 years from eight percent in 2001 to 30 percent last year.

These numbers may not be consistent, and how telecommuters are counted varies, sometimes covering people who also work part-time in offices. But the trend is fairly evident, and now seems likely to spread to Asia, particularly in wake of the current crisis. Most Japanese companies already offer this option, in part due to a mounting labor shortage and the growing necessity for children to look after their aging parents. With the rise of the virus, Korean firms like telecommunications giant SK Group and many other large firms are shifting to telecommuting.

This will not work for everyone. But, thanks to COVID-19, its moment may have arrived. Even before the pandemic, the benefits of working remotely were apparent in terms of productivity, innovation, and lower turnover. It appears to be particularly attractive to seniors and educated millennials. These digital natives have already accepted the notion that they can accomplish as much at home as in the office. As one student told me, “I don’t see the point of driving an hour to go from one computer screen to another.”

In the United States, some rural states in particular—Oklahoma to Vermont, Maine to Iowa—have developed incentive programs for telecommuters, including bonuses for moving and subsidies for establishing a business. These often include the option of living in an affordable small town or even a farmstead and still participating in the high-end of the global economy, which is particularly appealing to experienced older workers as well as young families. Ultimately, the dispersed work model may also be used to combat climate change since working from home can save considerable energy.

Some jobs—notably those in hotels, airports, and theme parks—may disappear for violating new norms of “social distancing.” This opens a potential gold mine to firms such as Slack—now the fastest growing business application on record—as well as Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Teams, all of which manage real-time collaboration on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and conversations. Other clear winners include Amazon (which is hiring 100,000 new workers), the food delivery services, streaming entertainment services, telemedicine, and online education providers.

The long-term prospectus: neo-feudalism or a better new world?

In the future, cities may not be defined as physical places but as what MIT’s late futurist William Mitchell described as “cities of bits.” This is something that did not exist during the Middle Ages, when the most knowledgeable survived in the isolation of monasteries. New digital connections could incubate a new urban culture unlike any we have seen.

As dispersion grows, our cities will become flatter and less dense. Many primary functions—food service, media, business and professional services, finance—will operate mostly free of unwanted human contact. They will be less like Le Corbusier’s super-high density “Radiant City,” and far more like American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s notion of a “Broadacre City”—an expanse of houses and gardens spreading far and wide across the landscape.

Mitchell predicted that these virtual cities could become heavily bifurcated with the wealthy clustered—like the socially isolated, germ-phobic “spacers” described in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction—in hermetically sealed corporate campuses or around university districts.4 The rest of the population could end up living in small apartments—constantly worried about infection and living increasingly in virtual reality—a new serf class dependent on subsidies or “income maintenance” provided by the state.

Dispersion might offer a sunnier scenario, with people spread out across different regions. Property would be far less expensive and accessible to the middle classes. Larger living space could be ideally configured from home-based work that would bring back the family-oriented capitalism of the early modern era. Rather than bringing us to a high-tech Middle Ages, we could use this crisis to develop a new and more human economic and social model that combines a cosmopolitan outlook with a better, and safer, way of life.



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The old saying is that the only thing Americans hate more than urban sprawl is high density housing..... If we can revitalize rural America, that will change politics forever.


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Originally Posted by Dutch
The old saying is that the only thing Americans hate more than urban sprawl is high density housing..... If we can revitalize rural America, that will change politics forever.


You've got to revitalize rural people though and I don't know that's possible. Otherwise you're going to get the typical rural liberal that moves to a rural area and tries to make it just like the chit hole they just fled

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Originally Posted by Dutch
revitalize rural America


What does that mean?

Asking because I “revitalize” urban neighborhoods, which is code for attracting the sort of White people who spend half their day at third wave coffee shops, so the real estate values increase.

I’m not sure rural America is going to want that.

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Originally Posted by Steve
Maybe.

California saw dense housing near transit as its future. What now?

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SAN FRANCISCO — As Californians grow accustomed to 6-foot social distancing, the coronavirus could have a chilling effect on the state's efforts to build more apartments near public transportation to solve its housing crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders have championed urban housing as a way to address the ever-rising cost of living in California. They prefer that approach over continuing the state's legacy of expanding freeways and suburbs that take advantage of California's vast geography — which has led to emissions pollution and neighborhoods in wildfire zones.

The Democrats' argument had been gaining traction, especially among younger residents desperate for cheaper housing and less inured to car ownership. It was also a weapon in Newsom's fight against homelessness, a sore subject that for months incurred the wrath of President Donald Trump.

But the coronavirus will likely stand in the way of that momentum. Opponents of infill and transit-oriented development are blaming population density as a primary factor behind the pandemic's spread in urban areas, largely based on New York City's exponential increase in coronavirus cases and deaths. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded as much this week when explaining why the virus has been found in 15 times as many New Yorkers as Californians so far.

"We have one of the most dense, close environments in the country," he said Wednesday. "And that's why the virus communicated the way it did. Our closeness makes us vulnerable."

Americans on social media are expressing a newfound appreciation for suburban homes and cars. Buses and trains are empty as residents stay home and work remotely.

"I think it's absolutely going to impact people's appetite for housing density," said Susan Kirsch, founder of the group Livable California, which has led the Capitol fight against building high-density projects. Kirsch is skeptical of the Newsom-embraced estimate that California needs 3.5 million additional housing units by 2025.

Even in a pre-coronavirus world, California's housing shift faced challenges. Cities and counties used to controlling their growth plans resented the state telling them to build upward instead of outward. Low-income residents feared a wave of condo gentrification that would force them to the outermost suburbs with long commutes.

For two years, battle lines have been drawn over bills by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat. His proposals would have forced local governments to allow more housing near transit stations and office buildings, but they died under intense opposition.

California still has 30-odd bills attempting to boost housing production, including a new one by Wiener that would allow more duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes based on the size of a city. Newsom declared in his State of the State address last month he wants more housing construction "especially near transit and downtowns."

The landscape changed overnight, however. Wiener said he fully expects opponents to invoke the coronavirus.

"Of course people will abuse the coronavirus pandemic for other political goals," Wiener said. "Some of the anti-housing activists, there's an undertone that it's somehow unhealthy to live in a dense urban environment. I'm confident they'll latch onto this."

While the outbreak in New York City has grabbed headlines and generated articles pinning the blame on urban density and predicting population shifts to the suburbs and exurbs, Wiener points to the relative success of crowded cities like Singapore and Hong Kong in curbing the virus' spread.

"This contagion is not about whether you live in a densely populated area or a less densely populated area; it's about whether you have a good public health response to a pandemic, and Hong Kong and Singapore had a fantastic response," Wiener said. "The U.S. did not. It's not because of density or lack of density, it's because they did a good job and we did a bad job."

Experts say viruses unquestionably spread more easily in denser areas, but it's too simplistic to draw a direct correlation between population density and the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus. The largely suburban Santa Clara County and New Rochelle, N.Y., have also been among the nation's hardest-hit regions.

"Density is a really important factor, but it needs to be unpacked," said Benjamin Dalziel, a biology and math professor at Oregon State University who authored a study in 2018 that found large cities sustain seasonal flu pandemics for longer amounts of time and with a steadier rate of spread, while less dense cities see spikier rates of transmission that can strain health care systems' capacity.

"I don't think density is either bad or good; I can't wrap my head around that notion of things," he said.

While New York has been the epicenter of the outbreak so far, the patchy testing there and nationwide makes it much harder to tell whether New York has more cases than it should be expected to have for its size and how much worse it's doing than other areas.

"Because we don't have widespread testing, we can't truly know what those case rates are and we can't truly compare urban centers to urban centers, what might be happening in New York compared to San Francisco," said Kathryn Conlon, an environmental epidemiologist at University of California, Davis. "Their testing capabilities might be different, so it's challenging to really compare apples to apples there."

Housing density advocates also have New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's relatively slow response to the pandemic as ammunition.

"Two weeks ago, the mayor of New York City was insisting people still go to restaurants, still go to clubs, still go to the gym," said Matt Lewis, spokesperson for California YIMBY, which is backing Wiener's bill and a host of others that would encourage more affordable housing. "That's a failure of governance."

Epidemiologists agree New York shouldn't be taken as a referendum on urban centers' vulnerability to the virus. The early spread of the disease in New York City "says little about the effectiveness of strong public health interventions of the kind that were imposed in Wuhan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore," said Stanford University epidemiologist Steven Goodman. "These show that social distancing can indeed be effective, along with other epidemic suppression measures, even in crowded urban centers."

Building industry advocates in California say viral pandemics will take their place among the state's other multifarious threats, including wildfire and the ever-present risk of earthquakes.

"California's set up so every single potential risk under the sun exists somewhere in the state," said Dan Dunmoyer, president and CEO of the California Building Industry Association. "You push people out of the wildland into the urban lands, you have the biggest seismic risk possible. ... You go back to the urban areas, you've got Covid. The way we look at it is, you just have to build smart."

Adapting to the coronavirus could include new plumbing and HVAC designs that minimize the transfer of disease, said Scott Wetch, a lobbyist who represents building trades unions. He pointed out that one phase of the 2003 SARS coronavirus epidemic was traced to a Hong Kong apartment complex where plumbing allowed virus-laden droplets in bathroom drains to recirculate through apartments.

"We can build denser housing and should, and do it in a safe way as long as we don't denigrate the building standards," he said. "Denser living conditions are going to present a better opportunity for spread and that's what we've seen in New York City and that's why New York City's numbers are 10 times the numbers of the country as a whole, but I don't think you can just turn a blind eye to the impact of climate change."






The reference to high rates in Santa Clara County and New Rochelle are so bogus in their intent that it is beyond imbecilic.

They are both bedroom communities, not close-nit communities like rural towns. People commute from them into BIG cities, and they bring back the disease.

Again, agenda trumps truth.


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Mankind moved to the city 8000 years ago. That isn’t going to change


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The black death, the plague, the flu, and covid-19 will not stop cities.

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Originally Posted by Stickfight
Originally Posted by Dutch
revitalize rural America


What does that mean?

Asking because I “revitalize” urban neighborhoods, which is code for attracting the sort of White people who spend half their day at third wave coffee shops, so the real estate values increase.

I’m not sure rural America is going to want that.


What’s a town that has vitality? A grade school with enough kids so there’s a separate teacher for each class. A high school with enough kids to field a football team AND have a decent band. A burger joint and a pizza place. A grocery store with a service meat counter. A family practice doc and a dentist. A decent rec center / gym. Enough people to put on a community play every year. A Kiwanis AND a Rotary club. A place where you have a choice of decent paying jobs with benefits at places other than government offices of one kind or another.

Coffee shop is rather optional.


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The internet alone is going to drive population dispersion because it makes geography less important for certain activities. Geography is still important for physical activities (shipping and natural resource use), however, so cities aren't going away.


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Oh I don't know, I find liberals as dense as ever.


The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Which explains a lot.
Joined: Sep 2011
Posts: 60,283
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Campfire Kahuna
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Campfire Kahuna
W
Joined: Sep 2011
Posts: 60,283
I'm a happy old farm kid livin' in the no place where I do. Flyover country.


These premises insured by a Sheltie in Training ,--- and Cooey.o
"May the Good Lord take a likin' to you"

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