The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City | Hacker News Reader

The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City

nytimes.com

47 pointsjohnny31342 comments

Just in the first 3 paragraphs of the article:

> ...An analysis of multiple sources of aggregated smartphone location data has found.

You need a smartphone and apps/settings that enable aggregation of location data. This is not something that is going to be evenly distributed throughout the city. Further, that is likely to be primarily advertising data, so quality is less than you would desire. How many people are going to be counted twice when you merge this data together?

> Roughly 5 percent of residents — or about 420,000 people — left the city between March 1 and May 1.

That's not a lot of people for NYC.

> Some of these areas are typically home to lots of students, many of whom left as colleges and universities closed

There are nearly 600,000 college students in NYC[1]. That's more than the number of people that left!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_York_City

A lot of those students are probably CUNY ones which don't live in dorms, and would have no place to "return" to.

From the same article: "In the city’s very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes."

The point of the article is that the vast majority of people leaving were from area s of concentrated wealth. 40% is a large number of people leaving.

“People who can afford and own second homes go to said second homes when pandemic hits” is a better title I think.

even better - "duh"

It's at the very beginning of A Journal of the Plague Year. I'm sure the same behavior among the same sort of people, for the same reasons, has happened approximately forever. It'd be news if it didn't.

So maybe we shouldn't be giving these people tax incentives and pretending that they stimulate local business.

Isn't it better for everyone who has to stay if those who can leave do so? The higher the population density in a region the easier it is for a virus to spread.

They are stimulating local businesses -- just not in NYC. And NYC is dependent on food/good/services outside of NYC, too, so it's not like this money is just vanishing to being transferred to China.

Stream of consciousness, but as a New Yorker, here are my two cents:

Anecdotally, one of the first things I noticed while driving through the Upper East Side about a month ago was the number of lights that were off around 8pm. It was a little disturbing to see, but people have their own prerogative and there is no way to tell someone that they should stay in the city to support the people who live here. Lately, I do still see people moving out. Typically one or two cars loading stuff. A lot of furniture on the sidewalks if you’re into that type of thing.

I am keeping a pulse on things by watching rental prices on Craigslist. I enjoy seeing the sublet ads that ask for someone to take over a 3000/mo 1 bedroom apartment in Hells Kitchen. They’ll be back in September. Until then, pay their full rent to live in a neighborhood that was sketchy before, but barely habitable now. I don’t even feel safe driving through there after sundown.

Which brings me to the point: I think the racial imbalance in terms of who gets sick is clearly driven by the ability to work from home, ability to actually socially distance, and the ability to just leave the city and go back home until things blow over. I’ve lived in a three generation apartment in the boroughs. If one person gets sick, they all do.

I know the point is to avoid getting COVID but... the hospitals in NYC, even in a crisis, are SO much better than they are out in the Hamptons (and other non-urban areas). It's night and day in terms of quality and resources.

I purposefully stayed in [other big city] for this reason, rather than going home. Seems very short-sighted to leave if you're that concerned.

You can stay in your apartment and go outside and have a much much higher chance of getting the infection, or you can go to your second home where you have a lot of space and a yard. You can do outdoor activities and stay healthy with very very little chance of getting infected.

Someone who lives in NYC.

Cool, come down to the beaches along with everyone else from NJ and PA, bring us your worried, asymptomatic carriers. All the old people who live at the beach year round really appreciate it.

on the con side, NYC has been hit the worst and has the lowest % of available hospital beds. the ideal plan would be to leave NYC for [other big city with good hospitals & low infection rate].

I don't think that's the primary reason people leave. They leave because the entire point of paying a lot of money to live in a nice part of Manhattan is all of the fun stuff they can do in Manhattan. The amount of space that gets you in Manhattan is much less than most other places. They can't do that stuff anymore, and they're stuck in their own space. So they leave to a place where they can have more space.

Pointing out disparities between groups can help us decide how to address them. But I don't see how this article helps much in that sense; it's pretty obvious it would happen and there's no palpable remedy. It's one of the thousand ways it helps to have more material resources, a fact nearly all are already aware of.

It’s important to have facts in a debate as opposed to leaning so hard on the quality of your instincts for money. “Well duh, isn’t that just what rich people do?” should only go so far in the age of data.

This map looks suspiciously like a population density map.

One of the most common geographic data viz failures.

Well here’s a real density map https://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/general-u-s/6696...

Pay particular attention to Bronx and Harlem up in the north, Chinatown in the southeast.

Seems to me as simple as this: the quantity and quality of options a person has is generally proportional to the liquid wealth they can access.

In this case I'd say not needing to be in a particular place to keep up with one's responsibilities, plus having any kind of access to a second house—owning, access through a family trust, having the kinds of friends or family who own the kinds of homes at which long-term house guests are fairly normal and don't inconvenience anyone involved, that sort of thing—are more relevant than liquidity per se. Though cash would do just fine to buy or lease those things.

My point just being the "liquid" part isn't necessary.

NYTimes will convulse if it can't pit poor vs rich in every single thing.

What exactly are you insinuating?

Why does the title have to say "Richest"? Just list the boroughs or areas from which people fled. Most people fled from Manhattan, etc.. Not clickbaity, right?

Because they're asserting causality. The wealth of these people is what enables them to leave. That's the point of the article.

Why don’t you have a quick look at the map that they show, and observe that it’s not Manhattan VS Queens or Brooklyn.

It’s some specific regions of Manhattan that are know to have some of the priciest residential real estate.

The title is not clickbait: it’s a very concise representation of the truth.

If they wrote “Manhattan”, that would imply places like Harlem as well, and you can clearly see that almost nobody above, say, 128th St left.

The title is reflective of the article itself, which uses data to show that the wealth of an NYC neighborhood’s inhabitants is on average directly correlated with the extent to which those inhabitants left during the last few months.

Alternatively the article could have “just” listed the boroughs as you suggest, but this would raise the question of why some boroughs emptied out and not others (also why there is visible clustering within those boroughs’ neighborhoods). This is the question the article tries to address.

Because that's what the data says when sorted by wealth? Wealth is a primary driver of many / most aspects of society including covid mortality rate. To ignore this is to abandon valuable tools in both social sciences and medicine. While data can always be manipulated to drive an agenda, I don't see how just naming areas and making no deep dive into the readily available statistics on these areas is helpful.

Comments like yours, especially on a site like this really make me worry that people are ignoring science and data in this country because it does not support their preferred narrative and politics. Anti - vaxxers contributing to a resurgence of measles may have just been the beginning.

"The five ZIP codes with the highest rates of positive tests for the coronavirus — in Corona, Cambria Heights, East Elmhurst, Queens Village, and Jackson Heights — have an average per capita income of $26,708, while residents in the five with the lowest rates — in Lower Manhattan, Tribeca, Battery Park City, and the east side of Midtown — had an average income of $118,166, according to an analysis of New York City data by The Intercept."

...

"Diabetes, one of the conditions that appears to put people with Covid-19 at highest risk of becoming severely ill, is also more common both among black and Latino New Yorkers and in low-income neighborhoods throughout the city."

Is the above not useful information?

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/09/nyc-coronavirus-deaths-r...

People running away from a plague in their city is an entirely common, natural, and understandable reaction. But rather than expressing sympathy, the Times is making it a class warfare thing. The leavers "do not resemble the city as a whole", the article says: they're richer, and more likely to have a college degree, and "mostly white".

Are they wrong? No one is saying that it is unnatural or baffling that people are leaving the city, are they? What are the implications of the data they are reporting on? Do you think it's class warfare to even acknowledge that people who have better economic means have more freedom to react to the pandemic?

Maybe it's class warfare that the poor bear the brunt of the damage the pandemic and quarantine have done, without means to leave, forced to work "essential jobs" to not get evicted and thus more exposed to the virus, and more vulnerable to economic disruptions.

I think it's class warfare to acknowledge that right this second. If you see a line of refugees trickling out of a disaster zone, and your instinct is to start sorting them by race and wealth, that's not a good mindset.

I can't speak for the commenter, but it's pretty obvious lately that the major media outlets love to hit low hanging fruit like class warfare to get outrage and ad views.

The NYT has a laser-focus on class and identity politics. Nearly every article is framed through that lens, and it seeps into everything the publish such as movie reviews. However, if you read the comments on articles, a lot of readers express frustration with this focus. Not sure if it matters though, their subscriber levels have been up since the change.

Controversy sells. That's been true in NYC newspapers for years, back to the Hearst era, if not before.

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