Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

There's some good articles discussing how after a major natural disaster, cities aren't really fundamentally derailed in how much they rebound to success vs. slide into oblivion by the actual disaster.

To spell it out more concretely, it's suggested that if a city is vital and people want to live there, a disaster will not hurt that growth and city's long-term trajectory. Physical damage, or even population damage will recover and people will still move there to be around other productive people.

On the other hand, if a city was already losing its vitality and drive and attractiveness, no amount of stimulus afterwards will stop it. People simply don't want to live and work there, or be part of the city's growth. The examples (I'll try to dig up the articles) were:

- Kobe after their earthquake (stimulus and reinvestment did not stop a general decline of that city that was happening long before the earthquake)

- New York, after natural disasters, 9/11, etc. (the city rebounded and people continued moving there no matter the physical aftereffects)

So for SF, you ask, aside from this virus situation, what was San Francisco and California incentivizing people to do? It has been a confused message. Tech and jobs, weather, and pleasant environment clearly drive SF's growth and attractiveness. However, homelessness, traffic, zoning, high housing prices/unaffordability, all the problems of SF that the supervisors have been too ineffective to tackle meaningfully, drive unattractiveness.

I think the virus (like any other natural disaster) just exposes to a greater extent what people really think and are likely to do about a city.

San Francisco (and any other city's) fate was made long before the current situation, and short-term popular messages of "we will get through this and get stimulus money or reform x,y,z" generally will not outweigh the years and decades of what the city had set up for itself up to now. Personally though, I think SF + Bay Area will manage to slide (survive) through it, despite many faults, because it's been fundamentally a desireable place to be.

This largely depends on remote work right? These people arent moving across the country, they are going to Marin, or maybe Tahoe. If the business is still centered in this area, they wont move quick.

Also, SF isnt the only issue with homelessness etc. Cupertino has their "first" homeless camp, solely because they used to live unseen in ravines, under bridges and have been kicked out of there

There are natural disasters and natural disasters.

Some are indifferent to location. Some are exacerbated by, or simply drawn to, cities.

An earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, flood, or wildfire is to a high approximation not particular to the level of urbanisation. It occurs, and strikes whatever happens to be in its path.[1] There's no real reason to see a one-off or random strike as part of a long-term trend, absent some compelling causal relation.[2]

There are phenomena which are exacerbated or directly caused by cities and their concommitant industries, populations, and activities: crime, corruption, pollution, and disease, principle among these.[3]

Looking at the COVID-19 data, greater incidence seems strongly associated with larger (and often poorer) urban areas. That concentration and lack of hygiene promote the spread of disease is hardly a novel concept, and there's a strong argument to be made that disease co-evolves with human social patterns of settlement, transport, and commerce.

You may be aware of a period of urban decline in the US beginning roughly 1950 and progressing through about 1980, as crowding, crime, pollution, soaring property values, and similar factors made cities less desirable, and open space, low housing costs, cheap and uncongested (for a while) transport, and high-paying jobs made suburban regions (Armonk, Mountain View, Walnut Creek, Pasadena) attractive.

The urban revival of the late 20th century, and continuing until ... recently? ... owed much to the virtual elimination of urban industry (and hence pollution), falling crime, and a small number of centres of largely informational work (software, banking, entertainment, some government contracting) favouring a small number of very large urban centres: New York, Seattle, San Francisco, London, Berlin, etc. At the same time, the recently-attractive suburbs themselves became crowded, expensive, congested, and obviously underserved with infrastructure and services. "Distributed cities" isn't a concept that works well, long term, I believe.

If COVID-19 isn't merely a one-off, but a harbinger of a future in which rapidly-disseminating novel diseases travel via airline and other transport systems to dense and highly co-mingled urban centres, then the calculus may well be shifting from the winning urban megacities of today. Whether or not that proves an accurate scenario of course remains to be seen.

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Notes:

1. There are factors which may make a city more likely to be in that path -- many urban areas are along rivers or in low-lying coastal areas, Because Reasons (mostly transport). But the city itself doesn't cause the disaster.

2. Climatic change and its related afflictions would of course be one of those causal relations with a plausible long-term trend line.

3. I highly recommend Kyle Harper's The Fates of Rome, which explores this for the Roman empire and its unprecedented urbanisations and wide-ranging commerce, including to China. Adam Kucharski's The Rules of Contagion, forthcoming in the US, published 2020 in the UK, looks at similar concepts.

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