 Is coronavirus the end of New York, as we know it? That's exactly what urbanist Joel Cochran argued in a recent piece for Tablet magazine. This is happening at a time when the demographics of cities like New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco are all going in the wrong direction. In other words, young people are leaving. Population growth is very low. I think the pandemic is just one more factor. With lockdowns and extreme social distancing bringing urban life to a halt and New York emerging as the epicenter of the national crisis, a debate among urban studies scholars is breaking out over what this will mean for the future of American cities. On one side are density skeptics like Kotkin, who believes the pandemic will only accelerate an already present decline in urban living. While pro-density urbanists like University of Toronto professor Richard Florida say that New York will do what New York has always done, bounce back. Biggest mistake people ever make is counting New York out. I mean, if there's one place in the world, don't count out ever. Thomas Campanella, a Cornell professor who co-edited a book called The Resilient City After 9-11, agrees with Florida. No, we're not looking at the end of New York by any means. Nor are we looking at the end of cities. We're very similar predictions were made in the wake of 9-11. And there was dispersal, certainly. In the book, Campanella and his co-editor document cities that did and didn't bounce back from catastrophe and find the disasters that damage critical infrastructure, such as the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii, or make land literally uninhabitable, such as the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, are most likely to do irreparable harm. Cities have recovered from pandemics fairly quickly, including New York after the 1918 Spanish flu. To suggest that this is going to mark the end of the city is it's ridiculous, actually. It traffics in a long tradition of anti-urbanist posturing and predicting. It goes all the way back to the founding generation in this country. Thomas Jefferson really launched them in his notes on Virginia, his famous comment about how the mobs of great cities add just so much to a nation as sores on the body politic. And John Adams wrote in a very similar vein about how the people living in crowded places in a small land area are prone to contagions of madness and folly, as he put it. Dedensifying the city, that's not going to happen. We still have London and Florence and Venice and all these cities that underwent terrible pandemic diseases again and again and again. The Black Death was a once-a-generation phenomenon. I remember my grandmother telling me how she, as a little girl in Coney Island, remembered seeing the herses every day going down Surf Avenue during the 1918 pandemic. We have gone through these things, obviously, in the past. Cities are not going anywhere. New York is not going anywhere. But Kotkin argues that what's changed is that ever-improving communications technology has made all kinds of remote work possible. People are moving to, generally speaking, less expensive, very often smaller cities. In terms of broad historical trends, urbanization has increased over the past 200 years, with the percentage of world population living in urban areas rising from 2% to 50%. More recently, mega cities like New York have experienced significantly slower growth than small and mid-sized urban areas. The total world population of small urban areas with populations less than 500,000 people is three times that of mega cities, with the median urban resident living in an urban area with a population of 650,000. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 92% of population growth within metropolitan areas has been in the suburbs and ex-urbs from 2010 to 2018. Only New York has bucked that trend with rising density over that period. But Kotkin says New York is an immune. What the pandemic may do, they may just accelerate some of this. I think they're going to be people who are going to have that memory of, God, I was living in the studio apartment in Manhattan when this happened. I was essentially in lockdown, which felt like a prison cell. That's probably not going to leave a greater impression. Between 2005 and 2017, remote work increased by about 159% according to one study, with about 5% of Americans working from home according to census data. Kotkin predicts remote working trends will continue to push more and more Americans out of big city centers. Again, what makes a pandemic important is that the demographic and economic trends were already running in the wrong direction. Like if you take a look at business service and high tech employment, New York, LA, Chicago, basically lagging way behind the rest of the country. Finance jobs have been leaving New York for the last 20 years. But Florida points out that venture capital is still concentrated in the Bay Area and New York. He predicts that the coronavirus pandemic will lead to more geographic concentration. So at the same time that you're having people leave, San Francisco's share of the tech industry, the Bay Area is increasing. New York's share of finance industry is increasing. LA is still a center of movie making and the creative industry broadly. And so I think with restrictions on air travel, the fact that it's harder to drop in and out of those places will cause a stop or further concentration. But Florida agrees with Kotkin that the growth of remote work will also continue to drive the growth of smaller cities in the American heartland. He points to a Kaiser Family Foundation project called Tulsa Remote, which pays tech workers a $10,000 stipend to move to Tulsa and work from home. They got tens of thousands of applications from people from San Francisco and New York and LA. And when I go to Tulsa, the people I meet are people from New York, from Chicago, from San Francisco, from LA. And so I think there is a possibility for some of these second and third tier communities, instead of trying to build a mini Silicon Valley, to literally say we're going to be a connected hub of remote workers to an incumbent economic center. And I think that can work. Despite his provocative headline, Kotkin isn't predicting New York's demise. Rather, he foresees a continued hollowing out of its middle class with future population growth coming from young single workers, immigrants and the ultra wealthy. It's probably at this stage almost impossible to see a return of middle class families to cities. Not necessarily because of housing stock or even prices is the kind of governments that are being elected. That's something that people almost completely ignore. When you have governments that basically think that homeless people can pitch tents anywhere they want, that's okay. When they can shoot up in public and all that, governments that are in many ways very anti-business, it's going to have an effect. And the problem is, as the middle class has declined in these cities, the politics have gotten crazier and crazier. Here I am a person of the left. But when you look at the dialogue popping from parts of the urban left, you just say, it's ludicrous. It has nothing to do with solving the problems of our cities. So that's where you could get a very broad coalition. If you're going to save the cities, you're going to have to take some pretty strong steps, which I think the current mayors are probably reluctant to do. The city has enormous appeal, but it's going to have to deal with the crime problem, with the homeless problem, with the education problem. Or else what it will do is it will move increasingly to a great place to be if you're rich, a great place to be if you're single and 25, and crappy for everyone else. That doesn't work long term for New York. There's going to be a premium now on no bullshit, no ideology. Can you make my city safe or suburb safe and secure? So the city is going to have time to really think about how to become a more affordable city, a more holistic city, a better city, to be 100% honest of any city in the world that you could point to over the course of the next two decades. New York has the brightest future. It still has the brightest future, but it's going to have a tough period of short to medium term adjustment to get there.