
The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City - johnny313
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/upshot/who-left-new-york-coronavirus.html
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OrangeMango
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_York_City)

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wonderwonder
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.

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

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

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tzs
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.

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partisan
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.

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curiousllama
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.

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dantheman
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.

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dicknuckle
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.

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pradn
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.

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threatofrain
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.

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olalonde
This map looks suspiciously like a population density map.

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Eric_WVGG
Well here’s a real density map [https://www.city-
data.com/forum/attachments/general-u-s/6696...](https://www.city-
data.com/forum/attachments/general-u-s/66962d1282079356-what-denses-
neighborhood-your-city-nyc-blockgroup.jpg)

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

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npongratz
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.

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karatestomp
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.

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

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danharaj
What exactly are you insinuating?

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greatwhitenorth
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?

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cribbles
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.

