There is a lot to mourn right now. Many thousands of people all over the world are mourning dead loved ones. People are mourning lost jobs, lost savings, lost security. Senior citizens in locked-down nursing homes are mourning the loss of visitors. I’m lucky; I’m just mourning the city.
To live in a city like New York, where I’ve spent most of my adult life, is to trade private space for public space. It’s to depend on interdependence. I don’t have a dining room, but I’ve been able to eat in thousands of restaurants. I have no storage space, but everything I needed was at the bodega. I don’t have a home office, but I could work at coffee shops.
Now those supports are gone. The coronavirus disaster is going to devastate communities all over the country, even if many in red America don’t realize it yet. But it poses particular challenges for urbanites, and not just because the disease spreads more easily where people are packed close together.
Historically, cities have made it easier for people to live alone without experiencing constant loneliness.
“For single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure,” my friend Rebecca Traister wrote in her book “All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.” “The city itself becomes a kind of partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men.”
In times of stress in New York — Sept. 11, the 2003 blackout, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — people gather for comfort and mutual assistance. When Donald Trump was elected and many New Yorkers felt the ground beneath their feet crumbling, they rushed to mass meetings.
Now the ground beneath our feet is crumbling again, but many of us are stuck in at least semi-isolation. Togetherness, once a balm, has become a threat. This mass withdrawal is like social chemotherapy, damaging the fabric of our communal life while trying to save it.
Social distancing is brutal for everyone, but it’s a particular difficulty for people in cities, especially those who live alone and those packed into tiny spaces. Steven Taylor, a University of British Columbia professor and author of “The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease,” told me that some people quarantined during the SARS epidemic developed post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Self-isolation is like a milder version of quarantine,” he said.
And where you’re isolated matters.
“It’s going to be a fundamentally different experience if you’re able to stroll around your 10-acre farm and pick the produce you’ve been growing,” Taylor said, than if you’re “living in a one-bedroom apartment with your three roommates.”
When this emergency is over, people are likely to emerge into fundamentally changed cities, with economies in crisis, and beloved restaurants, businesses and cultural institutions gone for good.
“We all need to be worried about the corner diner and the new coffee shop and the bodega and the small nonprofit organizations,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University and author of “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.” “There’s just countless operations that are vulnerable right now because everyone is pulling in.”
New York City is launching a loan program for small businesses, and hopefully state and federal governments will follow with more substantial rescue packages. But Gregg Bishop, commissioner of the New York City Department of Small Business Services, told me, “There’s probably going to be some businesses that may not be able to recover from this.”
I wonder if our cultural romance with urban living will recover either. In recent decades, millennials, who tend to be more averse to suburbia than their parents and grandparents, have helped fuel an urban resurgence. If the shock of the coronavirus is devastating enough, that could change, as more people seek their own personal bunkers.
“We have lots of previous historical experiences that generated new anxiety about the city and pushed people out into the suburbs,” Klinenberg said. “There was a post-World War II anxiety about nuclear war that gave some people the fantasy that the suburb would be a safer place. Before that there were anxieties about infectious diseases, or public health hazards like cholera, that pushed people out of the city as well.”
Klinenberg is far from convinced that this will happen again.
“What I hope for is that this rising generation learns to appreciate just how deeply connected we are to each other, just how valuable it is to invest in public goods, and how precious and important shared experiences in public spaces are,” he said.
I hope so too. Maybe when this ends, people will pour into the restaurants and bars like a war’s been won, and cities will flourish as people rush to rebuild their ruined social architecture. But for now it’s chilling to witness an entire way of life coming to a sudden horrible halt. So many of the pleasures and conveniences that make dwelling in cramped quarters worth it, for those privileged enough to choose city life, have disappeared. Even if they all come back, we’ll always know they’re not permanent.
Michelle Goldberg
Michelle Goldberg is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.
