New York City Reopening Splits Along Lines of Wealth and Race

By Andre Tartar, Jason Kao, Paul Murray, Jeremy C.F. Lin, Elena Popina and Eugene Reznik

July 24, 2020, 5:00 AM EDT

Once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., New York City has been attempting a gradual return to normal. But six weeks and four phases of reopening since the lockdown lifted, the city remains a profoundly changed place. Activity is picking back up in parts of the city, but New York’s reopening is taking shape differently across boroughs—driven largely by income and race.

2019

2020

Manhattan

Bronx

Queens

Brooklyn

Staten Island

Mobile-phone location data shows how dramatically travel between neighborhoods changed in a locked down New York from the same time last year. When the state’s shelter-in-place order went into effect on March 20, most movement in America’s economic center and its most populous city came to a halt.

Manhattan’s usually overwhelming magnetic pull, funnelling in millions of commuters, shoppers and tourists from surrounding areas, was replaced by a new reality where most people kept to their corners of the city.

As the city began to reopen in June, pockets of the city flickered back to life. By mid-July, travel citywide was still down 63% from the same time last year. But within Manhattan, where many office buildings sit largely empty, it was down 73%, while trips to the island were down 90%.

Note: Each dot represents 50 devices traveling between neighborhoods.

Underlying this portrait of a city emerging from lockdown is a stark class- and race-based disparity in the speed of the city’s reopening. Bloomberg News analyzed anonymized location data for hundreds of thousands of mobile phones provided by SafeGraph, as well as subway ridership data. Low-income, Black and Hispanic communities outside of Manhattan were less able to stay at home and saw movement rebound weeks ahead of high-income communities.

Change in Movement Since February, by Income Group

Change in Movement Since February, by Plurality Race/Ethnicity

Note: Income and demographic data derived from the Census Block Group level.

“It’s very clear that social distancing is a privilege that not everyone can afford,” said Christina Plerhoples Stacy, an economist at the Urban Institute. “Poverty leads to the inability to distance yourself from others and the inability to really keep yourself healthy.”

Bustling Main Street in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York, on Monday, June 29, 2020. Video: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg

Several researchers who reviewed the Bloomberg News analysis saw parallels to recent studies showing how workers in lower-income, Black and Hispanic communities were more likely to be adversely affected by the pandemic. Many work in lower-paid, service jobs most impacted by the shutdown and had fewer resources or savings to cushion the blow, leading to greater family food insecurity. Those still working were less likely to be able to do so from home. Unable to stay home, Black, Hispanic and low-income Americans have been at an increased risk of exposure to the virus.

“It creates this disease cycle where you’re not allowed to avoid the disease. You end up going to a job and bringing that disease into your community,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“It’s easy for a lot of upper-income people to be able to continue doing their job while staying at home, whereas for people in lower-income brackets—which disproportionately is going to include communities of color, younger people, women—they are not afforded the opportunity to do their job at home,” said Hudak.

The inability to work remotely, whether by essential workers or those people employed in the construction and service jobs included in the early phases of the city’s reopening plan, is likely why subway ridership fell significantly less in lower-income neighborhoods. (Neighborhoods with larger non-White populations were also relatively more reliant on the subway.) A recent study of Seattle’s public transit system during the crisis, which also used SafeGraph data for its analysis, found that the primary reason for ridership differences between groups was the continued need of lower-income and less-educated people to commute to in-person jobs.

Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority and U.S. Census Bureau
Note: Data compares total entries from June 30-July 06, 2019 to June 28-July 04, 2020.

Meanwhile, many residents of wealthier neighborhoods not only transitioned to online work, but also had greater financial means to stock up for weeks-long periods at a time, or to have supplies delivered to their front doors. Some even escaped to second homes or Airbnbs outside the city to avoid the spread of Covid-19, which has now infected more people in New York City than any state except California, Florida and Texas.

In parts of the city that are historically segregated by income and race, the mobility gap can be found mere blocks apart. For instance, the Queensbridge Houses public housing complex, which is in one of the poorest areas of the city, is considerably farther along the path back to normal than the high-rise clusters of the nearby Long Island City waterfront, with its wealthier White and Asian populations.

“A lot of people in Queensbridge Houses live hand-to-mouth,” said Florence Koulouris, district manager of Queens Community Board 1, which includes the public housing complex. These are people that “need to go out more often and buy food three times a week, four times a week.”

Some Queensbridge Houses residents are workers at a nearby Mount Sinai hospital, while others “work for the City of New York, they work for the MTA,” the city’s transit agency, Koulouris said. “They’re first responders. They’re a community of volunteers. A lot of people are on the front lines. They’re moving a lot because they have to help other people or volunteer through organizations like Mutual Aid Society or Food Pantry.”

Movement around the Queensbridge Houses public housing complex, home to many essential and frontline workers, was considerably farther along the path back to normal than the wealthier areas mere blocks away, on July 22, 2020. Video: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg

A few miles south in Brooklyn’s majority-Black neighborhoods of Brownsville, where public housing represents one in four rental units, and Crown Heights North, movement was 10% and 19% below pre-shutdown levels, respectively. In Prospect Heights to the west, where median household incomes are two to five times higher, movement was down 25%.

The recovery in foot traffic to local businesses has followed a similarly divergent trajectory for these neighborhoods, according to the SafeGraph data.

The main commercial streets of Crown Heights North—Utica and Nostrand Avenues—are dotted with relatively cheap take-out eateries and dollar shops, among other businesses, that have been in high demand as the city reopens, said James Ellis, who works in the neighborhood as second vice chair of Brooklyn’s Community Board 8. In comparison, Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, which he walks through to get to work, features more expensive restaurants that haven’t fared so well under the city’s continued prohibitions against indoor dining.

“These places cater to people of a specific socioeconomic income. A lot of them are now gone,” Ellis said. “People in Prospect Heights specifically are often wealthier and more likely to have either summer homes or summer rentals or families with second homes. My assumption would be that people with lower income probably don’t have the ability to leave home.”

In Harlem, some fast-gentrifying parts of this historically Black and Hispanic corner of Manhattan reveal how mobility patterns differed as the reopening wore on.

How far and freely New Yorkers move around has enormous implications not only for the city’s susceptibility to a second coronavirus wave but also for the city’s $1 trillion economy. Businesses located in richer neighborhoods and frequented by residents of those same neighborhoods are generally experiencing a slower recovery in foot traffic.

A prime example is the West Village in Manhattan—85% White with a median household income of more than $133,000—where foot traffic to local brick-and-mortar merchants is still down 78% from 2019 levels. “There are no tourists,” Bob Gormley, district manager of Manhattan’s Community Board 2 said, and “tourists make up a huge part of foot traffic in the area.”

In the city’s main business districts, places such as the Financial District or the new Hudson Yards development, foot traffic is also at near-zero levels. And likely to stay that way until large corporate tenants decide it’s safe to send their office workers back to work en masse, rather than the small numbers only now beginning to return to spaced-out offices with frequent hand sanitizer stations.

“In the short term, we would need a miracle. I don’t know what that miracle looks like,” James Famularo, president of Meridian Retail Leasing, said by phone. “Historically the most activity has been in commercial corridors like Times Square, now it’s the opposite—nobody wants to go to those areas.”

Foot traffic on Wall Street in New York’s Financial District remained low on Wednesday, July 1, 2020. Video: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg

On the other end of the spectrum is the Hammels-Arverne-Edgemere section of the coastal Rockaways in Queens—68% non-White with a median household income of around $42,000—where business foot traffic is back to 97% of normal activity. “In Edgemere, there are a lot of essential workers—people work in hospitals, emergency rooms, construction, utilities. They are apt to move around more,” said Binky Glennon, community board assistant at Queens Community Board 14.

Source: SafeGraph and U.S. Census Bureau
Note: Data compares change in average daily total foot traffic to commercial or public establishments from July 15-21, 2019 to July 13-19, 2020.

Manhattan’s normally bustling retail and dining scenes have been eclipsed by both Brooklyn and Queens in terms of overall foot traffic and by Queens based on the number of credit card transactions and total revenue at restaurants, according to data provided by small business data firm Womply.

While the return to normal, or a new normal, for New York City’s residents and businesses clearly remains a ways off—waiting, perhaps, for an eventual vaccine—the first six weeks of the reopening have clearly shown that not all are navigating it similarly. The greater movement and foot traffic in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color may well be partly due to a greater readiness to return to routine, but more likely speaks to the harsh realities of necessity.

“I think this is just exacerbating a lot of the inequalities and inequities we had prior to the pandemic,” said Stacy, of the Urban Institute. “The disproportionate negative effects on communities of color and lower-income communities is going to be felt for a long time.”

Methodology

The mobile-phone device location data analyzed, visualized and reported out for this story was provided by SafeGraph.

SafeGraph, through its data licensing partner Veraset, aggregates data from approximately 10% of devices in the U.S. Since not everyone has a smartphone, the data is not a perfect representative subset of the population and has been adjusted for sampling bias as well as for daily fluctuations in the number of devices detected. Additional factors impacting the data’s accuracy include changes in the panel makeup linked to the underlying apps, signal drift and, especially in urban environments, complicated or dense structures that limit the ability to track foot traffic, according to SafeGraph spokesperson Nick Singh.

Despite its inherent limitations, the granularity of SafeGraph’s mobile-phone location data and lower lag time relative to more traditional socioeconomic indicators make it a powerful tool to understand peoples’ movements and foot traffic to businesses during this once-in-a-generation global health pandemic.

Each dot and line in the animated map comparing 2020 New York City travel to the same period last year represents 50 devices traveling between neighborhood tabulation areas (NTA) within a one-week time span. Connections between neighborhoods are not shown if fewer than 50 devices moved between them within a given week.

Change in movement refers to the percent difference in average distance travelled compared to February 2020. Distance travelled is calculated based on devices’ home Census Block Groups relative to other Census Block Groups where they were detected on a given day, limited to the five New York City counties; if a single device was detected in multiple areas, those were logged separately. A device’s home is defined as its common nighttime location, within a 2,500 square-foot area, over a six-week period.

Foot traffic by neighborhood is the total for all available locations in the SafeGraph Places universe, which is mostly commercial establishments but does include a relatively small number of other types of places, such as churches and parks.

Change in movement and foot traffic use a seven-day moving average to control for weekday-vs.-weekend dynamics.

The median household income for each NTA was calculated using a pareto formula based on the raw counts of households per income bracket for the NTA’s subsidiary Census tracts.

Editors: Yue Qiu, Alex Tribou

New York City Reopening Splits Along Lines of Wealth and Race

Change in Movement Since February, by Income Group

Change in Movement Since February, by Plurality Race/Ethnicity

Subway Ridership Is Down Most in Wealthy Manhattan

Foot Traffic Has Recovered Fastest in Lower and Middle-Income Neighborhoods