Coronavirus offers opportunity to rethink urban design in Modesto and beyond
.jpg "Little traffic is seen during the evening commute on the Golden Gate Bridge Friday, March 27, 2020, in San Francisco. The surge of coronavirus cases in California that health officials have warned was coming has arrived and will worsen, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday, while the mayor of Los Angeles warned that by early next week his city could see the kind of crush that has crippled New York.(AP Photo/Eric Risberg)")
People aren’t dying from COVID-19 because they live close to each other.
They’re dying — although fewer here in Stanislaus County compared to many other places, thankfully — after becoming ill from breathing the same air as an infected person, or touching some infected surface.
It’s not the same thing.
I blame no one if they haven’t kept up with a raging debate over housing density and the coronavirus. Planning policy, I learned years ago as a growth and transportation reporter, is not a terribly sexy topic.
But it’s a super important one, if we want to avoid the mistakes of sprawl: dirtier air, more traffic and dwindling land for growing food, all things supremely affecting our quality of life.
Since the pandemic exploded, planning experts have been wringing their hands over a seemingly logical connection between the higher densities they’d been advocating and actual urban centers decimated by illness.
The United States’ densest metropolis, after all — New York City — produced the nation’s worst coronavirus nightmare. Also infamous for COVID calamities are prisons and nursing homes where people are virtually stacked upon one another; they include our own Turlock Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, with an abysmal nine deaths and 131 patients and staff testing positive for the virus.
Planners fear COVID-19 will hurt mission
Planners fear that associating high death tolls with high-density living will hurt their mission to grow up instead of out, and to build near transit hubs so people can walk to catch a train or a bus instead of driving solo to work.
It’s been a hard sell here in the Valley, where the housing market has been dominated by traditional low-density houses.
Elected officials here a few years ago passed up chances to chart a bold course with regional planning policies calling for significantly higher densities, specifically with the Blueprint effort in 2009, and again in 2013 with Valley Vision Stanislaus. In part, they were not convinced that developers would sacrifice the higher profits brought by larger, more expensive homes.
Across California, forward thinkers continued pushing higher densities and transit-oriented developments as an answer to the state’s worsening housing shortage. Townhomes, condominiums and apartments would have greater demand, they reasoned, as numbers of Latinos and millennials — both more likely to choose urban living than white baby boomers — enter the home-buying market.
Then came the coronavirus, and with it the appearance of danger in close-quarter living.
“The data imply that we shouldn’t be eagerly pushing Californians to live in high-density housing, give up their cars and ride transit,” concluded CalMatters’ Dan Walters, whose fine columns often appear on The Modesto Bee’s opinion page.
This time, he’s wrong.
First, we’re not going to fix the housing crisis by building tons more sprawling subdivisions of single-family detached houses.
Second, people aren’t condemned to illness or death just because they live close to others.
Impact on SF mild by comparison
Consider that San Francisco has the nation’s second-highest density for big cities, yet has suffered far fewer COVID-19 rates than New York City, by any measure. This has nothing to do with density and everything to do with leaders getting out in front of the curve with distancing and stay-home protocols.
Urban planners should stop despairing and begin laying plans for how to keep people safe who don’t have the luxury of living miles apart. This means emphasizing separate, self-contained air-flow systems within buildings — including elder care homes and prisons. It means designing housing with a premium on frequent cleaning and maintenance, with wider sidewalks outside. It means more sneeze guards, and layouts with more spacing for public seating, standing and walking.
“Cities are places where innovation has come about,” said Bill Fulton, director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, in a telephone conversation. For example, New York architects battled cholera in the 19th century by introducing more light and air in tenement design, he noted.
“I understand the argument, but (the coronavirus) is not only about urban density,” Fulton said. “There can be a lot of design solutions here.”
