COVID-19 and Cities

Fields became Houston’s first chief transportation planner in January 2020, when the city was working to develop a new vision for an improved I-45 rebuild to send to the Texas Department of Transportation — and right about when many of the region’s other transportation plans and patterns were altered by orders to stay home to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Throughout the economic shutdown and state- and county-mandated stay-at-home periods, bike sales skyrocketed and VMT — vehicle miles traveled — plummeted. (VMT measures the amount of travel for all vehicles in a geographic region during a certain period.)

Whether I’m looking at the question of why it has always been hard to be a working parent in the United States as a mother with two children under 7, or as a scholar of child and family policy, one reason stands out.

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, when New York was the epicenter of the crisis, many made assumptions about the dangers of dense urban areas. Density, they insisted, was the reason New York was devastated by COVID-19 while other parts of the country, including big cities, were faring much better. Sprawl, some contended, was helping to shield the populations of cities like Houston, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

On Thursday, the Labor Department reported some 117,000 people in Texas applied for unemployment benefits last week — an increase of almost 21.5% from the previous week’s roughly 96,500 new applications. Across the nation, nearly 2.4 million people applied for state and federal unemployment benefits.

This month, the Kinder Institute unveiled its 2020 State of Housing in Houston and Harris County report. This inaugural report chronicles housing needs and affordability challenges, and takes stock of the existing housing supply — all of which are likely to be impacted in the coming months by the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil bust.

Editor’s note: Houston and Harris County are being hit hard by the dual challenges of COVID-19 and a slowing energy sector. To track their long-term impacts and understand how the region’s housing system is changing over time, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research has published “The 2020 State of Housing in Harris County and Houston” report.

States such as Texas, Florida and Arizona are seeing the progress made in recent months against COVID-19 quickly disappear as infections and hospitalizations increase dramatically. These and other sales-tax-dependent Sun Belt states have been slammed with revenue losses as consumer spending fell dramatically after the shutdowns. As new cases spike in states across the region — many of which were among the nation’s first to begin reopening — it’s not certain how their economies may be further impacted.