The Big Covid-19 Suburban Head-Fake

During the months of the Covid-19 lockdowns, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers fled the city, some for second homes in the country and some to resettle in the suburbs. The flight began in March and April, and got turbocharged after Memorial Day with the riots and looting that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. City life had practically overnight become a low-value deal: no more restaurants, stores vandalized, museums and theaters shuttered. All the amenity trade-offs for cramming your family into a 900-square-foot apartment were gone. Plus, there was Mayor Bill de Blasio wrecking the police force and what little remained of a viable school system. Moving to the suburbs seemed like a no-brainer.

Yes, that’s exactly what it was, because the people fleeing into the suburbs were not thinking through the quandaries of American life and where they are taking us. The suburbs will turn out to be a bad choice. The middle class is sinking economically now; it has been since well before Covid-19 came on the scene, actually. The newcomers fleeing the city with hedge fund money might be flush for now, but most everybody else is struggling—including many people already out there in suburbia—and with that goes the mojo to pay for suburban living—everything from covering the monthly mortgages to towns collecting enough revenue to pay for their extravagant centralized school systems, far-flung electric, water, and sewer infrastructures, vast road networks, and lumbering bureaucracies.