1. Pod schools, which parents are turning to because of the utter dysfunction of America’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, will not only exacerbate socioeconomic inequality, they will exacerbate spatial inequality, reinforcing winner take all urbanism.
2. The conventional line in the main stream media is that the Covid crisis is causing families to massively abandon cities. Almost every week we see another set of stories about rich New Yorkers fleeing to the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley.
3. Vacation getaway homes are great in the summer, but there’s a reason they are summer homes. Because they lack the social infrastructure of big cities which many of the residents depend on.
4. People mistakenly believe that the core advantage of big cities, aside from their thick labor markets, is their ability to deliver public outside the home amenities.
5. But big cities are premised upon the talent pool required to deliver all sorts of services, including a talent pool that is much more able to deliver private amenities, at far higher quality.
6. Say you want a private fitness instructor, a private yoga instructor, a chef to come by and cook you dinner, I could go on but you get the picture.
7. A big city like New York is filled with that kind of talent, that you can gain access to almost instantaneously. The pool of the talent is so deep.
8. Try doing that in the Hamptons or Hudson Valley in the fall or winter. There is a much thinner pool of talent to deliver any sort of private amenities.
9. I mentioned this to a friend the other day and he said in order to make that work you’d have to have enough money to literally afford to live on a yacht. It was an extreme comparison but it makes the point.
10. To gain access to private amenities in places like this that are more remote you would have to hire these people on a more permanent basis.
11. Now let’s come back to the example of school. It is pretty easy to set up pods school in New York City or another big city.
12. New York City and other big cities like Boston or DC or San Francisco, are filled with smart young kids from leading universities who are looking for work. These are just the kind of people who could tutor and provide education to a pod school.
13. My hunch is by early fall, certainly by winter, all those folks who went to their getaway homes and are looking to set up significant private amenities will find it much easier to do from the platform of their city apartments.
14. In fact, I am increasingly led to believe that the ability of cities to provide private amenities, not just public amenities, is likely to radically compound inequality, gentrification, and housing unaffordability.
15. Indeed the ability of cities to provide such private amenities is so sufficiently better than most other places that I would not be surprised if it began to attract people who would otherwise prefer to live in the suburbs and rule areas over time.
16. Now I could be wrong about this, but the capacity of cities to provide and deliver private amenities deserves some serious thinking about, especially so in America we are public goods are so badly broken.
