Americans aren't mixing with people in different income brackets or leaving their neighborhoods as much as they did before the pandemic
Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
- Americans are mixing with each other and exploring the cities they live in less frequently, a new study found.
- Researchers at MIT studied the movements of people in Dallas, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
- They found that Americans' behavior has significantly shifted since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Americans are mixing with each other and exploring the cities they live in less frequently since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a recent study.
The researchers tracked cellphone data of more than one million people in Boston, Dallas, Seattle, and Los Angeles between January 2019 and December 2021 and found that people were much less likely to visit neighborhoods where residents make significantly more or less money than they do.
These interactions between people with different socio-economic backgrounds dropped by up to 30%.
Once the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, people became much less likely to explore new places — a trend continued through the end of 2021. The study's authors chalked this up to behavior change — including remote work and online shopping — prompted or exacerbated by the pandemic.
"Income diversity of urban encounters decreased during the pandemic, and not just in the lockdown stages," Takahiro Yabe, a study co-author and postdoc at the MIT Media Lab, said in a statement. "It decreased in the long term as well, after mobility patterns recovered."
The study tracked visits to 433,000 "point of interest" locations, including museums, parks, coffee shops, and grocery stores. And the researchers used Census data to categorize people in four income brackets based on the average income of the census block they lived in.
Los Angeles saw the largest drop in diverse interactions, while Dallas, where pandemic restrictions were the least severe, saw the smallest change.
The study's authors told Bloomberg's CityLab that they hope cities will use their research to inform policy interventions to reduce segregation.
"Maybe after we realize what is happening to the diversity in our cities, we will see major changes in urban interventions, transportation, developments to alleviate this problem," Esteban Moro, a co-author of the study and a researcher at MIT's Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, told CityLab. "But it is going to take much more time than three years."
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