- A new study says Americans are mixing with each other and exploring their cities less frequently.
- Researchers at MIT studied the movements of people in Dallas, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
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 reported in a recent study.
The researchers tracked the cellphone data of more than one million people in Boston, Dallas, Seattle, and Los Angeles from January 2019 to December 2021. They said that people were much less likely to visit neighborhoods where residents make significantly more or less money than they did.
These interactions between people of different socioeconomic 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 that continued through the end of 2021. The study's authors chalked this up to behavior change — including remote work and online shopping — which was 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 coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral associate 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. The researchers used Census data to categorize people into four income brackets based on their average income in the census block.
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 hoped cities would use their research to inform policy interventions and 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 coauthor 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."
Story originally published in May 2023.