On the Mark: Jury out on how pandemic shapes us

Since the coronavirus emerged, we've become acutely aware of our own social spaces - where we live, how close or far our families and neighbors are, how we move across local and regional space, the venues we visit and their features. Whether we live in dense urban, suburban, small-town or rural locales, we're learning how remarkably sociable are our day-to-day pathways. And how isolated we can feel when honoring stay-at-home and distancing strictures.

On the internet, a broad and international community of urban planners are engaged in a lively debate about how COVID-19 may change our future living and working patterns. Some are arguing that the virus will induce more people to permanently work from home. That it may increase demand for quiet housing spaces convertible into offices, home-based gyms and mud rooms, permissiveness for retail sales from home-based businesses, broadened residential streets with loading zones for home delivery trucks, and demand for more high-speed broadband infrastructure. Some argue that the virus will accelerate urban decentralization and undermine community life.

I disagree with these predictions. Yes, from the late 19th century on, people, mainly the well off, began to move their residences away from industrializing city centers. Sam Bass Warner's book "Streetcar Suburbs" chronicles this dispersion for Boston. He demonstrates how suburbanizing residents created their own local governments, a kind of income and wealth pooling that afforded them better schools, parks and amenities without having to support lower-income folks or the cultural and recreational offerings of central cities. These patterns continued well into the early decade of this century.

Yet in recent decades, many metropolitan residents are less willing to live far from their jobs, even with more high-speed freeways, and a wholesale flight of large-scale employers to suburban office parks has not materialized. The rise of the two-parent working family has accelerated this trend. Empty-nesting older people have abandoned their remote suburban homes to live downtown where they can walk to health care, cultural opportunities, parks, and grocery stores. In response to growing gentrification, many city governments are permitting greater housing density and rethinking single-family zoning.

In another sociable trend, urbanites of all ages are engaging in co-housing, where homeowners and renters are reconfiguring existing single-family housing units into shared neighborhood space. Minneapolis is debating an ordinance allowing this, and a co-housing project is in progress on Monterey Avenue in St. Louis Park (mn.cohousing.org). In Minneapolis and elsewhere in the metro, there is a movement to allow and build tiny houses to house the homeless. See http://www.tccoho.org.

This debate and counterexamples remind me of architect and urban designer Dolores Hayden's wonderful forward-looking plans. In her first book, she chronicles the shared housing experiments led by women in American cities ("The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities," MIT Press, 1981). Her subsequent book proposes reshaping suburbia by sharing facilities among homes on single-family blocks. She proposes converting one family's garage into a laundromat, another to a community kitchen, and so on, to both lighten women's household loads and create more sociability ("Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life," W.W. Norton, 1984, rev. ed. 2002).

There may well be more virtual and at-home working, a trend the internet makes possible. Of course, women and now increasingly men also devote many hours a week to housework and childrearing. Some can and will do more, and their employers and customers may find advantages as well as disadvantages to such arrangements. It will be an interesting phenomenon to watch. Many people like to work with others face-to-face: co-workers, trainees, bosses, customers, clients, funders. I recently wrote a piece on the quality of work for a special issue on the future of work (psmag.com/economics/the-future-of-work-exploring-the-quality-of-work). I argue that face-to-face human interactions and teamwork are desirable for most workers.

My prediction for COVID-19: Don't expect the current epidemic to intensify the dispersion of urban residences to further-out precincts. Yes, our interdependency and proximity render us vulnerable to pandemics. But they also show us how much we need social interaction. I'm imagining many people joyfully returning to their churches, gyms, coffee shops, favorite stores, theaters, galleries, and parks. We'll see.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.