Will Richer People Further Increase their Social Distancing in Post COVID-19 Urban Life?

Many urban scholars have noted that richer people tend to suburbanize.  Bob Margo’s 1992 paper makes this point in a straightforward way.    The usual explanations focus on the demand for newer, larger homes and fears of center city taxes and center city quality of life challenges (crime and pollution). 

In recent years as crime has fallen in many center cities and with the rise in the sharing App economy, consumer center city living has boomed.  Will a loss of trust in the post COVID-19 era, increase the demand for low density living again?

When one gets on a public transit bus, or sends a kid to a public school, or gets in an Uber; you are implicitly trusting a number of strangers.  In these examples, these strangers include;  the other people on the bus, the network of connections to the other kids at the public school and the people who have previously taken a ride in your Uber.   During ordinary times, these webs of people offer economies of scale such that you face a lower price for using the service as you share it with them.

While such economies of scale are usually a good thing, in the contagion world of COVID-19 these social interactions expose you and your family to more disease risk (assuming there isn’t a perfect vaccine).

Given that our willingness to pay to avoid mortality risk is sharply increasing with respect to income, richer people will take many more precautions to self protect and this includes a likely “suburbanization”. 

If public health officials have trouble screening people (so we know that we do not know who is contagious) and we do not have a cheap and available and effective vaccine,  how much face to face interaction between people of different income groups will occur?  Will richer people engage in quiet strategies to minimize their interactions with other groups who on average face higher contagion risk because of their more limited resources?  Such statistical discrimination is a rational strategy if the sole goal of the wealthy is to survive and protect their families. 

For research urban economists a question;  has anyone written a paper on what Tiebout migration equilibria look like where the local amenity level (proxied for by disease risk) is a decreasing function of average income of the local residents?