Neighborhood Isolation during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Thomas Marlow,Bruno Abrahao,Kinga Makovi

doi:10.15195/v8.a9

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily mobility, which could contribute to greater social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cell phone movement data from 2019 and 2020, we use two indices proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019) to measure mobility inequality between census tracts in the 25 largest U.S. cities. These measures capture the importance of hubs and neighborhood isolation in a network. In the earliest phases of the pandemic, neighborhood isolation rapidly increased, and the importance of downtown central business districts declined. Mobility hubs generally regained their importance, whereas neighborhood isolation remained elevated and increased again during the latter half of 2020. Linear regression models with city and week fixed effects find that new COVID-19 cases are positively associated with neighborhood isolation changes a week later. Additionally, places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily mobility, which could contribute to greater social stratification
We find that in 2019 both concentrated mobility index (CMI) and equitable mobility index (EMI) are stable across all cities
Using two mobility inequality measures we find evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic induced changes in mobility inequality in 2020 in the 25 largest cities in the United States

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily mobility, which could contribute to greater social stratification. With the growth of large data sets that allow researchers to track the movement of millions of individuals, a growing body of sociological research focuses on developing theory and methods to understand the forms and consequences of everyday mobility (Browning, Pinchak, and Calder 2021; Cagney et al 2020; Levy, Phillips, and Sampson 2020; Prestby et al 2020; Phillips et al 2019; Wang et al 2018) In this line of work mobility refers to the aggregate daily patterns of travel between neighborhoods. In a simulation of COVID-19 spread in 10 U.S cities using observed mobility networks, Chang and colleagues (2021) found that the predicted outcomes reflected observed inequalities in case rates between racial and ethnic groups

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