NEW YORK, NY March 26 (DPI) – Manhattan is one of most dense urban areas in the world – nearly 70,000 per square mile – and a NYT columnist offered that such population mass was the source of “resiliency” in the face of the pandemic.

Readers, though, were largely dismissive of Emily Badger’s promotion of the virtues of urban areas during this crisis. In a economics column this week, Badger suggests that places like New York City had the resources and benefits to withstand the effects of this unfolding crisis. “This sounds like it was written by an urban planner with a bias toward density,” whote one poster whose comment was among the most popular. “The facts do not support the hypothesis.”

Quite apart from the argument that city centers can handle a pandemic, readers were also skeptical of the notion that density had much to do with the response to the pandemic. Many cited highly dense centers like Tokyo and Singapore as examples of places that have effectively managed the pandemic.

Then readers focused on an unrelated point – affordable housing – and one comment about that became the most popular:

Density allows for affordable housing? You are definitely not talking about NYC.

Other most popular comments:

Tokyo has higher density than New York City, but very few Covid-19 cases. There must be other factors of equal or greater consequence.

Have to very disagree: In major disasters, highly dense places like NYC are certainly not where one wants to be. The longer power outages in NYC were a disaster: major food problems after 3 days. No power in the buildings meant dark hi-rises — quite dangerous without a working flashlight. No power means no commuting and dead cellphones. Then the cellphone towers stopped working because no power. All of this in three days! We know this because it happened several times in the 90s and 2000s. NYC is Very Vulnerable when something major happens to its power grid. Please dont suggest otherwise: major disinformation.

What a ridiculous statement. It is mans spectacular growth in numbers that has devastated the planet and lead to things like global pandemics. Want to see the real pandemic killer? Try breathing the air in these putrid mega cities we have created. The air will kill far more people this year in these cities than any virus. As long as we continue to ignore and pretend that our toxic civilization has any upside besides profits for a few, we will continue to slide toward oblivion and bring much of life on the planet with us.

This lost me at “bike share.” Really? Even before this pandemic, the tech-, share-, and density-utopians had worn thin. The noise, the grime, the garbage, and the exorbitantly priced broom closets will remain, and will remain unappealing, no matter how much they are glossed over in blue sky dreams. Dreams, by the way, that can flourish only in a culture with no living memory of small pox outbreaks, polio disabilities, and typhoid. We have fetishized the importance of barsnrestaurants perhaps a little too much.

I’m not sure the “density” argument makes sense. So all of the Americans that moved to the suburbs we’re actually lowering their standard of living or any other standard. They were all dumb? I live in suburban Indianapolis after living in NYC. The quality of life by almost every measure is higher here. Try it sometime.