scholarly journals Spatiotemporal Patterns of Human Mobility and Its Association with Land Use Types during COVID-19 in New York City

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 344
Author(s):  
Yuqin Jiang ◽  
Xiao Huang ◽  
Zhenlong Li

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every facet of society. One of the non-pharmacological measures to contain the COVID-19 infection is social distancing. Federal, state, and local governments have placed multiple executive orders for human mobility reduction to slow down the spread of COVID-19. This paper uses geotagged tweets data to reveal the spatiotemporal human mobility patterns during this COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. With New York City open data, human mobility pattern changes were detected by different categories of land use, including residential, parks, transportation facilities, and workplaces. This study further compares human mobility patterns by land use types based on an open social media platform (Twitter) and the human mobility patterns revealed by Google Community Mobility Report cell phone location, indicating that in some applications, open-access social media data can generate similar results to private data. The results of this study can be further used for human mobility analysis and the battle against COVID-19.

Author(s):  
Ian Thomas MacDonald

This chapter discusses a campaign by the New York hotel workers to ensure new hotels built in East Midtown will employ unionized labor and continue to offer decent wages and benefits. This case shows how the New York Hotel Trades Council's (HTC) intervention in East Midtown formed part of a broader campaign to block hotel development in a sector that is increasingly fragmented by service format, and most worrisome, witnessing a rapid growth of hotels providing few services and competing on price, leading to a stronger employer opposition to unionization. The outcome of this case speaks unequivocally to organized labor's strength in New York City politics and to a growing recognition in real estate and policymaking circles of labor's importance in urban land use planning.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hsu ◽  
Ting Meng ◽  
Albert Han ◽  
Daniel Suh

Buildings and energy systems are shaped within many different kinds of departments and agencies throughout local governments. This article argues that further opportunities exist to reduce the energy use of buildings and their associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the existing powers and jurisdiction of local governments. We use the example of New York City, where buildings produced 73 percent of all GHG emissions in 2014. By analyzing a data set of almost four thousand large buildings, we identify new opportunities for planners and other professionals to reduce energy use and GHG emissions by focusing on different mechanisms and/or collaborations.


SAGE Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401880921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bakry Elmedni

In the opening of the 21st century, housing affordability was described by the U.S. Congress as the most urgent issue facing America. This article provides an analysis of how feasible Mayor de Blasio’s Five Borough Ten-Year Plan will be in providing adequate affordable housing to low-income residents in New York City (NYC). It examines three main topics: (a) the Plan’s focus on using the private sector to achieve public goals and whether this is likely to come with unintended consequences such as less focus on the needy and gentrification of struggling neighborhoods, (b) the role of the nonprofit sector, which has historically been a major player in housing policies in the NYC, and (c) how much influence or control a municipal government has on economic forces to avoid negative outcomes. The analysis reveals that while providing any number of affordable units is a positive thing, it is unreasonable to assume that this intervention alone can adequately address the housing affordability crisis in NYC. This article also exposes other emerging problems as the plan is being implemented. One major concern is that through tax credits and rezoning efforts to encourage private-sector development, the Plan may wind up benefiting housing developers and gentrifiers more than actually ameliorating the housing crisis in NYC. Housing affordability is a multifaceted issue which requires a multifaceted approach from federal and state governments working in tandem with local governments.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 548-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel P Giovenco ◽  
Torra E Spillane ◽  
Christine M Mauro ◽  
Diana Hernández

BackgroundIn 2018, New York City (NYC) implemented a tobacco-free pharmacy law as part of a comprehensive policy approach to curb tobacco use. This study models the reduction in tobacco retailer density following the ban to examine differences in the policy’s impact across neighbourhoods.MethodsTobacco retailer density per 1000 residents was calculated in July 2017 for each of NYC’s Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs, n=188) before and after removing pharmacies as licensed tobacco retailers. Pearson correlations and linear regression (with predictors scaled to 10 unit increments) measured associations between the projected change in retailer density after the ban and NTA demographic characteristics.ResultsOn average, retailer density decreased by 6.8% across neighbourhoods (SD: 6.3), with 17 NTAs experiencing reductions over 15%. Density reduction was greater in NTAs with higher median household income (r: 0.41, B: 1.00, p<0.0001) and a higher proportion of non-Hispanic white residents (r: 0.35, B: 0.79, p<0.0001). NTAs with a higher percentage of adults with less than a high school education (r: −0.44, B: −2.60, p<0.0001) and a higher proportion of Hispanic residents (r: −0.36, B: −1.07, p<0.0001) benefited less from the policy. These relationships held after assessing absolute changes in density (vs per cent change).ConclusionsNYC’s tobacco-free pharmacy law substantially reduces tobacco retailer density overall, but the impact is not equal across neighbourhoods. In order to minimise disparities in the tobacco retail environment, local governments considering a similar ban should supplement this strategy with other retailer restrictions to achieve equitable outcomes.


Author(s):  
Karla Therese L. Sy ◽  
Micaela E. Martinez ◽  
Benjamin Rader ◽  
Laura F. White

Background: The United States CDC has reported that racial and ethnic disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic may in part be due to socioeconomic disadvantages that require individuals to continue to work outside their home and a lack of paid sick leave. However, data-driven analyses of the socioeconomic determinants of COVID-19 burden are still needed. Using data from New York City (NYC), we aimed to determine how socioeconomic factors impact human mobility and COVID-19 burden. Methods/Summary: New York City has a large amount of heterogeneity in socioeconomic status (SES) and demographics among neighborhoods. We used this heterogeneity to conduct a cross-sectional spatial analysis of the associations between human mobility (i.e., subway ridership), sociodemographic factors, and COVID-19 incidence as of April 26, 2020. We also conducted a secondary analysis of NYC boroughs (which are equivalent to counties in the city) to assess the relationship between the decline in subway use and the time it took for each borough to end the exponential growth period of COVID-19 cases. Findings: Areas with the lower median income, a greater percentage of individuals who identify as non-white and/or Hispanic/Latino, a greater percentage of essential workers, and a greater percentage of healthcare workers had more subway use during the pandemic. The positive associations between subway use and median income, and between subway use and percent non-white and/or Hispanic/Latino do not remain when adjusted for the percent of essential workers. This suggests essential work is what drives subway use in lower SES zip codes and communities of color. Increased subway use was associated with a higher rate of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population when adjusted for testing effort (aRR=1.11; 95% CI: 1.03 - 1.19), but this association was weaker once we adjusted for median income (aRR=1.06; 95% CI: 1.00 - 1.12). All sociodemographic variables were significantly associated with the rate of positive cases per 100,000 population when adjusting for testing effort (except percent uninsured) and adjusting for both income and testing effort. The risk factor with the strongest association with COVID-19 was the percent of individuals in essential work (aRR = 1.59, 95% CI: 1.36 - 1.86). We found that subway use declined prior to any executive order, and there was an estimated 28-day lag between the onset of reduced subway use and the end of the exponential growth period of SARS-CoV-2 within New York City boroughs. Interpretation: Our results suggest that the ability to stay home during the pandemic has been constrained by SES and work circumstances. Poorer neighborhoods are not afforded the same reductions in mobility as their richer counterparts. Furthermore, lower SES neighborhoods have higher disease burdens, which may be due to inequities in ability to shelter-in-place, and/or due to the plethora of other existing health disparities that increase vulnerability to COVID-19. Furthermore, the extended lag time between the dramatic fall in subway ridership and the end of the exponential growth phase for COVID-19 cases is important for future policy, because it demonstrates that if there is a resurgence, and stay-at-home orders are re-issued, then cities can expect to wait a month before reported cases will plateau.


2019 ◽  
pp. 729-748
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter discusses changes in American law in the twentieth century covering land use, environmental law, intellectual property, regulation of business, and business law. The twentieth century was a century of land-use controls. An important legal invention was zoning. The central idea of zoning is to divide a town or city into zones or segments and to regulate what kinds of land use are allowed in each of these segments. Some zones will be limited to one-family houses, others will be open to apartment buildings, stores and offices, and even to factories. New York City was a pioneer in the zoning movement. After the state passed an enabling act, New York City adopted the first comprehensive zoning ordinance (1916). Zoning soon spread to city after city. By 1930, it was pretty much the rule in both large and small cities and in the suburbs as well.


First Monday ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Adnan ◽  
Paul A. Longley ◽  
Shariq M. Khan

The penetration and use of social media services differs from city to city. This paper investigates the social dynamics of Twitter social media usage in three ethnically diverse cities — London, Paris, and New York City. We present a spatial analysis of Tweeting activity in the three cities, broken down by ethnicity and gender. We model the ethnic identity of Twitter users using their paired forenames and surnames. The geo–tagged Tweets provide an insight into the geography of their activity patterns across the three cities. The gender of each Twitter user is identified through classification of forenames, suggesting that, irrespective of the ethnic identity, the majority of Twitter users are male. Taken together, the results present a window on the activity patterns of different ethnic groups.


Author(s):  
Oliver Gruebner ◽  
Sarah Lowe ◽  
Martin Sykora ◽  
Ketan Shankardass ◽  
SV Subramanian ◽  
...  

Disasters have substantial consequences for population mental health. We used Twitter to (1) extract negative emotions indicating discomfort in New York City (NYC) before, during, and after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. We further aimed to (2) identify whether pre- or peri-disaster discomfort were associated with peri- or post-disaster discomfort, respectively, and to (3) assess geographic variation in discomfort across NYC census tracts over time. Our sample consisted of 1,018,140 geo-located tweets that were analyzed with an advanced sentiment analysis called ”Extracting the Meaning Of Terse Information in a Visualization of Emotion” (EMOTIVE). We calculated discomfort rates for 2137 NYC census tracts, applied spatial regimes regression to find associations of discomfort, and used Moran’s I for spatial cluster detection across NYC boroughs over time. We found increased discomfort, that is, bundled negative emotions after the storm as compared to during the storm. Furthermore, pre- and peri-disaster discomfort was positively associated with post-disaster discomfort; however, this association was different across boroughs, with significant associations only in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. In addition, rates were most prominently spatially clustered in Staten Island lasting pre- to post-disaster. This is the first study that determined significant associations of negative emotional responses found in social media posts over space and time in the context of a natural disaster, which may guide us in identifying those areas and populations mostly in need for care.


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