I’m amazed, and sometimes amused, at the many creative reasons people give for wanting to stop housing development.
Now they’ve latched onto COVID-19. Because New York City has high density housing and high rates of COVID-19, they argue that building more housing will lead to the proliferation of diseases, higher infection rates, and more deaths.
They argue that we must stop building housing to protect the health of our community members. Their argument fails miserably in the light of reality.
High density housing doesn’t cause COVID-19 and other diseases to spread. If density was the cause, the Navajo Nation, which has one of the lowest population densities in the nation, wouldn’t have one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19, would it?
Jerry Rioux
Santa Maria
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 2, 2020.