Neighborhood Isolation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily lives by changing how and when they move. These changes could alter inequalities in mobility and therefore contribute to many forms of social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cellphone movement data in 2019-2020 we focus on the 25 largest cities in the U.S. and measure inequality in mobility between census tracts by using two indexes proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019). These measures capture the importance of hubs in a mobility network (Concentrated Mobility Index) and neighborhood isolation (Equitable Mobility Index). We find that the pandemic affected mobility inequality in all 25 cities. 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 started and to increased again during the latter half of 2020. Furthermore, we estimate linear regression models with city and week fixed effects predicting changes in neighborhood isolation relative to 2019 baseline. We find that larger numbers of new COVID-19 cases are positively and statistically significantly associated with changes in neighborhood isolation a week later. Additionally, we find that places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation all had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020. Our results indicate that few cities returned to “normal” mobility patterns and that cities may remain more unequal than before the pandemic.