“Roughly 40 percent of American millennials have four-year college degrees, and if there’s one thing these highly educated young people have liked to do over the last 15 years, it’s move to big cities.
Researchers find they (well, we) have accounted for more than half the population increase in “close-in” urban neighborhoods in the country’s largest metro areas since 2010, and they credit our migration (and our taxes) with accelerating urban revival. We don’t have to guess as to why: Millennials like diverse, walkable environments with good public transit and bike lanes. They like the rich cultural amenities, including bars, restaurants, and concert venues. And they like the higher-paying work opportunities available.
All this might make you think millennials have moved to cities permanently. But as they get older, the number of urban children has continued to drop. Lower birth rates are part of the story, but economists say the strong correlations with population shifts strongly suggest that “out-migration” of cities explains a big portion of the loss. In other words, millennials now in their mid-30s and 40s with young kids have started decamping for suburbs to raise their families.”
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“the choice to stay in the city or move to the suburbs doesn’t feel much like a choice at all. There simply aren’t many family-oriented housing options in cities, let alone ones young couples could afford.”
“Uganda is one of several African nations where it is illegal to be queer; the nation enacted its Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2014, which allowed for life imprisonment for some homosexual acts between consenting adults, and codified the repression of LGBTQ Ugandans. That legislation was annulled in court in 2014, though homosexuality was still illegal per previous law, according to a Human Rights Watch report.”
“In 2020, gun violence surpassed traffic accidents, cancer, suffocation, and poisoning as the leading cause of death among children and teens. That makes the US exceptional: In no other wealthy or similarly sized country is gun violence one of the top four causes of death among children and teens, let alone the leading one, according to a 2022 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That analysis also showed that the US accounts for 97 percent of all child and teen firearm deaths among its peer countries.
Most of those US deaths are caused by assault, with 3.6 children and teens per 100,000 dying on that account in 2020. By comparison, 1.7 and 0.3 per 100,000 children and teens died from firearm suicide and unintentional or undetermined firearm-related causes, respectively.
Children and teens in the US also experience ongoing secondary effects from gun violence, even if they are not injured in a shooting. Researchers at Penn Medicine found in a 2021 study of more than 2,600 shootings that there was a significant spike in emergency department visits for mental health issues among children after neighborhood shootings, with the most acute effects observed among children living closest to the site of the shooting and those who have witnessed multiple shootings.”
“54 percent of the approximately 77 million gun owners in the US do not practice safe gun storage, according to a 2018 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health survey. And one-third of these households with dangerously stored guns are also home to children.
This is a fact that should alarm us. In 2020, firearms surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children, with 4,357 children killed by gunfire that year. While the majority of child deaths from guns are due to homicide, an average of 35 percent between 2018 and 2021 were suicides, while 5 percent were caused by unintentional, accidental shootings.”
“In March 2020, in the uncertain first weeks of the pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis acted and talked like most other politicians. He shut down public schools and prohibited visitors at nursing homes. He expanded testing capacity and closed parks out of what he called a need to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines on social distancing. By early April, he had issued his own version of a stay-at-home order and was urging his state’s residents to stay “spiritually together, but to remain socially distant.”
Three years later, DeSantis has transformed himself into the face of an anti-“woke,” anti-public health movement that blossomed during the pandemic — the leader of an administration that was willing to not only defy the public health consensus but to control and manipulate information in order to advance its narrative of a crisis that has killed more than 1.1 million Americans, including more than 87,000 Floridians.
A report this month from the Tampa Bay Time revealed that DeSantis’s state surgeon general had altered scientific data in order to justify his official position that young men should not receive the Covid-19 vaccine. DeSantis, who has criticized former President Donald Trump for deferring to public health officials like Anthony Fauci, has embraced conspiratorial talking points. He has suggested profits and not public health drove the Covid vaccine campaign and convened a state grand jury to investigate any “misconduct” on the part of drug manufacturers and the scientific community related to the vaccines.”
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“What’s clear is something changed, and quickly. Within a month of pleading with Floridians to remain socially distant, DeSantis had begun to reopen the state’s economy. As months went by, he became more brazen in his willingness to bend the truth around Covid and staffed his administration accordingly. Within a year, he had hired a Covid vaccine skeptic as his surgeon general, who would later be accused of altering study data to advance that agenda, and was fighting cruise ships over their plans to impose vaccine mandates for their passengers.”
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“In March and April, the governor’s approval ratings sagged. For those who wanted him to be aggressive in fighting Covid-19, he was not doing enough. For the conservative voters beginning to believe an alternative narrative of the pandemic, his response was an overreaction. As he fumbled through the first few weeks of Covid-19, DeSantis seemed to satisfy no one.
So the governor picked a lane. DeSantis sided with the Republican base upon which he would depend for his political future.
One public health expert who spoke directly with DeSantis around that time, who, like others I interviewed, did not want to be quoted by name for fear of retribution, said the governor referred specifically to senior residents in conservative areas like the Villages as “my people” and appeared preoccupied most with them when considering the response to the coronavirus. Later on, his vaccine-skeptical agenda reflected the mood of many conservative voters, who had glommed onto mischaracterizations about the risks of Covid-19 and conspiracy theories about the vaccines meant to stop it.
DeSantis’s pandemic response helped make him into a national figure, valorized among conservatives and villainized by Democrats and many public health experts.”