NYC Restaurant Reopening Tracker: Williamsburg is at higher risk of outdoor dining when COVID cases resurge
Gravesend and Midwood have more than 450 cases per 100,000 population positive rate in a 4-week average.
(This is an ongoing data analysis about NYC restaurant reopening, updated on November 22, 2020. Previous data analysis.)
More than eight months into the coronavirus pandemic, New Yorkers face another uncertain period of working from home. The restaurant industry, which represents one of the city’s economic pillars, continues to strive for their lives by setting up outdoor dining areas to meet rules.
In a New York Times article, Polly Trottenberg, the city transportation commissioner, described that the outdoor dining program “has developed into one of the few bright spots in the pandemic.”
He also called it “a creative new vision of public space.”
Here is a data tracker on NYC open dining’s status quo. It breaks into two parts: how restaurants face the uncertain future (in previous data analysis) and alerting the readers in advance on certain restaurants located in COVID hotspots. To achieve so, this spatial analysis also closely monitors the real-time Open Dining Restaurants application public dataset provided by the DoT( Department of Transportation) and COVID case rate provided by the NYC Health Department.
Most of the restaurants applied for reopening will choose to place their outdoor seating in the front of their businesses on the sidewalk or the roadway. Some restaurants had applied for both.
It is well-acknowledged that Manhattan is the most restaurant-crowded borough, and COVID, to some extent, makes it “worse”. For example, sidewalks and streets in places like East Village, Lower Manhattan, midtown, and Hells Kitchen are packed with outdoor dining tables and fences.
However, Manhattan is not the most “dangerous” region for outdoor dining. Several communities in Brooklyn and Queens have higher positive case rates, even does Staten Island.
Neighborhoods like Gravesend and Midwood in Brooklyn are with the highest 4-week case rate. But the reopening restaurants in these regions are more sparsely located than Manhattan’s.
Williamsburg, Astoria, and Jackson Heights are communities with higher 4-week case rates. Restaurant diners would like to avoid these places, especially when it comes to restaurants densely located in Williamsburg, the hip neighborhood in East Brooklyn.
The outdoor dining program was first introduced in June when the City witnessed a significant surge of applications. According to the tracker, the program has approved more than 11.2 thousand applications for their reopening plans by the end of October 2020. And the number is still growing. By November 22, it has reached 11.4 thousand.
New Yorkers might have never thought about moving their dining areas from the cozy bar tables to another teeny tiny area- sidewalks and roadways. But on September 25, 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the program would be made permanent.
However, the resurge of COVID cases in the city and the incoming winter makes the restaurant industry extremely hard to survive economically. On the other side, the restaurants’ reopening adds potential difficulties to the containment of the virus. According to the Eater, experts showed concerns about indoor dining, saying that it is more likely to spread the virus than keeping schools open.
Note
Data updated on Oct 31, and maps produced on Nov 22. Data source: NYC Open Data, Open Restaurant Applications and COVID 4-week avg. case rate data from the NYC Health Department; Code on R Studio and mapping with QGIS.
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