COVID-19 and Urban Futures: Impacts on Business Closures in Miami-Dade County

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the local economic geographies of many U.S. cities, and it remains unclear how long these changes will persist. This study analyzed the sociospatial dynamics of business closures in Miami-Dade County, Florida, from August 2020 to August 2021 with an explicit focus on reconciling the pandemic’s effects in the context of location theory. We found that traditional urban centers and transit-concentrated areas experienced disproportionately higher rates of business closures during the study period, suggesting a potential wave of commercial suburbanization in Miami. Middle-class and working-class Hispanic neighborhoods suffered the most business closures. The results of correlation analysis and spatial regression models suggested a positive association between the incidence of COVID-19 cases and business closures at both zip code and individual business levels. These results also beckon a revaluation of the role of certain urban externalities in traditional location theory. The importance of automobile accessibility and agglomeration effects are poised to persist beyond the pandemic, but the benefits of proximity to the public transport system might decline. The trends observed in Miami suggest that the pandemic could generate more automobile-reliant employment subcenters in U.S. cities and amplify problems of intraurban inequality and urban sprawl.