If you think cities are dying—with urbanites fleeing density during the pandemic, never to return—you can think again. With the release last month of details of the 2020 U.S. census, we now know that metropolitan areas gained population in the last decade.

Still, city-bashing goes on: “Anti-urbanism is an American religion, practiced widely and frequently in ordinary times, and passionately when cities are actually in trouble,” sociologist Eric Klinenberg told The New York Times, in a recent article about pandemic predictions of urban demise. Throughout U.S. history, cities have been seen as hotbeds of crime and disease—and for being places where people of different races come together. As Andre M. Perry of the Brookings Institution has noted, “social distancing” was familiar long before Covid in urban Black communities that have been subject to segregation and racist housing policies.