We’ll probably move to Minneapolis from San Francisco because of cost/space issues but also because of family.

We are going to do everything in our power to be car-lite (we are car-free right now) when we move.

The biggest barrier to keeping families in the city is incredibly simple: 

Not enough multiroom apartments. 

What little of that supply exists, gets taken up by young people living the roommate lifestyle. A two earner family of four cannot pay as much in rent as a 4 person group of roommates. 

Every other issue can be addressed. The schools, the parks, all that can get resolved by the city and the parents working together once the parents are actually living in the city. But without the housing stock, and the affordable rents, forget it. 

@ocschwar:disqus High rents are really a barrier to all groups, not just young people starting families. Cities used to build housing projects to solve this issue (I grew up in one), but they’ve been stigmatized and fallen out of favor. Regardless, I think we can build a lot more affordable housing stock in urban areas if we changed zoning laws and encouraged more businesses to offer telecommuting. Doing the latter would free up a lot of office space, which could then be repurposed into housing. Part of the reason we’re not increasing the supply of urban housing is because it would drive real estate prices down. Those currently owning real estate will lose, but everyone else will win. Real estate lobbyists unfortunately hold a lot of sway over legislators. Regardless, there’s still an urban real estate bubble if you compare current prices to CPI-corrected prices from, say, 25 years ago. Sooner or later the bubble will burst, and there will be less resistance to building new housing stock.

This is not a transportation issue. Really, it’s all about the schools.  I was just visiting friends in Washington, DC where I met a woman who told me that she and her husband are selling their home in the District. They are moving to Bethesda, Maryland because of the schools.  Their 10-year old is in a great elementary school, but next year she transitions to middle school, and they all suck. A friend who lived in San Francisco was told by the school district that she should enroll her son in a school across town in a poor neighborhood so he could be part of a great social experiment.  Her response was for the family to up and move to Corte Madera.  And sorry @JoeR.:disqus, the lessons the streets teach, most parents don’t want their students to learn.

Moving to the suburbs is what people do when they can’t afford to stay in the city and send their kids to private school

@abb249055208c7af4d35568e422dfd63:disqus : ahem. High standards? I admit suburban schools are better – though that mainly comes down to resources, parental involvement, demographics, and funding – but they’re still crap. American children come out of even the best suburban schools with a poor quality of liberal education and very few useful skills. Even basics like critical reasoning and personal finance tend to be sorely lacking. The deficit has to be made up for in college, which explains a lot of the problem with student load debt.

@2555783a6f62598b6aadd2d882a4830f:disqus : I gotta say, given the social problems that housing projects seem to attract, I’m not surprised they’re out of favor. What is wrong with infill anyway?  I doubt it would be a challenge to fill a 25 floor building anywhere in Manhattan or inner Brooklyn or Queens, and setting a city-wide height “minimum maximum” of six stories or so would probably do wonders to encourage smarter housing.

I also am not sure I agree about the bubble bursting, at least not in the same sense. The bubble isn’t a speculatory bubble the way the suburban bubble was. Not to say there isn’t speculation, but people really want urban housing, and they’re willing to pay for it. The way to “burst” this one would be to do what we should do anyway: increase supply.

@ce548db5af27b21a99f4ec46f70f7d21:disqus Infill is just fine. I see lots of places where we could do that. As for the housing projects, as I recall they were working just fine when they had mostly working families. Our building started going downhill when they let in welfare families in the early 1970s. Besides my mother and sister having to deal with catcalls whenever they went out, you had the woman downstairs parading boyfriends in and out constantly, and we also got roaches from her apartment. Until then, none of us even knew what a roach looked like.

If you compare historical housing prices to present ones, you’ll still see that prices are too high. The house I’m currently living in with my mother (dad died in 2006) was purchased in 1978 for $52K. If you correct this according to the CPI you come up with a figure of $225K, perhaps $250K tops. Houses like this are easily going for twice that. I know demand has something to do with it, but the hard fact is prices are still unaffordably high, even with today’s lower interest rates.

@pchazz:disqus I wasn’t referring here to lessons a kid might learn on the streets in a bad inner city neighborhood. Rather, I’m referring to learning from the all the interesting neighborhoods and the myriad other intangible things life in the big city offers. The suburbs are just sterile wastelands of grass and trees and roads and cars with no street life. One suburb looks just like any other. The schools might be better just going by academic achievement, but that seldom correlates with real world success. A lot of our most creative, productive citizens got their start in cities, sometimes with just a grade school education. Schools and formal education are highly overrated if you ask me. Environment is so much more important.

1980 the rates were almost 20%. even if you figure a 15% mortgage rate on a $52,000 house that is $7500 a year in interest costs for the first few years. $700 or so a month on a 1980 income

“A friend who lived in San Francisco was told by the school district that she should enroll her son in a school across town in a poor neighborhood so he could be part of a great social experiment.”
“the lessons the streets teach, most parents don’t want their students to learn.”

Ah yes, it’s time once again for the windshield perspective of the (in this case, San Francisco) urban school district. It’s awfully easy to pick and choose anecdotes rather than actually care and read about the issues, isn’t it?

“The deficit has to be made up for in college, which explains a lot of the problem with student load debt.”
Wrong. Student debt is reaching critical levels because university fees have far outpaced inflation and because universities continue to enjoy a cozy relationship with banks. Student loan consolidators can pile fees upon fees and bankruptcy cannot erase debt obligations.

Not to get away from the topic at hand, but this all figures into the complicated future of our economy. We’ve had waves and waves of foreclosure owing to bank overreach and now the wave of student-loan defaults have begun. The bright spot in that gloomy scenario is that it helps young people take a second look at staying in the city and doing more with less.

i remember the rates being around 8% in 2000.

NYC has some of the best schools in the USA, but the districts are the suburban districts where you almost need a car. but the houses will run you some ridiculous price. i can buy a $250,000 town home now in a decent NJ town with decent schools and pay almost nothing because i have close to $200,000 in equity in my co-op now. 

at some point you have to ask yourself, why stay in NYC? the air is dirty, exposure to the wrong kids is easier. the idiotic parking rules make it a PITA to own a car even if you take transit most of the time. some of the rules make you drive to work.

@465e3c020e944cc091ce94c6ffbb5c7d:disqus : No, not wrong. I don’t very much disagree with the comments on student debt, but what part of “a lot of the problem” do you not understand? People are going to college to pick up skills, basic skills often, they could and should have learned earlier. It’s true that such demand for college is raising tuition and fees, and straining public subsidies for higher education, but the over-demand for college/university is fundamentally to blame.

I think a big reason Boston is suddenly aggressively trying to change their school assignment system is because they’re suddenly getting heat from young, upwardly mobile, parents who are threatening to leave if they can’t send their kids to neighborhood schools.  Plus, they recently had a huge spike in enrollment the past year (something like 300 unexpected new kindergartners – all trying to get into the same elite schools – mostly in the west zone – which is where all the yuppie parents live).  change is afoot.

Anecdotally, the number 1 reason I hear for people deciding to move to the suburbs is the schools. 
There are important secondary factors, some of them probably only indirectly considered, like the relative prices of suburban vs. urban housing and the transportation infrastructure which make suburban living easier.  (Let’s face it, it is easier to get in your car and drive to work than to ride the subway.)
But a better public school system would go a long way toward retaining families who have the option to move.

J_12, I would argue that commuting by car is only easier if you live in a lower population. If you’re in a populous area with a lot of congestion, car commuting can be a nightmare. I’d much rather spend 45 minutes on the subway as I currently do than in a car fighting traffic into Manhattan every day. 

@andrelot:disqus You hit the nail on the head as far as the reason why many inner city schools don’t function. Ironically, in a place like NYC you have a paradox where the good schools with high parental involvement are located in areas where many parents with children simply can’t afford to live, while the affordable areas are often packed with kids from families who couldn’t care less. For a while (in the 1960s) we thought the answer to this was to bus the inner city kids to better schools. Of course, this didn’t sit well with parents who moved to neighborhoods with good schools, only to learn their kids would be bused to crappy schools. And this social experiment didn’t work anyway. No matter how good the school, children generally won’t learn if they come from a dysfunctional family. Unfortunately it’s hard to change the poor attitudes of some families towards education which were formed over generations.

I don’t really have an easy answers to this. Gentrification eventually solves the school problem, but at the same time it results in housing becoming unaffordable. Maybe the answer is to flood inner city neighborhoods with enough decent, affordable housing to attract lots of working class families from around the country who want to live in the city. The schools will have a much higher ratio of parents who care, and as such will be forced to improve in short order thanks to parental pressure. And you might even help the inner city kids with dysfunctional families in the process. When 75% of their classmates take school seriously, the peer pressure might be enough to turn things around for them, despite their families. There would also be a lot of parental peer pressure on the parents in the dysfunctional families if their kids started making life miserable for all the other kids.

andrelot – I think you are “falling for the stereotype”.

Several San Francisco schools have gone from poor quality to being among the most sought after schools in the city, simply because multiple families decided to lift the schools up with their own hard work. Google “Miraloma Elementary” for one example.

We recently moved from San Francisco to Healdsburg. When we discuss this, people in Healdsburg almost all say “This must be so much better for your son”, while my wife and I pretty much agree he has suffered from the move. We used to live on a street with dozens of children, now we live on a street with 3 other sub 10 year old children – the more density you have, the more of each population you have. In Noe Valley we did not have to plan play dates, anytime we noticed our son getting a bit restless we could just ask him if he wanted to go to the park and without fail there would be multiple children there for him to play with. In Healdsburg, there are several excellent parks/playgrounds and they are almost always *empty*. Restless children go out to the backyard. Dogs can roam in their backyards too, so there is no social interaction for him at dog parks either (this also sucks for the dog).

Or if we needed to get some toothpaste, we could use it as an excuse to take him for a walk, half the time we would return home without the toothpaste having been distracted by toy stores, getting a snack, conversations with someone we knew, and stopping in the parklet to paint. Maybe we would ride the MUNI train just because. Instead, if only one of us is home, and we need something urgently, our son has to endure a ride in the car seat where he sees things out the window he is not able to touch or stop to look at. We never get distracted and do something interesting walking from the parking lot to the door of Safeway.

A music class is miles away in Windsor, not 8 blocks away. And it’s only on Fridays, not every day because the student population is smaller. It is for children from 2-6 years old, whereas in San Francisco there were classes with narrower age ranges and the material could be better focused. We used to go to the zoo a couple of times a month. We gave up our membership. Ditto Academy of Sciences, Exploratorium. No spur of the moment BART rides to the airport to go watch planes.

These are the “street” benefits of a city.

Selecting a pre-school was much simpler, in large part because there were few choices.

The primary upside from a school perspective will be certainty – if we want to go to Healdsburg Elementary, we get to. Period. If we don’t like that school, a different school will be miles away with no public transportation even when he is old enough to take it on his own.

There are a lot of upsides as well, no doubt or we would not have made the move. But it was not a move we made because it was a slam dunk benefit for our son.

Alen – I’m talking about a toddler

As to whether cities will hold onto urban-loving, middle-class families with children: it depends almost entirely on the quality of the public schools, and almost nothing else.  All other amenities cannot substitute for a poor education.  Diversity is a plus, but it is also a sham if little learning can get done in dysfunctional classrooms.  Families unable to send children to private schools or do home schooling will be reluctant to leave.  But leave they will.

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