San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone? | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone?

nytimes.com

224 pointsjseliger290 comments

I'm a parent with two children living in SF.

Before I had children, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be, even putting aside finances. Most people without children just don't get how much more difficult ordinary life becomes. There is a deep reason that the "boring" suburbs beckon.

Yes, the schools and the lower housing costs are a part of it. But there's also just the easier lifestyle, where you don't need to compete as much for everything. Parking, sidewalks, aggressive cars, daycare, schools, a seat on the bus, and very much avoiding crazy people who might harm your children.

It is extremely stressful to walk your young child across a busy intersection in SOMA where a driver is aggressively trying to turn, where a crazy person is screaming at the top of his lungs, where a street that smells of urine awaits you on the other side.

Putting SF aside, it's extremely difficult to maintain a good relationship with your spouse when a demanding job takes up a huge amount of time, and when that job seems like a vacation compared with the weekends with the kids. Almost universally every parent I know says that going to work on Monday is a relief, the beginning of their temporary vacation from the intensity of nuclear family life.

The children themselves create the vast majority of the stress. Parents need environments that help reduce that burden, not merely keep inconveniences at bay. At our school the #1 wish of parents, by far, is for faraway grandparents to move nearby and help. If they could afford it. If they could survive in this city hostile to the elderly. If they were willing to give up their comfortable retirement travel adventures to shoulder some of the burden. Very, very few have this arrangement in SF.

A big problem is two income families. It's always struck me as odd that folks think they could give parenting their divided attention and then honestly claim they've given their best effort.

Our culture was hoodwinked into thinking raising children was somehow less important than having a career. Child rearing is a full time job if performed optimally and it's importance should be recognized and championed.

That dream was 50's nuclear family hoodwinking based on the sexism at the time and the woman's "place" in the home. My child goes to daycare and it is infinitely more stimulating than anything we could do for her at home even if we've "given our best effort".

What is the spouse who stays home supposed to do in ten years when the child is much more independent and at school or activities much of the day? He or she has to either start a career or go to school and then face the ageism for entry level positions. And what are two spouses supposed to do when they both deeply enjoy their work and the value it brings them as individuals? My wife was home with the child for 5 months before getting back into the workforce and she complained frequently about the loss of identity.

The real problem and solution, as other posters have mentioned, is a strong support structure from friends and family. We live in a wonderful area of Colorado, but all of our family is on the east coast or in Germany and it just isn't going to happen that we move closer. So we struggle and get by, but having a parent stay home to be daycare full time wouldn't serve either of us.

> My child goes to daycare and it is infinitely more stimulating than anything we could do for her at home even if we've "given our best effort".

Is stimulation the most important thing in childrearing?

> What is the spouse who stays home supposed to do in ten years when the child is much more independent and at school or activities much of the day?

Volunteer? Find self-fulfillment in something other than a career?

Plus, I think you may be begging the question: while older children require less immediate attention than younger ones, they still require plenty of care. It just tends to be more planning and less direct interaction.

Plus, why do you assume only one kid? My mother spent more than a quarter-century with children at home. She certainly was never bored.

> And what are two spouses supposed to do when they both deeply enjoy their work and the value it brings them as individuals?

Maybe work from home? Ultimately, though, parents today must sacrifice for their children, just as parents have done for millennia. Kids aren't expensive status symbols: raising them well is a duty, not a lark.

It's also just not financially possible. At one time you could raise a family on a single income, but unless you are in a fairly narrow set of professions, this isn't possible, at least not the same way it was then. I don't just think I should "raise" my child, I want them to have opportunities to do things. To travel, to try sports or music, to do activities, and all these require money. Even if you did none of these things, money would be tight on a single income of, say $70,000 a year in a midsized American town or city.

It's all a matter of priorities. When my wife and I got married we knew that she wanted to stay home with the kids when we had them. To avoid becoming comfortable with two incomes and have to back down later, we made the choice to live on only my salary and put hers in the bank. We never got used two incomes, so it was pretty easy for her to leave her job when the time came.

There's all sorts of caveats with this, of course, and not every family can make it happen. We definitely don't regret the choice, and I'm certain our kids are better for it.

I'm not criticizing people who chose to stay home, but I'm also defensive of being morally judged for having two working parents. Even if I can afford to do so (and many people can't), I've opted to give my child a different set of experiences.

I'm not at all judging anyone who chooses differently than we did. I do think our kids are better off than if we had chosen differently, but I think they'd turn out great either way. You're absolutely right - you're giving your child different experiences, and that's not right or wrong - just different.

I make it a point not to judge other parents' choices (except parents who let their kids wear camo - that's just inexcusable).

First, I would agree it's very difficult now days to raise children on a single income but if it's a priority I know it can be done because my family is a data point.

But you've touched on something that could get me talking for hours... Namely, the detrimental affects of inflation on a society and why the populace hasn't had the politicians' collective head in a noose for it.

Of course deflated real wages operate in tandem with inflation to put pressure on the family but that blame lies more with the populace. I mean why did we ever think that significantly adding to the labor pool (double income families) wasn't going to suppress real wages?

I think we ought to be very careful about blaming wage deflation on double income families since there are much larger factors related to wage deflation:

1. Free trade and aggressive foreign monetary policy. The ability to manufacture good with much cheaper labor.

2. Automation.

3. The shift in the workforce to skilled labor. This has some overlap with 2. Even if the manufacturing industry that enabled the heady economic days of the 1950s and 60s return to the US, the people who get them will need some education. This problem was laid bare after the housing crisis. The problem of the "unemployable male", a man with a high school education who was doing fairly well working low skill labor jobs in construction. When all that came crashing down, those men were left with nowhere to go. One of the ironies is that, at least where I am, we are very lacking in some jobs. Skilled labor, such as carpenters, welders and technicians of varying kinds are in demand. There's still wage deflation, but certainly there are jobs.

Yeah, I wouldn't suggest double incomes families is the sole reason for wage deflation but I'd submit it played a significant part.

WRT point 1; I remember 30 years ago thinking if the U.S. consumes such a disproportionate amount of the world's resources just how it was possible to bring the rest of the world up to the U.S's standard of living. Seems like the math doesn't add up here.

Your points in item 3 are well taken. It's interesting, or maybe obvious, that the skilled labor examples you've listed can't be off shored.

Often I think inflation has caused people to subconsciously choose to buy cheap, less quality goods. For example, buying furniture at IKEA versus buying hand made from someone local craftsman. Do people really demand the cheaper (price and quality) furniture or are they forced to accept the cheaper furniture because they're real disposable income is diminished? When we're talking about furniture it's not such a big deal but what about food? Are people really demanding carb, corn syrup laden crap with maximum calorie density or are they forced to make that choice because of the lower real wages?

Finally, I'm generally for free markets and against the idea of tariffs. However, it seems to me business and labor are not playing on a level field here because business (specifically multi-nationals) are allowed to take advantage of labor arbitrage but labor is not allowed to take advantage of rent arbitrage; meaning labor just can't up and move to Thailand or where ever to take advantage of the cost of living difference.

>It's also just not financially possible while maintaining a standard of living similar to my current one.

Fixed that for you.

Or not financially possible. I just checked. In my town the average cost of housing is about $650/month, but that includes apartments of varying sizes. So lets assume a family of four is spending $10,000-$15,000 year on housing. That makes the math easy and is not too far off for the price of a three bedroom home. Average household income here is about $50,000/year, so already we're using 20% of our income on housing. According to the USDA, the "low cost" food plan for a family of 4 is another $10,255 [0]. So now we've got almost half our income in just housing and food. Add to that transportation (where I live you have to own a car), sundries, clothing, utilities, health care, school supplies and so on and I can absolutely see how two children would be a financial hardship on a single income, standard of living or not. Even at slightly higher than average that would preclude all sorts of things (the activities, travel, and so on).

I'm not trying to make excuses for people's choices, but kids cost money and financial hardship happens. People get laid off, they make bad decisions, the economy goes boom or bust, changing the cost of living and incomes, shit happens. You also have long term security to think about, making sure you're putting money away for retirement and so on. It would be hard to raise kids on $50,000 a year, and I suspect the median income in most of the country is actually less than that.

[0]:https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/usda_food_plan...

Don't misunderstand me, I am not criticizing someone who chooses to stay home with their children. Opinion masquearades as fact on this topic, and I firmly don't believe that a child is going to be better off raised at home or better off going to daycare. They will for certain be better off in a family where their parents are happy, and if that means both work or one stays home so be it.

> My child goes to daycare and it is infinitely more stimulating than anything we could do for her at home even if we've "given our best effort".

Are you sure? I remember daycare and it was mind-numbing torture. The parents all thought it was great but I would have preferred to be anywhere else.

Same. It's a dim memory at this point but at best it was OK, and I mostly hated it.

I actually remember having a good experience. We were taught how to play chess, played Mario on an MS-DOS machine and I remember there being a ball pit.

> but all of our family is on the east coast or in Germany

So I take either you or your wife is German. If your child doesn't spend enough time with the German parent, he or she will not know the German language, so please be careful with that.

Disclaimer: I don't speak the language of my father (Vietnamese), for the reason I mentioned, and as a French expat I try to make my two kids speak French when I can, but they don't have the same level as "normal" French kids, especially my older son who is 6.

As I have American ex-pat friends living in Paris with a young child, I can tell you that the main difference is support from society.

Replicating socialized daycare on your own is massively inefficient (often one or two children max per caretaker) and really challenging financially. Instead of paying for child care over the course of say 10-12 years, many countries in Europe effectively spread that out over your entire working life (40 or so years) via taxation. Clearly the American way needs to get someone a Child-Care Bond or Annuity or something...

My wife and I both work, and we have kids. It's not because of any relative importance of career versus kids, it's simply because we couldn't afford to live here in the SF Bay Area otherwise. It would be wonderful if one of us could stay home, but there's more to it than that as well.

Have you ever spent all day with toddlers? It's enough to make you go mad sometimes, and it also starves you of adult interaction. Chasing little wild humans and occasionally commanding, "No! Spit that out!" isn't really interaction.

You need a support system when raising kids. Traditionally, this has been family, but people move around for work so much in the US, that many of us don't have that support system, and we outsource that to professionals - day care, nannies, co-ops. All that stuff costs money, and so, we both have to work.

The questions I am about to ask are not meant to judge you. I am asking, because I am pretty sure you asked yourself these as well and I am just curious about your answers.

If you both are so busy and "barley" (not homeless barley, but like needing dual-income) can afford living in the SF Bay Area, then why have kids?

Similarly, why live in the SF Bay Area?

Employment, just the same as anywhere else. In this country a job isn't something that most people can simply pick and choose from. Tech jobs especially are very different outside the Bay Area. A big example: it's common to have 18-30 month tenures at a job in the Bay Area, and that's considered "job hopping" many other places. Others include the casual dress and relatively greater time flexibility.

Tech experience in the Bay by no means guarantees the ability to find employment outside it.

I guess, I also foolishly assumed that both are in tech. Thanks for your input.

The bay area is very expensive and it takes an exceptional single income to live comfortably, or you make huge compromises, so I think dual income families are far more common that not.

When it comes to having children, at some point, you decide you're ready and find a way to make it work. We're managing, but we both have to work. We love the area, our friends are here, are careers are here, we're up in the mountains every few weeks enjoying nature, this really is a beautiful part of the country, and you pay for that. Life isn't only about minimizing costs.

Long term, we probably can't afford to stay here unless I win the startup lottery, so we have an exit plan, but for now, we're enjoying this place.

I think blaming "career culture" isn't correct here. Two working parents has been the norm in Northern European countries for quite a long time now (usually due to necessity rather than because of a career), and they are still often ranked as the best places to raise a kid.

It's been the norm in the US as well. There was a time when it was more common for middle class Americans to have a stay at home parent, but it was never the most common case among all Americans {1}. It is only in the last several decades that parents have been demonized for not having a non-working parent (and this as real wages have been reduced for most people), but historically, the American family did not just have working moms but working kids (on the farm, baby sitting, running a paper route or as with my great grandmother in the button factor at age eight).

{1}: https://www.census.gov/hhes/families/files/ASA2010_Kreider_E...

This largely depends on where you live. In urban areas, I think two working parents is the norm. In rural areas, one parent staying at home is a lot more common. Cost of living is a big part of that, for sure.d

The real problem starts with the idea/wording of "one / two income family". It trivializes the issue and is likely rooted in the dated "housewife" concept that forces people into a permanent role, dependence, and general lack of choice, a social structure that really needs reform (and has been to a great extent in many countries).

Why can't parents work (earn) and take care of their kids at the same time? Why assign a (permanent) role of stay-at-home-parent to essentially half of the adults (with children) risking unnecessarily trapping them in roles and financial state that's unfair.

I would speculate that it is lack of sufficient competition in the market. Therefore the cost of living for single workers in single worker dwellings raises to eliminate any surplus.

Most larger dwellings are similarly set by the price that can be afforded by two full time adult workers.

This leaves no room for reduced time workers, such as two adults with jobs that allow them to work within the hours that children are typically in public daycare (warehousing in schools).

It also doesn't help anyone that the building codes are very lousy at requiring sufficient acoustic isolation. I'd sure like to not be woken up early / kept up late by the noises of those in other units.

Because the U.S. has evolved a model where childcare is very expensive and people are expected to work > 40 hours per week. We need public pre-K and a 30- to 40-hour workweek.

Childcare by grandparents is pretty common outside of the USA, often in places where both parents genuinely need to work

It's also fairly common in the US for "poor" people.

I don't really get why it's not more common for all people: I have a cousin who's probably in the 99th percentile for household income and his mom helps out with his two very young kids a LOT.

This pretty much exactly sums up why we packed up our 3 kids (3 weeks, 1.5yrs and 3yrs at the time) and moved from Seattle back home to Portland where all my family is 20 minutes away and hers is only a couple hours. We're 6 months in and, minus the income tax, it's the best decision we've made as parents.

Not having family, or people that are that close to you in your general vicinity makes a hard task incredibly more so.

It's not like that for everyone. We moved to Portland (partly) to get away from our families back east. They were like more kids, adding more stress than relieving.

Right. When your mom is the physical, dark haired embodiment Estelle Costanza it's a difficult decision.

Maybe it's just Portland.

where all my family is 20 minutes away

To me this would be the factor that beats all others. Having raised a kid in perfectly nice area but with zero family or friends close by that could really help out, I'd probably consider moving to just about anywhere on earth to be closer to someone who could lend a hand.

I suppose it's easier to make new friends before having kids?

Had friends, but they where all happily child free single people, who weren't super keen on spending a Friday evening baby sitting a 1 year old. And I certainly don't blame them in the slightest.

> Before I had children, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be, even putting aside finances. Most people without children just don't get how much more difficult ordinary life becomes.

I have a very very tiny tiny inkling of how difficult, after spending several weeks with my sister, her husband, and their (now) 8-month-old. And I know that what I see and feel is only a tiny fraction of what they see and feel. It's the best shot of birth control I could ever get.

And yet, parents -- on the whole -- love their kids, would do anything for them, and believe that their decision to have kids was the correct one. Holy biological imperatives, Batman.

I really hate that there are so few kids in SF. I wish SF could be a more kid- and family-friendly city. It just seems like too many things need to be fixed to make that happen in any reasonable time frame, and it's tempting to suggest that other things -- such as the housing crisis -- are more pressing and deserving of people's time and attention.

> Holy biological imperatives, Batman.

Putting those aside, from a purely logical perspective, someone has to have kids or the human race won't last much longer.

> give flat tax cut for people who have children

> problem solved.

Keeping it a flat rate also incentivizes wealthier (and thus on average higher educated) people to have more children.

Experiments with this type of program have found that it mainly acts as a windfall to people who would have had children anyway. Demand for children seems to be pretty inelastic with respect to money. As far as I can see, it's a matter of social expectations and convenience.

I beg to differ.

https://www.melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/media_release/f...

> “Our analysis of mothers’ intentions to have a child, and an examination of reported births statistics, suggested that the baby bonus increased the fertility rate by 3.2 per cent”, said co-author of the study, Mark Wooden Professorial Research Fellow and Deputy Director, Melbourne Institute.

I meant it more in sense that when the human race (or rather 'civilization') starts to collapse that its easy to start propping up birth rates by making having children more and more attractive (financially-wise anyway) until you have the rate you want. The only problem is (and I'll probably get downvoted for this again) is that its mainly poor people that have lots of children. That's not good for society, so I'd rather incentive educated people to have more kids.

Uhm, citation needed?

I thought that it was well known that economic considerations such as career, daycare costs & even how many children does the car fit affect family size.

You say that like it'd be a bad thing.

A martyr for a planet, now that's a new one.

If some combination of benign incentives causes the human race to be smaller than 7B 100 years hence, that won't be a bad thing. I doubt anyone here is advocating for anything Swiftian.

The comment wasn't about the human race shrinking in size, it was about the human race ceasing to exist.

Amusingly, this is one of those things that's been around for a while: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement http://www.vhemt.org

If humans actually died out, there wouldn't be any humans to lament it. Seems neutral to me.

Yet somewhere a faint "You bastids!" will still echo from my grandmother for all of eternity.

As a global population, we reproduce plenty. Why should we non-kid producing folk have to subsidize your energy/water guzzling sprog?

Because our society supported you when you were a energy/water guzzling sprog.

"Why should we others pay" is a worthy point, if the survival of the planet means anything, Of course. But, unfortunately, it turns out that half-assed parenting ends up costing society very dearly over time. By which I mean taxes and worse landing on your tab, anway. More jails, tons more depression and substance abuse, increasing illness and more. It's better to pay less, up front.

You'll surely want someone to pay for your retirement and healthcare, and provide the services you'll need.

I lived in Bernal Heights with a 6-8 year old. Then we moved to Lafayette. East bay kid raising is really awesome. But now we live in Reno.

SF kid raising wasn't ideal, and when we realized what would be involved w/r/t schooling, we left.

> It is extremely stressful to walk your young child across a busy intersection in SOMA [...] where a crazy person is screaming at the top of his lungs, where a street that smells of urine awaits you on the other side.

It's not normal for a city to have these things. It's unacceptable that one of the richest cities in the world has normalized (or become conditioned to) such a sad state of affairs. You shouldn't be afraid to raise a young child in the city.

>You shouldn't be afraid to raise your child in a vibrant, stimulating urban environment.

"Stimulating urban environment". What do these words mean to you? Cities strike nothing but fear into me.

I'm curious if anyone here has ever had kids in a (good, well run) cohousing community.

A major reason young kids are so stressful is they're relying on parents for play and social stimulation when they need more unstructured time with other kids. This is not the preferred way for either parent or child. Parents get fatigued entertaining three and four year olds because they are not three, and kids will choose other kids over parents most of the time if it's available.

The problem with parks and play spaces is that the kids don't know each other. Family life is segregated so kids don't get to form bonds.

100% on point. That's why I'm insanely happy to live in St. Louis now right as our kids were born one mile from grandparents. We avoid most of that stress. As long as you work at a thriving place it feels virtually no different intellectually than SF. After all think about how many people you interact with meaningfully day to day. Seems like most people's work are little bubbles so the city you live in isn't super relevant.

STL here too. Also happy to be in flyover country with my family, close to a major city, working remote for a coastal startup.

This is so true. Having children is such a tectonic shift in lifestyle that I think it is very hard to anticipate how it will impact your priorities. I was close to both my parents and grandparents before having kids, but I felt a new, deeper connection to them after we had kids.

>Most people without children just don't get how much more difficult ordinary life becomes.

This is a common thing to hear from parents but I feel it misses the mark for some couples that have rationally decided not to have children for precisely the reasons you stated. I think the difficulty you mentioned is actually a large reason as to why less couples are having kids in the first place.

Edit: completely reworded.

How is that even slightly relevant?

Everyone knows that kids are a pain in the ass. Everyone who has kids says "I knew they were a pain in the ass but they are way more of a pain than I even anticipated."

So no, you don't know. You think you know but you don't. Continue not having kids. I will also continue not having kids. But don't be the "well I haven't seen it because I don't have a tv" guy because nobody gives a shit.

As a parent of three I never thought of it as difficulty so much as it just really forever changes things compared to how you lived as a single person or childless couple.

You can understand that well enough to decide that you don't want any part of it, without understanding it to the depth of a person who has experienced it.

I agree, but I'm often confused by those without kids or those who say that having a kid totally changed people's lifestyles unexpectedly.

For me, having a kid has certainly been an (expected) money drain. But beyond that, my life is pretty similar to pre-kid. Wife and I still work our day jobs. Outside of work we still enjoy the same sorts of things we enjoyed before having a kid and continue to do those things. Now we just have an extra source of entertainment and responsibility in the kid as well.

Yes, fully agree.

I'm not a parent for those reasons. However, if you haven't experienced something for yourself, you cannot truly know what it is like. This is true of everything, including parenting.

Not exclusionary. Knowing it would be best to avoid being hit over the head by hammer, is not the same as experiencing being hit over the head with a hammer. Knowing you should avoid it and roughly why, and knowing what it's like when it happens are still very different things. (This is Bertrand Russell's distinction between "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance.")

https://youtu.be/uFQfylQ2Jgg

Stand up comedy - people with no kids don't know

You just told me everything I needed to hear. Thank you.

[edit] being serious here -- I needed to read what you wrote.

If you don't mind, in what sense? There are multiple ways to read your message.

Well, I was being somewhat vague to avoid inserting my own story into the thread too much, but I'm going to be a first-time parent soon and I'm living in the same town I've lived in most of my life, which I often get fed up with and daydream of moving away from.

OP just made me realize how lucky I am in my current situation, is all :)

[edit] I'll add I've spent enough time in SF too to know what OP is talking about quite well

We bought a house across the road from the infants school (4 to 10) a decade ago. Later this year my boy starts. So glad we did that.

Having kids with two full-time working parents totally changes you. So much that it took 3 job changes to finally find the right balance - no more interesting startups, it's relatively boring web stuff as freelancer for me. It's worth sacrificing a little of my work pleasure for the simplicity and extra money.

> Having kids with two full-time working parents totally changes you. So much that it took 3 job changes to finally find the right balance - no more interesting startups, it's relatively boring web stuff as freelancer for me.

You can still do interesting startups! But I would strongly recommend:

1. Startups which support remote work well. (If you can survive and thrive as a freelance consultant, you've got the discipline to make this work.)

2. Startups with enough money to pay you salary.

3. Startups where at least some of the cofounders have kids.

So no more pre-money startups in dubious makeshift "offices" in San Franciso run by brilliant and ambitious 23-year-olds, basically. I know, that spoils some of the fun, but it also reduces the outcome variance.

(I also wake up at 5am and start my working day very early, giving me more flexibility later in the day. It helps.)

Good then! :-) Finding a job where I could work from home was my best life choice ever. My wife could keep her job (1 hour commute, but at least we live close to all four grandparents) and I have flexible hours so I can take the boys to school.

> At our school the #1 wish of parents, by far, is for faraway grandparents to move nearby and help. If they could afford it.

thats what the two Au pairs sunbathing on your porch are for.

> Most people without children just don't get how much more difficult ordinary life becomes.

i think your mind is playing tricks on you. most people over 25 without children know exactly how difficult life is with children -- that's why they don't have any.

For me, it feels like the article could have been a lot shorter. "San Francisco housing prices have gone so high that people can't afford to have kids here." It never really delved into many of the underlying incentives and such.

Yea, other locations might have some good draws like schools or a lack of fog. Yes, SF might have more LGBTQ folk. Neither of those are going to be a good explanation for the exodus.

Ultimately, I'm not sure cities see this as a problem that needs solving (regardless of what public officials might say to a reporter). I live in a similarly expensive city. Schools are expensive and I have no kids so that's a win for the city. I have high income and can bid up property values which is a win for the city. The city is building a lot of office space which pays very high property taxes while using comparatively few city resources (compared to residential). The abundance of jobs drives property values even higher which drives tax revenue to the city. Why would a city actually want kids?

I think a big driver of this in SF is that the software industry skews young. Software is a relatively new field unlike, say, medicine where you'll find a broader range of ages because computers have become a much bigger part of life more recently. Software can also be concentrated in certain cities in a way that doctors are going to be spread out a lot more. So, SF has an army of young, childless software engineers with more money than they know what to do with who might not have reached an age where they're thinking about saving willing to replace anyone looking to have kids who might move out.

So SF has no incentive to make it a better place for kids. If you want kids, leave and the city will replace you with a young childless person who can plunge their money into the city rather than asking for city services.

I think it's gone on too long to really course correct at this point. If you try to take steps to deal with housing prices, you're going to get a lot of opposition from your voters who have bought property in the city (and sunk their life savings into it). If I've paid $1M for a condo in SF, I don't want the city embarking on a big new plan to double the amount of housing. If anything, I want the opposite.

It's an unfortunate circumstance that wasn't addressed soon enough.

Its not just housing prices, its also the school system, and the way children are placed in schools. From the article:

-- Jean Covington, a San Francisco resident who works as a public defender in Contra Costa County, said she noticed a “pilgrimage” of her friends out of the city when children reached school age. When she decided to stick it out, she was confronted with what she described as a bewildering public school selection system governed by an algorithm that determines where children in the city are placed — sometimes miles from home.

When her daughter turned 5, Ms. Covington applied to 14 public kindergartens, but her child ended up being placed in another. She chose a private school instead, along with the strain on the family budget that it entailed. --

In my personal case, we owned a house, but moved out of the city specifically because of the school system placement process.

At our local elementary, Lafayette, over 70% of kids are neighborhood kids, despite it being one of the better schools in the city (there's a wait list).

I'm not looking forward to the stress of the lottery system. But the nearest private school to us is St. Thomas Apostle, with a yearly tuition of only $8k ($6k for parishioners). Catholic schools are crazy cheap in the city.[1]

[1] To people without kids: that may look expensive, but hour-for-hour it's a heck of alot cheaper than daycare. Daycare in SF and most major cities is roughly $100/day, and it ain't that much cheaper anywhere else except with less formal arrangements.

That's a feature of urban life in general. Cities are forced into lottery systems to prevent segregation. So people with means self-segregate by moving away. In my case, (nowhere near SFO) my son was assigned to a school in the hood that is in the other side of my city. Just logistically it's a stupid policy -- during the afternoon it takes us almost 90 minutes to get there due to traffic.

There's more craziness in these systems. More special needs kids end in urban districts, for example. In my region a school that recently completed an Olympic swimming pool outsourced several special needs programs to a pnother district 45 minutes away by bus. Parents who need those services migrate away.

Cities aren't forced into lottery systems, they are perfectly free to allow kids to go to schools close to their home. Yes, that will result in segregation of students to generally match the segregation of residents. But artificial forced integration has it's downsides and costs, as this article shows - and IMHO it doesn't really solve anything, as the segregation of residents is not solved by randomly integrating students.

Many cities were either directed to do so by the courts or DOJ, or threatened with legal action if they didn't.

San Francisco's lottery system hasn't even succeeded at desegregating the schools.

> Why would a city actually want kids?

Long-term planning over short-term exploitation.

Being a good place to raise children is crucial to keep people in the city long-term. When people decide to stay in the city long-term and put down roots, they develop a stronger emotional attachment to that place, and invest more of their personal energy into making it better. Investing solely in young people who plan to leave introduces a pump-and-dump mentality to the city's voters and thus into its municipality. It makes it politically untenable to invest in, say, large infrastructure projects which will cause much discomfort in the short term but are necessary in the long term.

It's also necessary to combat discrimination, particularly ageism. If every "old" person who has kids moves away, then there are fewer "old" people in the city's labor market. The less visible "old" people are at work, the more that they are stereotyped and ultimately discriminated against. This reinforces a common work culture of valuing inexperienced workers over experienced workers and hurts the industry in the long term.

>Why would a city actually want kids?

School districts want kids for the same reason start-ups want customers: it's hard to scale with smaller demand. Yesterday when I was in SF, I saw a sign hanging on the fence of a schoolyard: "SUPPORT YOUR SCHOOL - BUY SCHOOL LUNCHES!" Apparently, so few students were buying school lunches (and instead bringing their own) that it was becoming more expensive to provide it for the ones that do buy it.

Children who grow up in a city go on to invest in that city. Children also require services that drive the local economy, from babysitting to clothing/toys/food.

I know you don't like sitting next to a table full of kids at a restaurant. Me neither. But children are necessary components of a thriving community.

What if SF has so much external demand that it doesn't need to generate any internal demand? As in, who cares whether anyone grows up in the city, because the job market is so strong that every available living space will be taken by someone from out of town? What happens in 30 years when there are almost no kids in the city and almost no adults are ''from'' San Francisco? Does it even matter? Maybe this is just a harbinger of things to come as the birth rate declines more broadly.

You mean what if tech is forever? It's not forever. We thought it would be forever in '99 and it collapsed. The truth is, we don't know what the future will be like, but we can be almost certain that it will include children because there will always be some people who want children. So dismantling the support system for them (or letting it die slowly) is just asking for trouble, and is short sighted. Besides, you're underestimating the value of the children's economy. From birth to move out (let's say 18), many industries serve children, including quite a few that are startups.

> We thought it would be forever in '99 and it collapsed

damn, you're right. if only the tech industry were still around.

The fact that a boom might turn into a bust is an even better reason not to encourage people to start families in a particular location.

The problem with that logic is that it leads to gold-rush/mining cities which become ghost towns when their main driver goes away.

I'm not saying that all of The city would disappear, but a flood of people leaving the city, driven out by a bust that will eventually happen, could leave large areas completely empty. That gives rise to higher crime, which increases stress on a police force that doesn't have as much taxpayer-funded support as it did before.

You need people of all ages to keep a city thriving.

because that external demand could disappear tomorrow if fashions change

This has the same weakness as investing all money in a single stock. Great when it's doing well, disaster when it's not. Diversity is key for stability and sustainable growth. What will happen to SF when the tech bubble pops?

"As San Francisco moves toward a one-industry town with soaring costs, the dearth of children is one more change that raises questions about its character."

Quote from OA, my emphasis. One industry towns don't fare well when the industry gets disrupted or ceases to be relevant.

Houses in Marin and the Peninsula are just as expensive, only slightly larger, and they get lots of kids. It's all about the schools.

Schools in SF are a mixed bag, but many of them are very good. We have a 6 and 9 year old, who started in a parochial school. We switched to a well-regarded local public school, and getting a fantastic education.

Edit: after reading some other comments, I should note, the lottery system is problematic. We got lucky and got a good school near us, and SFUSD stats show most people get one of their top few choices. But in a worst-case scenario, you have a long commute to a bad school--and you leave. The intention is good--to make good schools available to everyone, not just those who can afford the good neighborhoods. But until you land your kids in a school you're ok with, it's a big stressor.

The article mentioned Elizabeth Weise who I hadn't heard of, but just spent a good 30 minutes on her blog. It's excellent. Her "about" page summarizes why 1/3 of SF parents choose private schools. It's a pretty good proxy for why so many new parents move out before their kids are school age. She dug up another amazing stat: of all children born in San Francisco 1/4 will move out before kindergarten, 1/4 will go to private school and 1/2 will go to public school. The school district expects it's growth to be entirely from kids who live in public housing.

http://elizabethweise.com/2014/03/21/1-in-3-san-francisco-sc...

The lottery should be used for placing teachers in school not students. And it should be illegal for parents to support individual schools. With those two policies, all schools will be average - which is how it should be.

I agree with you. I currently have two kids in SFUSD as well. The lottery system has some problems, but also brings some benefits. I got lucky as well.

However, I find a lot of people erroneously believe that San Francisco schools are generally bad, or that you have to really luck out to get a good school assignment. I'd say that SF schools are mixed. If you go onto "greatschools.net" and sort by test score, you'll find that SF has an unusually high number of very high performing schools for an urban district. It also has an alarming number of poorly performing schools.

Here's the thing - do the same search on the peninsula or in marin, and you'll find essentially the same thing. The difference is that in SF, you can't automatically convert a high mortgage payment into guaranteed access to a top school. Nor does poverty condemn you to a poorly performing one.

Although a good assignment is not guaranteed, it's hardly a long shot. The way the system worked when I was going through it is that you list 7 choices. If you create a good, balanced lists, and look for some good schools that are under the radar, you do have a good (but again, by no means guaranteed) crack at a decent placement.

Of course, the reality is that high income people can and will leave if they don't get an assignment they like, so SF does lose families this way.

Often more expensive in the Peninsula. And then you have situations like Redwood City where the schools are awful but you still have bad house prices and all you can do is hope that by the time a kid is old enough for school that the influx of new tax dollars from Prop 13 property taxes that were reset to market rates has given them enough budget so they don't suck as much when your kid is ready to enter. And don't forget that any new measures that help schools tend to try to be percentage based in terms of how taxes are assessed, so new owners disproportionately shoulder the burden of improving things while those who have been here the longest and arguably gotten the most value out of the system pay a pittance.

The whole situation is horrible.

We picked Marin for the schools & to be close to nature. Lots of new neighbors are families from the city with young kids. There's a lottery here for new arrivals, so it's still a crapshoot, but the odds are better and even the least desired schools are good.

The problem is that kids are anchors and encourage a more diversified economy and workforce.

From a long term perspective, your army of high income engineers are a liability in the long term for two reasons. One, you're going to get old and systematically pushed out. And two most of these folks are in cyclical industries... boom cycles are fun, busts not so much.

I live in San Francisco (Richmond District) and I have a kid. The city is _great_ for kids because there are so many kid-friendly facilities and programs. And the city has been relentlessly dumping tons of money into those facilities and programs. It might be one of the best places in the country to raise a kid, all things considered. (Which is to say that although my kid won't be able to wonder miles away from home at the age of 6, playing in the woods from dawn to dusk like I did, there are plenty of other advantages that more than make up for it.)

Setting the aside the cost factor (which is huge, obviously, especially before they're old enough for the free daycare a la elementary school), the biggest issue is expectations. Most Americans' expectations of family life is based on a suburban ideal, whether we realize it or not. It's literally baked into our cultural DNA at this point. But those expectations won't work here, obviously. And so it's a doubly-whammy of cost and expectations.

My neighborhood is heavily immigrant--Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, and Irish--and most of the kids (there are alot!) are of those ethnicities, out of proportion to their share of the neighborhood population. It's not a coincidence[1]. For one thing, it's slightly cheaper for them because they can rent below market price through their network of families, friends, and co-workers. Secondly, their cultural expectations are different. Rather, in many cases their desires are better met by striving to stick in the neighborhood. At my local playground (3 blocks away, like most things--groceries, restaurants, schools, libraries, parks, etc) there are inevitably a few kids speaking Russian. Other than moving all the way to Sacramento, where could an immigrant or first generation Russian family move where they could still regularly speak Russian--at the playground, at church, at a restaurant, at school? The Chinese and Vietnamese have many more options in that respect.

Alot of young people move to the city and think they've shed their suburban outlook. But when the kids come they return to what they know. Because raising kids is difficult and scary, and people don't understand how heavily they'll lean on the crutches of their ingrained cultural expectations and habits. Also, because it's damned expensive.

[1] I mean, it's definitely not a coincidence which countries they're coming from. The Russian and Irish communities, for example, have been here for over a hundred years, and for various reasons I don't completely understand still sustain a steady stream of new immigrants. An Irish family (2 kids) just moved into a house on our block. And, FWIW, I'm pretty sure the husband works in the construction/contractor industry. It's certainly not all techies here; certainly not in my neighborhood, even though the median home price hovers around $1m, a tad less than the median for the city overall.

Immigrants don't come with the crazy and decadent expectations that many Americans have.

Folks uproot their lives to better theirselves and future generations. There's an explicit link to the future, and little people are required for that formula to work.

Contrast that to HN threads that have this weird dynamic of people who see children as a nuisance or taking away from computer time. Personally, I find that outlook deeply cynical and depressing... that's why we need immigrants!

Agree, SF is awesome for kids, at least until school age (not that it's bad for school-age, I just personally have no experience with that yet) - it's almost always nice out so they never get stuck inside, and there are tons of programs and things to do.

Not sure if you're still reading, but there's definitely a life pattern to this.

I'd say SF is great for

0-5: Fine to be in SF, doesn't make much of a difference. Parents take you everywhere, but it's all pretty compact and there are lots of fun programs. The academy of sciences, the various discovery museums, and playgrounds You're often driving regardless of whether you're in a city.

6-11: Better to be in the 'Burbs. I grew up in SF, west of twin peaks, in the 70s, and back then, it was an ocean of kids playing outside, unsupervised. There's much less of that now. At this stage of life, the kids in safe suburbs may actually develop more independence than the city kids, because it's safer for them to be outside, riding off on bikes, and so forth (really, even in the 70s, parents in many SF neighborhoods would say "you're being too loud, get out of the house and don't come back until dinner" - you were expected to be in earshot when dinner was called, but eh, everyone was called in at that hour). I do see plenty of kids playing outside in SF, once you get to the medium density neighborhoods, but overall, my guess (don't really know, I grew up in SF and am raising my kids here) is that this is better in the burbs.

12-15: Better to be in SF. You learn to get around on the bus, muni, and bart, you can go visit friends at distance, you can grab your skateboard and explore the city, usually nearby where you live. Your independent mobility is vastly better than a car dependent suburban kid.

16-18: Better to be in SF. You start getting more interested in more cultural and adult activities. The drinking age in SF (the US) will limit your access to some cultural activities for some time, but you can go to coffee shops, art galleries, museums, musical events (some good jazz takes place in coffee shops rather than bars).

EDIT - eh, figuring it's pretty clear this is all opinion, and a bit from the hip. But a lot of this is actually the difference between SF and exurbs, not really so much suburbs. There are suburbs that are more accessible on bikes/buses, with enough going on to be interesting to older kids.

> For me, it feels like the article could have been a lot shorter

This attitude is emblematic of why people don't want kids. Attention starved minds can't endure long, narrative type articles; the absolute last thing they could comprehend is the long haul effort of raising kids.

I don't agree with Peter Thiel often but I do agree with his quote mentioned in the article - SF is "structurally hostile to families."

As someone who is trying to raise school-age kids in San Francsico the insanity of the school lottery process is one of the greatest problems. We have so many friends who drive an extra hour every morning to take their kids to their algorithmically chosen school across the city. This when there is a great school in walking distance.

Don't get me started on Algebra. SF school district has banned algebra in middle schools.

My happiest friends with kids in the city home-school.

Public transportation is OK for adults, but if you have more than one kid good luck. That's why you see in this report that parents with kids are driving everywhere.

And of course, space. Since SF won't build, there is no space.

The parks are great, the playgrounds are great. Most neighborhoods give you everything you need in walking distance: park, playground, library, grocery. Except schools. You're going to drive past your local school to get to the "fairly chosen" one.

We had three candidates running for school board who supported neighborhood schools and an end to this madness. They all lost.

Peter Thiel is brilliantly observant and often makes correct observations, it's the conclusions he draws afterwards that I find to be specious.

Making observations is much easier than coming up with solutions. Marx's analysis of capitalism was right on too.

... as was Ayn Rand's analysis of authoritarian socialism and communism.

Pointing out flaws, contradictions, and systematic shortcomings is so easy that I've lost a great deal of respect for it. Solutions are hard, and "magic happens here" is not a solution.

> SF school district has banned algebra in middle schools.

WTF? What's their rationale?

They did not ban algebra in middle schools. They adopted a program that follows the Common Core math sequence, which moves about 40% of what used to be in 8th grade algebra to high school algebra. It also adds some things to middle school that used to be later, if at all, such as statistics and geometry.

The whole sequence, from kindergarten through high school, can be seen here: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

Very educational link. We're holding back the third of students who certainly should be "creating and rearranging equations" in 7th grade (frankly, who should have been doing so in 5th grade, if decent teachers had been available), for whose benefit? The middle third who will struggle to do so in 11th grade, or the other third who will never even attempt it?

Then we wonder why "STEM" employers are always trying to import labor from overseas. One doubts those workers are coming from schools that assume all children are equally talented.

While this article on [1] priceonomics covers the issue really well, the given reason is to ensure all kids enter highschool at the same level.

[1] https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...

That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. When I entered high school (central Maryland), I already had two years of algebra under my belt, which allowed me to jump ahead in HS, which then allowed me to jump ahead in college and take more advanced courses than someone who had to start from the beginning would have had time for.

This is ridiculously short-sighted.

Same. This is precisely the wrong way to approach equality: make everyone equally poor. Education is to educate people, why would SF's authority feel the need to regulate what and how much amount people should be educated?

This feels so authoritarian for a city that is branded for liberalism.

While I myself am fairly left-of-center, I acknowledge that "equality of outcomes" is one of the darker undercurrents of liberal thought. There are an amazing number of people who would prefer that everyone be held back, rather than suffer the inequality of some getting further ahead than others.

It's categorically easier to slow or dumb down something than to improve it. It takes exponentially more energy to fight the second law of thermodynamics.

No child left behind means no child gets ahead.

Yes, this makes me think of the idiotic laws in the Province of Quebec which don't allow parents to send their kids to English public schools. The only exception is if at least one parent did attends English public school (which is a minority of the population). Of course, sending your kids to a English private school is always possible ($$$).

So, you have a whole bunch of kids whose parents were immigrants and learned to speak french and go to english school (becoming bilingual, or better).

But, the white french majority of the population is mostly uni lingual because this opportunity of english immersion in school is not accessible to them publicly by law. Talk about no child getting ahead ... Learning english used to be seen as a cultural threat in French Quebec (long time ago), and trying to protect the French language ends up screwing most of the population stuck in 1 language with all the economic, financial and political ramifications of such ridiculous laws.

You're proving their point: you had an "unfair" advantage.

Ugh. So sad. Essentially disincentivizing higher performing kids from getting ahead. Hope I never have to deal with that in our school district.

I somehow doubt they've banned it in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan or China.

> SF school district has banned algebra in middle schools.

Surely there are some kids who don't learn it in elementary school. Are they supposed to wait until high school?

My kids started algebra in elementary school as well. This is pathetic.

Haha, I'm from Central Europe and I competed in Maths Olympics since I was like 10. (Its a competition mostly in central/eastern europe).

This was around 2000 and we didnt have internet at home yet. So there was nothing better to do. Little worried about future generations.

But this is really pathetic. to ban algebra. I would leave the country.

> But this is really pathetic. to ban algebra. I would leave the country.

If mathematics education at the pre-university level is a priority for you then I'm not sure that leaving the country is the best approach.

https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2016

Elite results do not say much about average education. UK also scored high on olympiad, but average UK public school is much worse compared to Central Europe.

It's a question about what you want to optimize for. I believe that societies need elites for progress. People who can really push things forward tend to be those with the highest innate ability who happen to have an education that pushes them to the limits of their ability. Optimizing schools to raise the minimum or the average education level seems to have the effect that the maximum suffers.

There are great arguments why you'd want to raise the average education level, but I think sacrificing the best minds to this cause is short-sighted.

But elite education is not attainable for all pocket sizes.

So China and US are at the top - but it's same as Canada/Russia having best ice hockey players. There is a huge pool to select from.

Wait. Your kid is assigned a school across town and it's up to you to get them there (no school bus)? What if you just can't?

SF parent here.

The original idea was to mix up the student diversity. Poor kids would sometimes attend schools in expensive school distracts - Kids from expensive neighborhoods would attend poorer schools.

Hilariously not thought through. (just like rent control). All that actually happened was the rich kids yanked their children out of public school, the "in the middle parents" put their kids into catholic school (which is 1/5 the cost of private here). The poor kids then had to beg their parents to get across the city -- WHICH THE PARENTS could not. What a mess.

Also, the rich folks get a place in the poorer neighborhoods (we've talked to people that just pay an additional rent and don't even move there) which then gets them their first choice.

Exactly.

And the poor kids are the one which end up suffering the most since they are mainly single parent families and/or they really do not have time driving kids around.

Yes, the city got rid of school buses.

BUT, they still keep the different morning start times left over from bussing. Some schools start at 7:30, some 8:15, some 9 - these are all things you have to consider when picking your lottery list.

Just for the record, we picked 30 schools and spent oct & nov touring schools. The system is ridiculous and a failed experiment in my mind.

Just suck it up. http://www.sfusd.edu/en/enroll-in-sfusd-schools/how-student-...

I see kids being transported by grandparents or carpooling with another parent who has space.

> Don't get me started on Algebra. SF school district has banned algebra in middle schools

WTF? Got a link?

Personal story here. I have a 2-year old, and used to own a condo in what is now called Mission Bay. Here are some factors that we had to consider when planning on a child:

-we are not sure how many children we want, and didn't want to lock ourselves into a lifestyle where that decision was driven by finances.

-our 1-bdm 900-sqft condo is not a bad size but still woefully undersized for 1, much less 2, children. The couple on the floor above us had a baby in their unit, and they told us it was hellish.

- there was a park nearby, which is nice, but the number of dogs we see reliving themselves on that patch of grass makes me think I'll never let my child play on that grass.

-people drive aggressively through my street, and I'd be terrified to let my child play on my sidewalk.

-it's really hard to find daycare in SF, and what you do find is expensive. A co-worker told me she got on a school's waiting list before she got pregnant. And when you do find a space, it'll be $2k+ per month per child.

-the public education system in SF is opaque and confusing; there is no assurance that your child will be sent to the school geographically closest, and everybody has a horror story about a friend's cousin's brother who moved away from SF after getting their child assigned to a terrible school across town. I don't know that I'll be able to afford private school if needed (and, see aforementioned comment about finances).

-when it comes right down to it, I want my child to have the sort of childhood I had, which is from a middle American suburb, with the parks, bike rides, and lemonade stands that that entails.

Are any of these 100% accurate? probably not. Maybe I was horribly misinformed. As you note, most of my info came from conversations with other people who already had kids. But that's how most people learn, and I imagine it's how others learn the info they use to make their decisions too. So here I sit, commenting from my home in the East bay. I miss SF, sure, but you know what? It's pretty nice out here, too.

Our son was born in a 230sqft studio. We moved to a 75sqmtr, 760sqft, 3BR apartment. This is in Paris where anything over 500sqft is considered luxurious. Somehow with kids, visitors, and our stuff we managed to make it work. I honestly believe most Americans are latent hoarders. Just buy whatever's on sale with no thought on where it fits into our lifestyle.

BTW, everything else I agree with. Childcare is criminally expensive here.

I agree, but the European apartments also typically have much more practical use of space. The U.S. condo market in particular seems aimed at single people or couples who want to have cocktail parties all the time, followed by retreating to their luxurious master bedroom suite for a romantic evening. Or at least imagine that they would, so are looking for a place that looks impressive for that use. The focus is on big, airy open spaces (open-plan living/dining/kitchen areas), plus a large master bedroom suite with attached master bathroom, walk-in closets, etc.

One reason Americans find it hard to imagine raising a family in an 900 sq ft (85 m^2) unit is that if you design it this way, it really isn't a lot of space for a family, or at least not space laid out in a useful way for a family. That much space would typically be only a 1-bd in SF or one of the newer NYC buildings (maybe even a studio). While in much of Europe it'd be a 2-bd, or 3-bd, and even compared to American 2-bds the space would be laid out more practically (e.g. less space devoted to those giant bathrooms and walk-in closets).

I was about to make the same comment. It's amazing how much the layout affects the usability of the space. I hate, hate, hate those huge master bathrooms and walk in closets because they eat space. Also common where I am: large hallways and entryways that could have been part of a room instead, and an open seating area at the top of the stairs. (What is that even for? Why not just make it an enclosed office. I don't want to hang out on a couch at the top of a stairway). Older 1300 sq ft houses often feel just as spacious as new construction that is 2000 sq ft because they have no wasted space.

I'm about to move into a postwar apartment, 900sqft, in Miami. It is 250sqft smaller than my 90s built hi-rise apartment. What I noticed is the ceiling is higher and the windows are larger. It just feels like a much larger, brighter space.

I guess at some point something changed. The layout of houses in the US just lost the ability to be functional and tasteful. I did lose the walk-in closet, dual vanity sinks, gift wrapping room, and letter writing room (joking on the last 2).

Honest question: do you know of examples of plans/layout diagrams of family apartments in Europe? I'd love to see how they compare.

Here[0] is the layout for a typical F4 apartment near my area in Paris. This posting just has the floorplan and not interior shots. It's 4 rooms, 2 bedrooms, a salon, and dining. These are middle class, 150 y.o. apartments, not the shining chrome and glass architect wankfests that are popular now.

[0] https://www.century21.fr/trouver_logement/detail/1339155193/...

Not that I disagree, but one of the vagaries of the SF property market is that 2-bdm units are much more expensive than 1-bdm units, even for the same total sqft. I assume that's because would-be-landlords expect to rent 2-bdm units to 2 single SW developers, not a family of 3. And yes, as other posters note, 1-bdm are all high-celinged, glossy units with chrome fixtures and hardwood floors.

I think it has more to do with developers building 1BR units than 2,3, or 4BR apartments. For example, there is no shortage of studio and 1BR flats in London or Paris. But if you have a small family and need 2BR, well, the market demands what it demands.

Friends of ours even went so far as to buy 2 1BR that were above and below, knock a hole out and put in a staircase. We thought of doing the same, buy 2 adjoining studio flats. We lucked into an abandoned apartment (which presented some other problems).

It's a shame most new build apartments ins SF are so horribly designed. 900-sqft is enough for a comfortable 3 bedroom apartment. In an SF new build it probably means a deep, dark open plan space with windows on only one small wall.

I'm not sure I'd say comfortable. Three 10'x10' bedrooms would leave you with 600 sqft remaining to play with, and that's not a lot of room for two bathrooms and a decent-sized living space and kitchen, not to mention closets and any kind of storage space (which the need for increases with the number of people who live there).

My 1BR is around 900 sq ft, and I'm having trouble envisioning how you'd carve two more bedrooms out of it and still have a nice space. One more bedroom, sure, but two more feels like it would be a stretch.

It's an interesting exchange to read for Russian because here it is somewhat common to have two generations (e.g. my grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, two nephews and a small dog) living in a 2BR 500 sq ft flat.

Gives me kinda different perspective on the poverty of everyday Soviet living, eh. It's slowly changing for the better, though.

Again, it's a matter of perspective. I've seen quite a few well designed 1 bath/1 bed places for 600 sq ft or less. Not hard for me to envision turning the bedroom into another bathroom, with some space left over, and you've then hit pretty much all of your criteria.

Many would not consider 900sqft comfortable for a 1bd/1ba let alone 3/1 or 3/2.

It's interesting to see such a different perspective: my 2-bed apartment is 645sqft.

It seems the average house in the USA is over twice the size of the average house in the UK [1], and is significantly larger than many countries.

[1] http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house

Your reference says that Americans think they need ~900 sqft per person, which I agree is around what the people I know think is enough. So I guess I'm pretty average in my thinking.

That's 83 square meters! Here in the UK my four-bedroom house is extravagantly large for just the two of us at 90m^2.

That speaks at length about the prevalence of extra large flats and bedrooms in the USA.

Why I didn't move to SF (even though pretty much all my friends live and/or work there):

Cost used to be a factor but I think I could afford to live in SF at this point in my career if I made a few sacrifices.

Really it comes down to:

_Homeless people_ They are everywhere. They are yelling (tourette?). They are drunk. They are falling asleep standing up at the bus stop (heroin). They have followed me, calling me a 'billionaire', demanding money and making awful comments about my wife. They pee in the street right in front of you. Half the city smells like urine, and EVERY enclosed space that homeless people can get into smells like urine.

Why would anyone want to have their children near that every day?

I'm sure someone, likely making $150k-$200k in salary and too busy "disrupting" the pet food industry via drone delivery to have the time for volunteering in their community, will be along shortly to tell you what an awful person you are for feeling such things. And while it's important to be mindful and sympathetic to the plight of those less fortunate, particularly those with mental health or substance abuse problems, I can definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to deal with the issues you've described, especially when paying $3k/month for an apartment.

As an anecdote, dealing with other homeless people was by far the most difficult part of being homeless in SF as a young adult.

I'm not as positive about it. I think volunteering is often subsidizing something that we should be fighting against. Most of the people in line for free soup can be found just hours later purchasing alcohol or drugs.

If you have a famine or a war or serious poverty, or it is effecting young children, then I think we should put everything else aside and give and volunteer until it hurts.

If on the other hand we have some nasty person who lives on your front porch drinking himself unconscious every afternoon, I don't want them to be fed or clothed. I want life to be as painful as we can make it for them so that they either change their behavior or die more quickly. It's harsh, but I don't see why someone has the right to degrade the lives of everyone around them and have those very people feed and clothe them. If we can offer people help that is effective, we should offer it, even if it is expensive, but otherwise we shouldn't feel guilty about trying to keep nasty people away from our families and ourselves.

I don't wish for this to be confrontational, but I think you may be underestimating how deeply debilitating substance abuse problems can be. I firmly believe that it is a disease and should be treated as such. It also isn't a self inflicted disease like some like to make it out to be. I have friends who grew up in such horrible conditions that it's almost miraculous that they have come out of such an environment and made it to adulthood, although not all of them have.

I grew up poor but from a generally stable family and through both my own poor decisions and some circumstances outside of my control I ended up homeless. I never suffered from addiction or mental health issues and I still ended up on the streets, so I can sympathize with how hard it must be to tackle those issues simultaneously.

I'll agree with you that we should do much more to tackle these issues early on before they turn into more chronic problems later in life. The initial cost would be expensive but it wouldn't surprise me if it ended up being cheaper in the long run.

Just to be clear, if there is any effective thing we can do, we should do it, even if the cost is extremely high.

However, if there is nothing effective we can do to help, we should accept that and move on to a strategy of preventing homeless people from making all the rest of our lives worse.

I would further argue that making something easier will lead to more of it, and making it harder will lead to less of it. However, even if displacing or containing homelessness away from the rest of us doesn't reduce it, it will improve the quality of life for everyone in the city.

Consider housing the person before murdering them via starvation or whatever you had in mind.

Can't you see, their condition is a manifestation of your thinking. What if instead, we took the view that they ought to be guaranteed housing, schooling, healthcare and food. And all this at minor inconvenience to you, some money. Maybe you and your boss already have more than enough money and looking for a way to improve your quality of life and incidentally help someone else too?

It's not a 'minor inconvenience' to have random mentally ill people constantly near my children and to have to be hyper vigilant all the time.

I'm not suggesting anyone be murdered. I'm suggesting that if someone is given $5 and they haven't eaten in 3 days, and they choose to buy heroin or gin with it, they are going to die pretty soon. The alternative world where you stop that death, fix them up and send them right back out to destroy themselves just the same, with the same conclusion, but with a much longer timeline, isn't a better or more compassionate world, it's a morally lazy world where people make believe that they are doing something 'good' by delaying a death while doing nothing to improve that very life, and simply prolong a horrible life. In the meantime that miserable existence makes everyone else worse off, and the city unlivable.

I'm certainly not calling for anyone to be murdered or anyone's rights to be violated in any way, I am very much for not subsidizing the behavior by delivering sandwiches to people so they don't have to take a break from their drinking.

Maybe there is a misunderstanding. I said it's a minor inconvenience to pony up for shelter. Nor do I see where you figured I wouldn't try to improve their life.

For your sake, just hope the robots don't feel the same as you when they takeover. "Oh, he'll never figure out the system, let's let him die."

You're acting like 'housing them' isn't something people have tried over and over. It's super obvious. It doesn't work.

Well, it does work, I mean it does provide protection from the weather. However, you can't trust random people with access to something without supervision, because many will completely destroy it. You can't provide personal supervision to each person so that they can have a private space, because that would cost an incredible amount of money. Finally you can offer some kind of barracks/homeless shelter environment where you have an open space that is easy to supervise to the level of preventing arson and other overt destructive acts. HOWEVER, this means bringing together a bunch of homeless people in one space, and you can't provide enough supervision to prevent them from victimizing each other. Read up on the topic, time and time again homeless people will say that the most dangerous thing about being homeless is you have no protection from the other homeless people.

So on a more personal level, do you really think that super, super obvious ideas haven't been thought of before, and the world just needs someone like you to swoop in and say 'give them shelter!'?

3k? (studio?) Please send me the link.

I read comments about this phenomenon in SF regularly here, so it must be really bad. But as an European who has made some trips to America but never been to SF in particular, it's difficult to understand why there is such a high density of unpleasant homeless people specifically in that city, and not in others. Anyone care to explain or hypothesize on reasons?

According to this study of homeless people in nearby Santa Cruz (https://blog.civinomics.com/2015/04/07/the-reality-of-homele...), ~1/3 the climate, ~1/5 each the social programs and lifestyle, followed by several other factors. I imagine the views of SF homeless are similar.

I visited SF a tourist just over a year ago, and I didn't experience any of the issues being described.

Sure, in places, there were homeless people sitting in doorways, and some of them asked whether I could spare any change - much like homeless people in many other cities. I didn't experience any of them shouting at me, shooting up drugs, demanding money, or peeing in the street. I didn't notice anywhere smelling of urine (although the sea lions around Pier 39 where a little bit stinky).

SF has its issues, like most cities around the world, but I don't think they're as severe or widespread as is being suggested.

I can imagine that it's possible to visit SF and not experience aggressive panhandling, the shouts of people with mental health issues, public urination and defecation, and open drug use, but I find it very hard to believe you could experience much of the city without the smell of urine at least a few times.

Even touristy, well trafficked areas, Powell St station for instance, will very often smell of urine.

On my most recent visit back to the city around the holidays, I saw a young looking couple shooting up on 21st and Valencia, albeit this was at night, and I almost had someone poop on me while waiting at the crosswalk at Sutter and Montgomery, this was at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon.

  I find it very hard to believe you could experience much of
  the city without the smell of urine at least a few times.

To be fair, there are parts of all cities that I expect to smell of urine: there's something about stairwells in multi-storey car parks that seems to demand it [1].

So it's quite possible that I did experience that, but in a context where it was such a commonplace experience that it simply didn't stick in my memory.

  I almost had someone poop on me while waiting at the
  crosswalk at Sutter and Montgomery

I can't help wondering, in a kind of morbid fascination sense, the mechanics of this. Was someone hanging their bum out of the window? Crouching down next to you whilst you were waiting for the lights to change?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/mar/27/ncp-...

Good point about the multi story garages. And I apologize if my comment came off as too dismissive. As you said, we're all dealing in anecdata here and your anecdotes are just as valid as mine. Although, I will reiterate that in my experience both as a normal resident and a homeless resident of SF, I found the homeless population particularly aggressive and at times unstable and violent.

Regarding the narrowly escaping pooping incident, yes, I was waiting for the lights to change and not paying much attention when an older woman crouched down on the curb 3-4 feet to my side and relived herself. Without getting into too much detail, what came out was rather liquified and I only noticed her as I saw it hit the pavement in front of me.

Good grief, I can see why a bizarre incident like that would stick in your mind.

That said, I can relate a story where I was ordering takeaway on a Friday evening in (the UK city) Bristol, when one of the customers started weeing where they were sat, on a bar stool at the counter.

I think some of these incidents are a reflection of cities in general, but also - like shark attacks and plane crashes - they're talked about because they are so unusual and rare. The consequent discussions aren't necessarily proportionate to the number of incidents.

I also wonder whether the "must relocate to San Francisco" phenomenon has brought in people who have previously lived in more suburban or rural surroundings, and are attributing their changed experiences specifically to SF, rather than to cities in general.

Or it could simply be that SF does have a significantly different homeless population to most cities, which would make for a fascinating study in behavioural science. It sounds like your experiences support that, and I'll keep an open mind to the question.

You make an excellent point again on the risk of letting personal experiences unduly influence perspective.

And I've embarrassingly never considered your point about the transient nature of tech employment in SF possibly bringing people into contact with the homeless that don't have any prior experience dealing with them. Great point and I can definitely see how this could color their experience.

You visited a bunch of the 'clean' tourist neighborhoods. How can you actually think you are qualified to have an opinion here after visiting part of a city one time?

  How can you actually think you are qualified to have an opinion
  here after visiting part of a city one time?

Well, you know what they say: "Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks."

There's very little data in these comments. Lots of anecdata, and I'm presenting an alternative perspective with my anecdata, but until there's actual data in the discussion, I'm not sure that we should be dismissing someone else's opinion out of hand.

From the context: parent said "as a European who has made some trips to America but never been to SF in particular", so I thought it appropriate to reply with my experience as a European who has been to SF in particular. My experience there was simply my experience: I didn't observe the antisocial behaviour being described, so it's fair to say that it's not common behaviour (in the areas I visited).

That's not to say it doesn't exist, or that it isn't more common elsewhere in SF. That said, homeless people do tend to congregate in areas where tourists visit, so you would expect the density of homeless people to be highest in those tourist areas, and for those places to experience the most severe issues.

I'll do my best to give some reasons but this list is by no means exhaustive. In general I would say there are two main issues at play, one is that SF is relatively welcoming of homeless people, the second is that most other US cities are incredibly unwelcoming. So you end up with a homeless population both being pulled to SF and at the same time pushed into SF by other cities.

Some of this is simple geography. It's much easier to be homeless in a dense (by US standards) city than a sprawled out suburb. SF also has decent public transit, again largely due to the necessary density, which makes being homeless easier. SF also has a relatively mild climate. Yes, the fog and the dampness/rain do suck, but it rarely gets either extremely cold or hot.

Outside of geography, some cities are known for being extremely hostile to the homeless through policy and actively try and push their homeless out. I believe some cities, Las Vegas if my memory is correct, have been caught giving bus tickets to SF to their homeless. I know there are cities in Orange County where the police have been known to pick up homeless people and drop them off in neighboring cities. So, SF tends to get stuck with homeless problems that should be shared between many other cities/regions.

SF also tends to have pretty good homeless services in terms of things like food kitchens and temporary housing/shelters.

I will also add that having grown up partly in SF, and having spent some time living on the streets (more accurately parks) there, I don't think SF's reputation as a dirty city is entirely due to the homeless population. The people in SF, even those with multi million dollars houses, just don't really seem to care much. I've seen plenty of what I assume to be well employed people litter and no one really bats an eye. It also isn't unusual to see non-homeless people urinating in the streets after bars close. Again, I just don't think there is a critical mass of people that care enough, and I get the strong impression that those that do care don't really want to say anything since it could be interpreted as being intolerant.

I think the fact that you have a large number of young single tech workers who probably don't have plans to stay in the city long term leads to a lack of civic pride. Additionally, while there are many wonderful aspects of the tolerance that SF is know for, I do believe that many people end up being too accepting of what is and isn't acceptable public behavior. This is probably complicated by the fact that I don't actually think SF is nearly as progressive as it claims, it's mostly virtue signaling. It's much easier to say you're progressive by tolerating all sort of behaviors that aren't particularly healthy, than it is to try and help the underlying causes of those behaviors.

It's very late here so my apologies if this wasn't a good explanation.

  I don't think SF's reputation as a dirty city is entirely due to the homeless population

In some contexts, littering almost seems to be a brand of counterculture rebellion. Recurring problems at Delores Park[0] unrelated to homeless gatherings is a classic example.

[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dolores-Park-Friends-w...

I think it was an excellent explanation, thanks. It sounds like a perfect storm of factors, with no obvious solution.

I've read that a large proportion of the homeless in SF are from SF. My hunch is that the economics of the city are causing a lot of lower income people to be placed at risk of losing their housing options. The difference may be in how European and American cities treat people who are "almost" homeless.

I have Tourette's syndrome. It's not Tourette's syndrome. It's a variety of other afflictions.

The article tries to pin the phenomenon on high housing prices, Google, Twitter, etc but the numbers aren't really there. The big drop in the percent of families with children in SF happened between the 1970 and 1990 census. In 1970 24% of households had children, then 19% in 1980, 19% in 1990, and 19% and 16% in the subsequent decades. The share of children in the population had already fallen from 25% to 15% by 1990, and is down to 13% today.

All of that happened before software was even a thing in this region, when the major industries were defense and semiconductors. And it happened regardless of housing prices going up or down.

Umm, you realize that the crazy housing bubble of the 1970s is what got us Prop 13, right? 1980 in San Francisco was quite the crazy time (I think someone had linked to a great nytimes article from that period on HN in the last year or so).

I've observed what seems to be a growing sentiment among 20- to early 30-somethings that is... "child hostile" (?)—no babies or young children doing in public spaces what babies or young children are wont to do: cry, fuss, whine, speak loudly, etc. Just seemed to be a notable trend, especially when it came to places like restaurants and airplanes.

I'm not suggesting this is the sole root of the problem, just that it could be a factor when you have a city flush with a demographic that is probably the least likely, after teenagers, to want to stand out for the "wrong" reasons. Who wants to be "those people" at the trendy restaurant?

I recently had an experience with this type that was so absurd it belonged in a movie. Waiting in line at a bakery with my kid (who was uncharacteristically silent) and a woman in front of us with a newborn who was crying loudly. A mid 20s woman came in with her dog and immediately started the passive aggressive complaining about people who bring their crying babies into public. And while she was complaining about it, her dog shit on the floor. And when someone pointed it out to her, she said "What can you do? She's a dog!" and proceeded to not clean it up.

I try my best to raise my kid with good behavior in public, and I am peeved by parents who obviously do not...but there are some times that children have learning moments in public and it is part of being a human to understand that. Complaining about children having their childish moments in public is near sociopathic levels of self centeredness. The best you can do is ignore the sociopaths and hope their karma comes elsewhere.

Do you have kids? Because, as a parent, I don't care what might be bothering some childless 20 something. On the other hand, who brings their kid to the trendy restaurant?

>I don't care what might be bothering [someone]

Sorry, but people like you are what creates this 'hostile' attitude.

You're supposed to care whether your kids are bothering people.

It depends on the place. If you're in an expensive restaurant or a movie theater, yes, you should most definitely care if your kids are bothering people.

If you're in the supermarket or some other public place, well, kids are kids, and shopping has to get done. All you can do is ensure that a tantrum is always wasted effort, and little kids stay in the novelty race car-shaped cart so that they aren't toppling the pyramid of soup cans onto themselves.

The problem is some people are so out of touch with a reality that includes children that they become too easily bothered.

A child throwing a tantrum is bothering. A child just saying something out loud or running around a bit is just being a child.

I care whether my children behave themselves. I'm too busy caring about my kids to worry about what other people might think. In my experience, most people are reasonable, but some are not. I don't waste time on those if I've got more important people to worry about.

If I would care about everything what someone could bother I would have to lock my kids into the house the whole day.

My view is that a child throwing a tantrum in the supermarket, and a 20-something being bothered by it, are two sides of the same coin. And in fact, I care about the consequences of either behavior, but not the causes.

Of course we care at some level. We're programmed to care, otherwise kids wouldn't have developed the tantrum gene. If my baby has a tantrum in the supermarket, I will swing into tantrum mode and deal with it.

If my kid reaches the age of 20-something, and expresses hostility towards the reasonably expected range of human behaviors observed in a typical civic environment, well, I hope that doesn't happen.

Sure, it takes a village to raise a child. But if it's somebody else's baby, or somebody else's 20-something, then in fact I don't care about it in the same way as if it's my own.

That's a fairly self-centered view you have there. Why should anyone care what bothers you?

In my opinion the more self-centered view is going around doing exactly what you want without any concession to how it affects other people.

I regularly think about whether my actions are bothering anyone else. It's the opposite of self-centeredness, and something that many modern parents fail to do.

That isn't the opposite of self-centeredness. In fact odds are you avoid behaviors that annoy you. You simply aren't gifted enough to know the range of behavior that might bother others. To think you do is arrogant and more than a little self-centered.

High rent and home prices in SF have in recent history been driven by the finance industry, not tech. This trend has been ongoing since the mid 1980s. Articles and popular sentiment calling out the tech industry divert attention away from the true causes of this inflation on the demand side. On the supply side, of course SF has failed dramatically due to Nimbyism and the powerful entrenched interests of the landed gentry and real estate industries who work to keep housing supply limited.

As a SF resident since 2010 with a now 3 year old (Pac Heights pre-kid, Outer Richmond post), we are most likely to leave the city before he starts kindergarten. Although our preference would be to stay, the major factors are 1) home prices and 2) the school situation. We are renting at what would now be considered a reasonable rate, but our building has recently changed hands and the new owner's modus operandi is to Ellis or OMI as soon as our protected status is ended this summer. While we could afford to buy in the city, we would not be able to simultaneously budget for private schools. The public school system is in our opinion, far too much risk. Yes there are good schools, but even the best have crowd control problems for simple demographic reasons. Fully one third of SF school children attend private schools, and among the remaining two thirds there is an unfortunately sizable constituent whose family backgrounds are not as committed to education as we are. While we chafe at the insular homogeneity of the suburbs, we are also not so blind as to place our son in a school where significant resources must be expended on crowd control at the expense of quality education.

It's a tough bind to be in. Just yesterday I attended the grand opening ceremony for Alamo school's playground where supervisor Mark Farrell and Sandra Lee Fewer were both highly encouraging for families to stay in the Richmond. I don't doubt their sincerity and I do believe they are doing everything in their power to make the city more family friendly. But my household simply does not have the resouces to compete with all-cash offers from overseas investors or investment bankers. It will be sad to bid farewell to this city, but education for my son is far more important to me.

I found the amount of 'all-cash' offers in sf totally disturbing. SF homes are from 1-3million in a decent area. That amount of money can't be saved by working. That is money passed down or achieved by some nutty liquidity event - but those are quite rare. Where is this money coming from? This money is from Trusts [1] with hidden directors and foreigners (from politically unstable areas) using land as a great place to secure their money. If you own a deed that is registered with sf county - good luck to china, venezula, or russian officials trying to take it. Transferring titles is a circus - even if you live here. Thus your cash is secure, and you can continue your shady dealings in those countries not to worry about the current political winds.

Example of trusts: [1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-suing-Academy-of-Ar... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/all-cash-buyers-rea...

> The city has also invested millions in upgrading parks, according to Phil Ginsburg, the general manager of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.

I'm not sure infrastructure is the issue here. Bay area parks can be a bit, well, heavy on needles and doodoo.

The main problem is the cost of housing. You can have the best parks. You can have the best schools. But when your city's median home price is seven figures and rising, it's not affordable for people to raise a family in your city.

Wealthy people raise families too. The GP is right, the problem is that SF parks are unsafe for children. Needles, human waste, etc. SF parks are very hard-hit by the homeless problem. I don't claim to know how to fix it, but I notice that many plausible solutions are struck down because, roughly speaking, they're not nice to the homeless people leaving shit and needles everywhere.

As someone with two school aged kids in SF, I can say with some confidence that you are overstating this. I live south of 280, and I've gone to a ton of playgrounds around glen park, sunny side, mission terrace, and the sunset. Yes, there is a homeless presence in and near playgrounds, and some areas get pretty bad.

But the hyperbole gets ridiculous. Seriously, you'd think you're dodging human shit and needles every third step in every corner of SF. I have spent a great deal of time in SF playgrounds over the last decade (in the aforementioned neighborhoods), and the playgrounds are very safe for children, and don't have shit and needles everyone.

Both points are correct. Unsafe parks are bad, but wealthy people also tend to raise smaller families than less wealthy people.

it's not affordable for people to raise a family in your city

It's not quite as bad south of San Francisco. But still bad.

A while ago I worked in the Oregon office of a Bay Area high tech company. I was down in the Bay Area for a work/social occasion. I was sitting at a table with a group of engineers. It was dinner, so the talk turned from work to things like family.

And that's when I learned they were all "DINKs". Dual Income, No Kids.

This was years ago, and even then people in the Bay Area found it hard to afford children. The median price of houses has easily doubled since then.

It made me really sad. The Bay Area is just so different from most of the rest of the country.

The sad thing is, many might move away but the job market is unique here. The reason other housing markets are so much cheaper is in part due to Prop 13 but also due to lack of great jobs or a large number of jobs. That reduction of job risk carries a cost of living premium.

One thing to point out-- the inefficiency of Prop 13 makes it much more difficult for families to grow.

As this article[0] points out, only 30% of three-bedroom households in SF have any children at all.

[0] http://sf.curbed.com/2017/1/19/14327998/san-francisco-famili...

Prop 13, along with rent control, at least the non-means tested variety, are definitely huge impediments to allowing SF to become a more family friendly city.

Much of the anti density/development uproar is rooted in those issues.

America is really killing itself slowly (if people stop having kids we'll die out eventually but terrible economic consequences will hit much earlier) because of how bad the policies here are. Family values is just something conservatives like to blather about while doing everything to make people not wanna have full fledged families.

Having kids shouldn't be this difficult and it isn't in countries where the government has common sense policies to actually support family values but in US half the country has been brainwashed to think of them as evil socialism.

I know many Europeans with kids and they seem to be much less stressed out than Americans, still have time for hobbies and are genuinely enjoying having kids. It turns out that having kids doesn't have to be completely overwhelming when you have long maternity leave, government providing free day care and great public schools in your area (none of that lottery politically correct idiocy) plus parents who aren't living thousands of miles who prefer spending their retirement playing infinite rounds of golf and going on cruises over being involved grandparents.

The government system and the individualistic, selfish mindset of Americans (both things that we delusionally pride ourselves on) is the cause of many major problems here and many people are still unwilling to even admit them.

Europe's natural population growth is largely negative too, so it's no utopia over there either.

I grew up in eastern Europe, and work in the US, so I've got perspective on both cultures. The biggest difference that I can see is that families in Europe tend to stay closer together, and grandparents, aunts and uncles help with child rearing, which is a huge help! Here, in the SF Bay Area, we're a society of immigrants who have severed those links. I've been working in tech in and around SF for 20+ years, and it's rare to meet someone with family in the area. All the growth here has been from immigration, foreign and domestic. People in the US really do seem to move a lot for work.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?

US - 1.9 births per woman EU - 1.5 births per woman

In many places in western Europe we look at US policies to try to increase births.

That looks like a mean, but what's the distribution? And since this is births per woman so far in their life (I guess), how old are the women?

One other cause could be that silicon valley tech companies "is about infantilizing people" in the words of the late Aaron Swartz (about Google employees in this case).

They make it so easy to not know how to feed yourself, clean your clothes, or even make friends outside work. Now the decision to care for another human being becomes much much scarier.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife

If you have no children around, what’s our future?

This question at least has a simple answer, and it's exactly the same as San Francisco's future has been for decades: Immigration.

Do you mean immigration from other countries, or other US states?

Unless I'm very much mistaken, both.

It's kind of a no dogs kind of city, as well. I see people with dogs around San Francisco and the bay area, but I don't know where they're living. When I lived there I had to search for ages to find a place that allowed dogs, and it was a house, a lot more expensive than I'd hoped to spend on housing (I took it and lived there for three years...never moving to a cheaper place even when my girlfriend moved out and I was covering rent by myself).

The search for an apartment around the bay area when you have a dog goes something like this:

1. Search by size, location, price range. Get back hundreds of results.

2. Narrow search with a filter: Allows pets. Get back two dozen results.

3. Oops. Many of these don't allow dogs, only cats and goldfish. Narrow search again, allows dogs. Now, we've got eight to choose from in the entire region.

4. Notice that many have a size limit...dogs under 25 pounds. Ok, read every ad through to the end to find out whether they allow real dogs, or only barking cats. Great. Two options, both more expensive and farther away from the train and a downtown than I really wanted.

Not that I'm bitter. But, I don't live in the valley, anymore.

At least if you have kids, you're protected by law. Landlords cannot prevent you from renting because you have children. But, they can refuse to rent to someone with a dog.

...they can refuse to rent to someone with a dog.

Thank goodness, although one wonders how much longer we'll be spared from that.

Oh, I'm not suggesting the law should change. I'm just saying that housing is a sellers market in the bay area, to an extreme degree; sellers can set whatever ridiculous terms they want, and someone will still buy.

What needs to change in the bay area is the housing supply. There just needs to be a lot more of it, so landlords stop being so picky and charging so much. It can cost several thousand dollars to move in the bay area, right now, by the time you cover deposit, first and last months rent, etc. And those are the kinds of terms you find on housing in the bay area. It's just an absurdly lopsided market, where renters have so little negotiating power.

Every rental market is a little tougher for dog owners, but nowhere have I seen such an extreme disparity as in the bay area. That's really all I'm saying.

Well then, of course you're right. To solve the problems you cite, supply would have to increase drastically. The current situation, however, solves the problems that actually interest TPTB.

There are 15 dogs every 100 people in SF. I don't think it's a no-dogs city. It's also very generous with enforcement of off-leash ordinances and whatnot.

It is not just price IMO, even though this is obviously a major factor. Several other things make this place hostile to families:

- school system creates a somewhat unpredictable situation

- not enough decent parks spread throughout the city

- units on the market are often inappropriate for families

- all new buildings are designed for young, single tenants

- due to rent control and housing scarcity, many older apartments are not well-maintained

- 40% the city sidewalks are a noisy polluted clusterfsck, 40% are desolate and boring

- few trees or covered sidewalks, reducing shelter from sun and elements, walking around unpleasant

- streets are extremely wide in many parts of the city, creating a dangerous environment for children

The lack of street trees and the wide, busy streets make SF sidewalks really unpleasant. Another thing is that so many of the row houses have garages and driveways to the street, not an alley. So not only are sidewalks uglier - in many parts of the city it's mostly pavement all around you, with walls of garage doors - but also you have to watch out for cars coming in and out of garages.

Some neighborhoods in SF are really pleasant and walkable, but overall the city isn't really pedestrian-friendly at all. It's not designed for walking, and it isn't dense enough. It's more of a high-density car-oriented city, which is kind of the worst of both worlds.

"Why would a city actually want kids?"

"School districts want kids for the same reason start-ups want customers: it's hard to scale with smaller demand."

"I know you don't like sitting next to a table full of kids at a restaurant. Me neither. But children are necessary components of a thriving community"

I believe in capitalism, i'm not sure if this is representative of SF (never been) but this hyper capitalism with no soul/morals/religion where everything is a transaction, an asset, a business is simply scary and starting to feel like Logan's Run. Will you be paying breeders in "poor" areas to supply "kids" for your startups next? (let the down votes pour)

Aren't we already doing this?

A mechanism where people are born and raised in cheap areas and in their twenties go to a expensive place to live and work is (a) in general, already happening in SF; (b) unusual, but kind of works and (c) could be sustained indefinitely, at least without any obvious factors preventing that.

I cannot believe some of the comments I'm reading...

Shouldn't the schools in SF be incredible? I mean with the skyrocketing costs of residences intersected with the hugely decreased student populations, $/pupil should be higher than ever. Seems like a great place to start to draw families back into the city.

Proposition 13 caps the rate at which property taxes may increase. Unless a huge proportion of SF properties are being transferred (outside of a family), property taxes don't keep up with market rates.

San Francisco has notoriously strong NIMBYs that largely prevent new developments and redevelopments, which also suppresses tax base improvements.

Added fun... New home owning families pay massively disproportionate taxes than those who owned a long time, despite probably not getting anywhere near the same benefit of those tax dollars.

$/pupil in public school operating costs is mandated to be equal across the state; local tax base may make more money available for capital improvements, but doesn't make any more available for classroom operations (even to keep pay of faculty and staff in line with living costs.)

SF children are also assigned a school via a lottery. Kids can't go to the school that's closest to them unless they get lucky. My co-worker was assigned a school with a terrible commute, so he reluctantly chose a private school instead.

I think it was done to improve racial/socioeconomic integration, but in practice it means wealthier parents withdraw from the system and send their kids to private schools instead.

The results: 58% of SF public school students are on free/reduced-price lunches, higher than the national average. That means they're in families making $43k for a family of four (quite tough in SF).

The racial impact is also striking. San Francisco is 42% white, but in 2013-2014, only 13% of SF public school students were white. That number is 9% for high schoolers.

You can find a good description of the system in this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/education/21sfschool.html

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Here is how the current system works: Let’s say a 5-year-old — we’ll call him Jake, like my son — wants to go to kindergarten. His parents fill out an application and list seven schools they prefer.

The more desirable schools get more applications than they have seats; in some cases that ratio is 20 to 1. That’s where the Diversity Index comes in. Known as “the lottery,” the index uses five factors to determine a child’s profile: poverty level, socio-economic status, English-language proficiency, academic achievement and, for upper grades, the quality of the student’s previous school.

Once that profile is built, the child is placed in one of his selected schools, in a class of students whose collective profile is as different from his own profile as possible. As each child is added, the class profile is adjusted, and more “most different” children are placed. Students living near their selected schools are considered first. The district also gives preference to children who have siblings at the same school and apply on time.

But there is no guarantee that a child will get in a selected school. And once the lottery has filled all the slots, those soon-to-be kindergartners who get into none of their choices are offered a place in a school with open positions. Proximity to their home and transportation are considered.

Designed to be race-neutral, the system has instead been widely criticized as too complex and opaque. “It’s all magic and voodoo,” Ms. Menegaz said, only half joking.

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Basically, they try to balance out the schools, but it means that if you are of a higher socio-economic status you are placed into schools with people with lower socio-economic status to try to balance things out. But that often means being placed into schools that are farther away, and don't perform well. So, it pushes away people from public schools who can afford to move away, or send their kids to private schools (this is why we left San Francisco).

> But there is no guarantee that a child will get in a selected school. And once the lottery has filled all the slots, those soon-to-be kindergartners who get into none of their choices are offered a place in a school with open positions. Proximity to their home and transportation are considered.

Is there _any_ system that can "guarantee" that a child will get in a selected school when there are big demand-supply gaps?

Is there _any_ system that can "guarantee" that a [customer will receive a service] when there are big demand-supply gaps?

I think you're looking for a market? There never seems to be a problem getting e.g. a haircut, in any community.

It's much easier to quickly scale the number of barbers, and even so people sometimes can't get an appointment where they want when they want.

Haha ask any teenager if she wants to start school at 7 AM. Also this entire thread is about SF's misguided "go to the school on the other side of the city rather than the one on your own block" program.

Better hairdressers are paid more money. If the same were true for teachers, they would "scale" too.

This is exactly right. All the poorest kids get to go to a bad school far away. The rich kids go to a great school far away. One of the reasons that I wouldn't move back while my kids are in school.

That's silly.

> $/pupil in public school operating costs is mandated to be equal across the state

That's not accurate, a major part of Jerry Brown's education policy changes have been improved funding for title 1 schools (low income criteria - which most or all SF public schools meet) at the expense of non-title 1 schools. The measure is the Local Control Funding Formula.

You are directionally accurate in that CA law greatly reduces the ways cities can put money into the operating budgets of their school districts. However, there are plenty of ways around this, if people were strongly invested in building better schools in SF they would be using them.

Thank you for the reply. While I understand the idea behind that law, it seems untenable for a teacher in SF to be making the same as a teacher in Bakersfield.

DC schools spend more per student than anywhere and the results are uneven at best (though improving). Money sent everything.

I'm a parent with two children living in SF (sunset) and depending on middle school lottery results we will be forced to move.

It is not that we are moving because of lifestyle, because it is expensive (yes it is), etc. The problem is: if our middle school kid ended up begin placed in middle school at other side of the town (Mission, Marina, etc.) it will theoretically impossible for us get them to and from the school.

So two things needs to be fixed and we will stay:

- public transit system and/or

- school system

So what? With its insanely high rent and notoriously overworked populous, isn't SF a perfect place for people that don't have kids? There are millions of other places in the U.S. that are extremely kid friendly. Having one or two that aren't might even be a good thing. (Meaning you always need an alternative to the norm)

My wife and I just moved from SF to Minneapolis two weeks ago.

She's an SF native and I'm from Minnesota.

I work in tech for a company based in SOMA. Our daughter was born in April.

We managed in our one bedroom in the Tenderloin for nine months. We probably could have stuck it out longer, but we certainly weren't saving any money and the looming thought of child care costs and school were enough to push us to our decision.

My wife and I decided to move from SF to Walnut Creek some months before she gave birth. We're paying slightly more for rent, but instead of a 1-bedroom, we now live in a townhouse. Aside from more space, this has other perks: we don't have to deal with loud neighbors, crappy Victorian radiators, communal appliances, and playing garage Tetris. The commute sucks, but the benefits outweigh this drawback.

Its really sad and terrifying that most people think spending all day taking care of and raising their children is terrifying, boring, unproductive, undesirable because of a variety of reasons etc etc.

No one has mentioned the joys. And raising your kid and being a good parent is not supposed to be easy or enjoyable. Its a lifelong task. Your parents did it. Its your responsibility.

Maybe I'm naive (I don't have children), but many of these articles basically can be reduced to "I want it all." [1] Nothing is wrong with that, but considering the popularity and ideal climate one can't expect to live in the bay area without a few caveats, right?

The first thing I thought when I saw the title was, "oh, just move." Then I thought, "ah, people won't want to move because it's San Francisco." And so I see three options for anyone who complains about anything in any city:

1. Move

2. Pay extra for whatever convenience(s) you require (e.g. private school, a home closer to the school, etc.)

3. Attempt to change the law.

So, when there's an issue like the one of schools, doesn't it just mean there are not enough people interested in (3) or are not affected by it sufficiently? Or maybe (3) is just too much effort. Regardless, if people REALLY wanted it and there were a sufficient amount of people affected, the problem would be fixed, no? I think also that the problem is compounded by conflicts of interest. Maybe people paying extra for private school makes it more difficult to change the law.

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of city politics.

[1] Seriously though.

> “Everybody talks about children being our future,” said Norman Yee, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. “If you have no children around, what’s our future?”

The future is being kicked out or becoming like Detroit (if god forbid the tech industry somehow collapses). Isn't this literally what happened to the past inhabitants of SF? They were kicked out once the higher paid people started coming in droves? The same will happen to everyone else once the wage(s) become sufficiently high. Isn't this just the free market or whatever, at work?

Even if SF was a good place for kids and there were tons of kids, it would only be available for people of sufficiently high income. This article, then, would be titled "San Francisco Asks: Where have all of the regular families gone?" and would lament how no one goes to public school. Well, NYT has written similar articles already (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/backlash-by-the-bay-tec...).

I wonder, where in particular does SF's children-to-family rate diverge from the national metrics? Are all races having fewer children in SF than nationally, or just some? Are all incomes having fewer children, or just some?

Not that the overall stats aren't illustrative, but it's often enlightening to drill down. The 53,000 public schoolchildren, who are they demographically and socioeconomically, and how do they differ from, say, NYC, Chicago, LA?

The article alludes to an important point - it never quite asserts that anybody is having fewer children. Instead, when people decide to have children, they move to a suburb.

Raising children is the ultimate expense. It makes zero economic sense, it only makes biological sense. Biological, as in a people with no children ceases to exist in a historical blip. Our metrics and the policies they drive are solely concerned with improving the economy. The gradient is stronger in the more expensive place, thus more noticeable. Hence pieces in NYT.

> It makes zero economic sense,

This is patently false in the bigger economic picture, and dubious still thinking about it from a microeconomic view. Japan is perhaps our leading indicator of why having less (or no kids) has a huge impact economically. Fundamentally, because our economy is at it's core driven by growth, if the number of consumers doesn't increase (or even stay stagnant), the economy will fall flat on its face, and we'll have a huge glut of older peak (again like Japan) with no one to carry the torch forward (or even to take card of the elderly).

It makes zero economic sense [at the individual level]. As a society, we've largely resigned to care about of the future of the native population and instead propose immigration to solve the "children are too damn expensive" problem.

People, or most people atleast, dont have kids for biologically progressing their clan. They have kids because it brings them emotional fulfillment and happiness. Its gives people a sense of family. So even though it makes little raw economic sense, it makes lot of sense if you start valuing your happiness and your happiness depends on a sense of family.

One could argue that happiness being so traditionally tied to a sense of family is a part of the biological imperative, or at the very least strongly encoded in our social and cultural mores. People get pressured by their friends and extended family to get settle down, get married, and have kids.

If you look at a place like Japan, they're starting to lose that social pressure. It's worrisome for their economy and for care of the elderly in the longer term, but I find it fascinating to see what people do (and don't do) when societal pressures change or go away.

Having kids for emotional fulfillment vs economic assistance (free labor) is a relatively new concept in the history of civilization and America though. Unfortunately the last couple of generations had economic factors that enabled this attitude, but now the current crop of potential parents are finding all the pressure and drive to mimic their childhood but a distinctly worse economic climate. I foresee a weakening of the concept of the traditional family if it keeps up.

I recently visited SF for the first time.

The hills make it hostile to kids already; you simply could not trust you kid to go out on most places with a bike or a skateboard.

Of course it's always been like that so what matters is how much it (kid pop.) has declined. Which I couldn't actually find in the article.

What is it like raising kids in east bay? does anyone have experiences to share?

"The East Bay" is extremely large, so this question cannot be answered. I am raising children in north Oakland, near Berkeley. I think the combination of those two cities offers me what I want: enough interesting urban amenities, sufficient transit system, plenty of other kids for my kids to play with, and enough open space.

But as I said the east bay runs practically all the way to Tracy, so no one answer can suffice.

I wonder how much of this can be attributed to the Roe Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_effect

Oakland/Marin/south bay

Peninsula? I live here with my two kids, it's full of kids. Burlingame, San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, redwood city, Menlo park all seem full of people who moved from the city when their oldest was ready for school.

> Oakland

I've lived in Oakland for almost a year and I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a child older than an infant.

I strongly suspect the answer to "do you see a lot of children around" depends heavily on neighborhood.

Much more accurate to say Walnut Creek / Tri-Valley as far as the East bay goes.

What do you do, just walk back and forth between Temescal and Uptown? If you look at the actual numbers, 21% of Oaklanders are children and 25% of households include a child.

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Oakland.htm

Short Answer: The East Bay.

the SF school lottery system is the primary culprit

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