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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.

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.

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

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

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.