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Comment by tjwds | Hacker News Reader

> As millennials age into their 30s and homeownership is on the rise, demographics are now moving against urban landlords.

> We know how and what to build when we're dealing with an influx of young urban renters. But what will they want as they age into their next phase of life, and how can policy makers meet their needs?

A lot of this article seems to be pinned on an unwritten idea that the suburbs are where you go when you want to grow up. This seems like a bit of a trap for developers and speculators, to me: at least in the city I live in, there has been some focus on urban development to provide services for families of all sizes.

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The dealbreaker is schools. Without getting into a fight about why urban schools are dysfunctional, they are, and that will drive families to suburbs. While millenials are having kids somewhat later, it doesn’t look like there will be a dramatic drop in the percentage of millenials who will ultimately have kids.

"Without getting into a fight about why urban schools are dysfunctional, they are, and that will drive families to suburbs."

It's interesting if that is the case in the US: it was also true in the UK in the 1980s and 90s with Central London having a reputation for poor schools.

However, today the UK situation is completely reversed and the narrative is more about why schools in the regions don't perform as well as schools in the capital.

One eye-opening statistic I read recently is that a disadvantaged/poor kid growing up in Hackney, East London (which is about as 'urban' as it gets here) is 3X more likely to go to university than a similarly disadvantaged kid growing up in the North of England.

Did you consider that the cost/benifit of higher education might be different in North England?

That's how it is in the rural US.

I'd say it's even more important in the North because of the paucity of opportunities.

In what way? Tuition cost is capped - it costs exactly the same to go to Oxford or UCL as it does to a small university in the North.

The tuition is not the biggest cost of education living expenses are. Oxford is dead expensive and UCL is in the heart of London.

It really depends though. As a parent raising kids in the city myself, my wife and I made the conscious decision to settle in the city and raise our family here.

We based this on:

0) We just really like the city and want to raise our kids in the city.

1) In Chicago, where we live, CPS students outperform the state overall. Source: https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/perception-vs-reality-c...

2) Breaking down a school's performance at the demographic level can often change the equation. The elementary school my son will attend actually scores higher for students above the poverty line than the one I attended out in the suburbs.

3) My wife is a STEM professor and has seen lots of students who attended the region's top-tier public schools (9/10 or 10/10 on greatschools, etc) that were woefully unprepared for college, despite otherwise decent ACT scores.

4) The suburbs are facing their own austerity crisis: postwar subsidized infrastructure gravy train is long over, so property taxes are rising. Their housing stock doesn't align well with the smaller and most cost-conscious millennial family. So a big worry for us was, do we want to buy into a "good school" suburb only to have our kid's school budget slashed to control costs? This is already happening to one Chicago suburb famous for its great schools (Hinsdale, IL)

5) School performance is, at best, a trailing indicator. Say you've got 2 kids under the age of 4. Is it worth buying a home somewhere because of a high school they won't be attending for 10+ years? It makes sense if you're talking about a radical difference in school performance, but marginal advantages seem prone to change.

I don't claim that this is the best course of action. For all we know, the city schools could just as easily go sideways due to budgeting issues, or maybe suburban schools are the first to break free from the trend of "teaching to the test" and our kids are left behind. But right now, it just feels like once you have a safe learning environment and some basic academic standards, most of the outcome is in the hands of the parents and students. High-performing schools don't produce great students so much as they attract the people who foster that attitude.

What neighborhood do you live in? I live in Uptown with my wife. We don’t have any kids yet but I don’t think I would want my kids to go to school around here. Uptown is sketchy and people seem to get murdered here on a regular basis. I would feel differently if we lived in Lake View, Lincoln Park, or Wicker Park, but those neighborhoods are too expensive for us.

I live in the painfully uncool neighborhood of Jefferson Park. There are a decent chunk of good K-8 CPS neighborhood schools up here. A very safe neighborhood, in part due to the number of CPD who live in the area.

Uptown is amazing and while it is still rough around the edges it is easily one my favorite neighborhoods in the city. The crime is slowly getting better, but I think most parents of means send their kids to private school or lottery them somewhere else.... or move.

Yup. Even before school comes into play, daycare is a major factor as-well. My wife and I applied to 6 different daycare centers when we found out she was pregnant. Despite paying application fees, we got into none of them due to overcrowding. We did receive a phone call about two years after my child was born, offering us a spot in one of them, but we'd since left the city.

A friend of mine (who also lives in a major city) just told me that getting into their local public elementary school isn't guaranteed and is based on a lottery system because of overcrowding.

So their options are:

1) Take their child to the next closest and available school which is 30 minutes away

2) Pay for private school - which, as you can imagine, is expensive

3) Move

They're ultimately choosing #1, but I can easily imagine them getting sick of that quickly.

Oh well, I guess it's better than SF's system. Can't even imagine dealing with that.

Yep once we start having kids we’re leaving the city. That’s just the reality. There’s also elements of my childhood I want to ensure are available to my offspring (plenty of outdoor, unsupervised play) that aren’t possible in the city or are simply too unsafe today.

Cities are likely to be much safer today than they were when you were growing up. It's the adults' attitudes to seeing kids alone and unsupervised that changed.

Uhhh no. When I was a kid there was viturally zero chance of running across used needles at the park, nor being harassed by homeless people on public transit. Look I want to make cities work as much as the next guy, but at some point I’m going to vote with my feet and signal that things are not acceptable.

Any homeless person who's not completely bonkers knows that harassing a lone child on public transit is just about the worst possible way of attracting the attention of law enforcement, since other adults might ignore harassment of other adults who seem to be dealing with the situation but will step in to protect a child. In all of my life living in large cities, I have never seen something like this happen, nor came across any news of something like that.

This seems to be in the same category as not letting a child walk alone to school, in a Western country, because of fear of Islamic terrorists -- possible, but so unlikely it is statistically improbable.

Depends on the city. Millenials could also push for changes and upgrades in urban school districts.

They could, and some will...but the majority won't have time/inclination with the obligations of work/family and will just move to the suburbs (if history is any indication).

This is basically been the case for decades in the U.S.

It could be like that, but the new generation has proven to be very different from the baby boomers, so who knows.

Other countries seem to get by just fine with living in cities and having kids.

> Other countries seem to get by just fine with living in cities and having kids.

Other countries don't concentrate all their disadvantaged people in the cities.

You're absolutely right! That could very well happen!

With that said, it's perhaps possible that millennial pushing for changes and upgrades and improvements and the fundamental human right of quality education for all might not yield an ideal outcome. Improving schools can very reasonably be expected to be multi-decade project of changing budgets, priorities, staffing, training, expectations, culture, and more. Someone with a toddler might want quality schools in the next three years instead of next thirty. This might, for some, incentivize a different set of somewhat more selfish reactions.

You're completely right. Millenials can, should, and are morally obligated to push for improvements and upgrades. But there may be a wrinkle or three.

So, make city living even more expensive?

This is what the whole urban charter school thing has really been about. A cluster of middle class people set up a charter school and steal most of the other high potential kids, leaving the actual public school with even worse performance and students.

Indeed they do. You're right, and it's a disaster.

With that said, is it possible that high-potential children could be viewed as something other than interchangeable widgets whose primary purpose is to make public schools that are failing many students look good? Especially given that such schools are often little better at meeting the needs of the high-potential children than they are all of the other children.

You're right. Charter schools are often guilty of creaming. Yet, are we doing anyone a favor by sacrificing the education of high-potential children to mask problems?

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