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Comment by Kaibeezy | Hacker News Reader

For ponds, she says, it might be that the presence of a certain type of newt tells you whether or not the water is healthy. In cities, the newts are children. “If you can see children, it’s probably a healthy and happy city.”

Large [presumably US] Cities With the Lowest Share of Families With Children

  San Francisco    16.5%
  Seattle          18.7%
  Washington, D.C. 18.9%
  New Orleans      20.7%
  Miami            21.4%
  Minneapolis      21.8%
  Philadelphia     22.5%
  Portland         23.2%
  Denver           23.3%
  Cleveland        23.7%

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/01/top-cities-for-families...

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I can't speak for SF or Seattle, but I suspect a big reason for lack of families with children in many large American cities is that, for the most part, public schools are unacceptable for any family that cares about education.

DC, Philly, Baltimore, Cleveland... all the same story. Even in gentrifying and resurgent neighborhoods, parents with the means to do so leave as soon as their kids get to school age or enroll them in extremely expensive private schools. Some might try charter schools or selective magnet schools, but the local neighborhood school in your typical big city is typically a hard "no go".

From what I see, Washington parents who care can be good at managing the charter/magnet school thing. On my block are two kids at each of two charter schools, one at a well-thought-of public middle school, one at a private school, and several I couldn't tell you about. Yes, I have seen people move across the park (to the more prosperous part of town) when the kid left Aidan Montessori or they got tired of the admissions stuff. But I suspect I know three families that stuck it out here for ever two that left.

It doesn’t have to be that way, Boston public schools for instance are excellent.

And we still think it's not good enough!

I'd bet it's also more expensive, less safe, less space, basically none of the things that you think of when you imagine the typical American nuclear family

Exactly this. You could not even pay me to raise my two kids in the city. What the city offers to someone in their 20s does nothing for those in their 30s spending most of their time working or child rearing (and I work from home).

I require space, comfort, and convenience for family, not eatery and nightlife variety. Proximity to interstates and international airports is also desirable though for work and vacation travel.

As much as I hate on the old joint family system it definitely took care of this problem

> convenience for family

As a late-20s person living in the city, this is a thing I've been pondering. I grew up in typical suburban sprawl living "close" to school, soccer practice and friend's houses... but "close" still meant entirely dependent on my parents for rides to each place (less the 5-10 children my age within a 1-mile walk). It was a huge time sink for the family, and having to be driven everywhere felt isolating as a child (i.e. can't hang out because mom is too busy to drive me). Not every urban neighborhood is inherently walkable, but many cities have inner ring suburbs (usually within city limits) where all of those amenities are at most a 20 minute walk away. Would this type of neighborhood be livable with your requirements?

Maybe. Suburbs streets have so little traffic you can let a 4 year old play games in them. As you get closer and closer in there is more traffic. If I lived on any of the roads near downtown in my tiny city I'd be concerned about my kid running out the door and into the street. While I worry about that anywhere, the odds are in my favor where I live now because there are so few cars, while in the city there are cars all the time.

Surely after 4 or 5 your kid can look for traffic no?

Sure, she looks. It doesn't always register to not run out in traffic though.

Possibly! Depends on the climate. The more mild, the more I’d consider it. I’m not walking 20 minutes in weather below 32F (Chicago) or above 90F (Tampa, Orlando, Miami).

My partner is a stay at home mom who wouldn’t mind providing daily transportation, and after a certain age we’ll just provide electric scooters and bikes to our kids before they’re old enough to drive.

I grew up in New York City (Queens) so YMMV, but none of these are huge blockers.

- more expensive: pre-K is now universally funded by local government and the public schooling system has decent pathways. General living expenses are more expensive, but not so much so if you're comparing with any of the NYC suburbs with decent schools.

- less safe: NYC has become, on a per-capita basis, one of the safest cities in the country, and certainly the safest large one. In general, a massive amount of "eyes on the street" helps keep crime down, whereas in the suburbs being outside alone is not uncommon.

- less space: in terms of living area and backyard, strictly speaking, yes. But I lived fine in a two-bedroom apartment with my parents. There are also houses with modest front and backyards within the city limits, and we moved to one of those with the addition of another child. Do you need 3000 sq ft and an acre of land to raise a child?

As far as outside, the city offers a lot of playgrounds and parks with other people in it. And then as you get older and outgrow the playground, the constant variety of things really helps with boredom, and many attractions like the museums are even free for residents. And the cherry on top is that the mass transit system allows children to travel without a chaperone of legal driving age, so parents don't have to pick between chauffeuring children around or keeping them at home.

I think it's also preference. I like being close to the city, but living in the city proper is suffocating.

American cities are strange because you usually have the spiky, tall central districts and the extremely low density suburbs, but nothing in the middle.

Queens is 2.3M people, but they're mostly in low-rise, <5 story apartments and houses of various sizes. Fresh Meadows, NY is hardly suffocating levels of density, and yet this kind of neighborhood is simply not available in most metropolitan areas. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7337074,-73.7813407,3a,75y,3...

SF has a lottery system. With the wrong stroke of luck, your child can be damned to hours of commuting across the city every day, just to go to a crappy school, when a "good" one might be across the street.

That's an extreme example, and in the worst case scenario there are plenty of good private schools to send your children. But choosing to live in SF comes with such a set of pros and cons that many parents of school-age children who have a choice choose to live outside of it.

Is a lottery system really worse overall than just letting people buy their way into desired school district? That model obviously hasn't been working well either.

You can have proper zoning and not have to make it buy in only. Before I moved to the suburbs the city I lived in created “Workforce” zoning to combat gentrification.[1]

What’s really hard to stop are the doctors and lawyers who just send their kids to private schools and vote against everything.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/brookhaven-zon...

Depends on your goals and metrics. I'd say yes, it is worse.

An interesting read: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-s...

Thanks, that was a genuine question.

How long has the lottery existed? Hopefully in a reasonable amount of time, it will cause the differences between good and bad public schools to disappear?

This is only the case if the schools are bad because of the students going to them.

> This is only the case if the schools are bad because of the students going to them.

Presumably the good schools got good because they're in rich neighborhoods where the parents pour time and money into the schools. If their kids are going to a wider variety of schools now, the rich parents will have incentive to make all the schools good.

What instead happens is rich parents either move out of San Francisco to the burbs, or send their kids to private school. And so San Francisco ends up both with the lowest population of children of any major city and one of the highest private school enrollment rates in the country (~20%).

Absolutely true. Safety, good schools. Most major cities compromise on both if you're middle class or below. In our case we're already planning our move away in time for public school and it's a few years out yet.

That may have been true 10 years ago. In DC, the nicer neighborhoods have some of the best (top 400) elementary schools in the country. This is driven primarily by wealthy younger couples choosing to stay in the city rather than leave for the boring burbs.

That's certainly possible. People have been trying to figure out what threshold of gentrification is required to keep families with means from leaving. I expect it's very high in DC and hard to replicate elsewhere.

That said DC is a small place surrounded by some significantly urbanized parts of Maryland and Virginia (eg Silver Spring, Alexandria, and many of the communities with metro stops).

Very true. We'll see how things evolve over the next few years!

Yeah but its not if you have children, its if you see them. Children are not playing in the streets of Denver or Cleveland.

Exactly this. But it's harder to get this stat, how would you properly measure it?

Maybe not at nighttime/all hours?

Children play in the streets of New Orleans (the article does blame depopulation) and played in the streets of Cleveland when I was growing up there (cf. Tamir Rice)

Anecdotally as a resident of Minneapolis, I'm not sure what its inclusion on this list is supposed to signify. I think it's a great town to raise a family. We recently chose to build a new house just a few blocks from our current one, instead of move to the suburbs; our children are thriving in their public neighborhood school. There's tons of parks and green space nearby where we often run into neighborhood kids.

One possible explanation I guess is that the city is doing well economically, but is not as overpriced as some of the others on this list. It's still attractive for both young professionals without kids to buy houses, as well as older adults without kids to remain in their houses after their kids have grown.

Also, I think that for the top three you have to account for the influx of the young, who may have just established a household and not got around to children. That was the case for four households I can think of on my block since 2009.

Kinda misleading data IMO.

For example Philadelphia proper is 141.7 mi² and Phoenix proper is 517 mi². A lot of families part of the the Philadelphia area live just outside the city limits.

Thanks for sharing. I think these metrics explain a lot of the differences of opinion on zoning laws/density, management/tolerance of crime, transportation modes, etc.

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