Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

I live right next to Boston in a town called Brookline---specifically the region above Rt. 9 called North Brookline. It could be better, but it checks the boxes that make it a wonderful place for families:

* Neighborhood schools over 90% of people walk to. Builds community.

* Lots of parks, both near the schools and elsewhere. Gives kids a place they can go by themselves and have some independence.

* Dense neighborhoods so it's easier to go play with your friends rather than play video games over the internet (they still do the latter sometimes of course)

* Nearby shops. Kids and parents can walk to the grocery store, movie theater, bookstore, pharmacy (ie candy store for the kids)

* Wide sidewalks and relatively safe streets for kids to walk to these things.

* Bonus: we've got a trolley that stretches the neighborhood and goes into downtown Boston for the older kids.

You can find pockets like this (sans the train) across the US, but they're just that: pockets. I don't know of any city or town that has all these traits in its entirety (South Brookline for example doesn't cut it, for example). However, as long as they're scarce they'll be expensive. I hope we see a move towards building more neighborhoods like it so that more kids can grow up in them.

Everybody seems to think that sparse suburbs with large yards are ideal for children, but it seems to me that a nearby park filled with other children is far more appealing to a child than an empty back yard.

Suburbs in the 50's used to be filled with children all about the same age, but a modern suburb is filled with a very wide spread of ages. The number of children on each block the same age as your children is likely to be very low.

OTOH, apartment buildings filled with immigrants and poorer people seem to have a much higher density of children than suburban blocks.

The percentage of the population under 18 has dropped from 35% in 1970 to 22% today. Outside heavily immigrant communities, it’s probably even lower (e.g. 19% in Vermont). The suburbs are materially emptier of children than they were when they were built.

Yes, the immigrant communities tend to have lots of kids, but nobody outside those communities wants to move into them. Heck, the people in those communities want to move out. My Bangladeshi immigrant family all noped out of Queens (where there’s a large Bangladeshi enclave with recent immigrants) to Long Island the minute they could afford it.

About half of my children's friends are the children of immigrants. There are pros and cons, but in my opinion it seems to balance.

They aren't poor immigrant families, though. That might make a substantial difference.

The apartment buildings full of immigrant families with kids are almost exclusively low-SES immigrants. Higher SES immigrants don’t move to those places (and have extremely low birth rates).

You have to remember that high SES immigrants are an extremely small self selected and culturally distinct slice of their home population. Culturally distinct in ways that are hard for Americans to even understand because they don’t have a rigid class system where higher status people culturally diverge from lower status people to the degree, they do in other societies. One major difference is the pre-existing exposure to Western culture.

Extensive exposure to western colonial governments, western non-profits, and western businesses is common among the class of people who emigrate as high-SES immigrants. My family was quite Anglicized even back in Bangladesh. My grandfather’s house was a former British property (my mom comments half a century later about how solidly the British built the tennis courts). At the time I was born my parents weren’t planning on leaving Bangladesh, but my dad adopted the western practice of having a family name (instead of two given names as is our system). My first name is misspelled German, and I never had the nickname Bangladeshis universally use instead of their legal name. I went to a pre-school for British expats (“Catherine’s Playgroup”). After we immigrated, I grew up in a 90% white and asian town in the U.S., spoke English at home, have never set foot in a mosque, etc. My dad was very deliberate in forcing us to assimilate, at least in outward appearances. That’s my particular story, but if you press your high-SES immigrant friends you’ll likely learn about the ways in which they’re very distinct from others in their country—and were long before coming here.

My aunt and uncle, by contrast, live in a Canadian publicly subsidized high-rise that’s entirely low-SES immigrants. Those Bangladeshis are completely different. They’re very religious, socialize primarily within their community, practice arranged marriage and primarily marry within their community, etc. And they were very different from us even when we were all in Bangladesh!

On the northern edge of Jamaica Plain (east of Brookline in Boston proper), there's a pretty stark example of Brookline's accumulated advantages. On the Boston side of the pond that separates the two, there's Jamaica Way. It's a four lane road with few pedestrian crossings, and drivers regularly going way over the 25mph speed limit. The multi family housing on the Boston side is significantly cheaper and denser as well. It too has a trolley (the E branch of the Green Line), but unlike the Brookline side, the trolley on the Boston side isn't grade separated, so it's quite slow. It also typically runs older rolling stock.

I went to school at Northeastern and so spent plenty of time in that neighborhood. We actually looked at buying in Jamaica Plain because of the price difference. Ultimately we didn't because our kids had grown roots in Brookline and the Jamaica Way was too much of a barrier between the neighborhoods.

I think the biggest difference in the price between the two neighborhoods is the schools. Once you cross over the border (either into JP, or the less segmented allston) the prices drop. Brookline's got well-regarded schools (though they've been coasting), whereas Boston is a mixed bag with a lottery system.

Median income for a family in Brookline: $122,000. Median home price: $1.19 million. Judging by the homogenous demographics, almost no refugees or recent immigrants other than perhaps high-skilled Boston tech and education sector workers.

It’s easy to create a city that works for families as long as you use economic redlining to exclude everyone who suffers from the social problems that affect every major U.S. city.

Family friendly trends pretty hard with homogenous demographics.

Differences breed contempt, or just displays the inability to empathize with a different way of life.

A sad fact of life. People with kids tend to regress back to their familiar mothership when the kids arrive. It's instinctual protection mechanism for their children.

There’s two different issues. In the US, demographics is highly correlated with other factors. Even the most progressive parents will self-segregate to get away from these issues (under the pretext of finding a “good school district”), which in practice means the suburbs.

Apart from that, cultural differences become much more salient when you’re a parent. Because culture is how we transmit our values—what we believe about how to live a good and successful life—to our children. Culture is also highly correlated with demographics and also is a source of conflict. My kids attend a private school with affluent white and black kids (about 2/3 and 1/3). The neighboring supermajority-black county is richer than our supermajority-white county, so there are no socioeconomic divides. But there’s quite a bit of racial conflict nonetheless. A couple of kids in my daughter’s friend group wanted to kick her out of a running group chat because they wanted to make it black-only (she looks fully south asian though she’s half white). My daughter is far more accepted by her white friends who aren’t socialized from an early age to have a sense of racial identity/group solidarity.

White/asian places like Brookline have cultural problems as well. My high school was about 30% asian, the remainder white (all affluent and educated). There was a lot of conflict over cheating and the school being a “pressure cooker” that boiled down to conflict between the asian immigrant proclivity of academically grinding to get ahead and the WASP mentality of raising “well rounded” students with diverse interests. Studies show that white families move out of school districts as asian families move in: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res.... This is true even though, statistically, asians are more affluent than whites, much less likely to be arrested or imprisoned, etc.

Parenthood is where the rubber really hits the road in terms of any sociological preconceptions people may have. It’s the time when you’re faced with applying those ideas in practice in a situation that will have consequences for what you hold most dear.

It also doesn't help that any perceived error in raising a child results in a phone call to CPS (by literally anyone) and possibly you and your children being terrorized, and much of this perception is cultural. The more cultural diversity, the more chance you come across that single person that doesn't approve of the way you do it.

This has happened over as little as a kid walking home alone or playing at the park while the mom is at an interview.

I've partially chosen to raise my family in a place with people like me because I know the neighbor kids drive trucks, work in construction, explore the backcountry on dirt bikes, etc from a very young age and I don't have to worry about the local nazi mom sending the child snatchers for the sin of a child having some independence.

Yes, that’s yet another dimension! My wife is a free-range Oregonian, and that’s a reason we couldn’t raise our kids in DC where most parents would love to give their kids an ankle monitor.

You people want to just build South Africa around here all over again, don’t you? Just a reminder: it works well until it does not.

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