Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see this pop-up. For whatever it's worth I was born in the Sunset (SF) and love the city in spite of all it's problems. My parents were forced out when I got a school on Treasure Island for my 1st grade lottery pick. Went back to SF for college, east coast for grad school where I met my wife from Milwaukee. We have a 5 year old now and I would love to move back to SF and raise my son there. But no matter how many different ways I try to analyze it I just can't come close to justifying the move as beneficial for him or for our marriage. I'd have to work a more intense job to make enough to afford even a quarter of the space we have now. And without knowing our lottery pick in advance I'd have to budget in private school for at least twice the price we're paying for our current STEM-focused private option.

I don't have any personal aversion to working more to pay for more expensive options but the tradeoff of time keeping my relationship with my kid and my marriage healthy is hard to ignore and seems like a really concrete deal-breaker.

We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento where my extended family is from. We thought it might be temporary before getting pulled back to the bay for work or schools maybe but the culture here has just been so positive and conducive to family. The public and private schools are excellent with dozens of options, everything is bikable and green, there are literally more museums and restaurants than we can keep up with and the parks / sports options for kids are amazing. And it's swarming with healthy young working / middle class families about half of which are bay area expats. The city obviously has some known issues but I'm continually grateful with the amount of new development going up in every direction and the overall feeling of being a culture / city that supports young cool people having families.

Anyway I'm just surprised and disappointed at how hard it is to justify moving to SF right now as a native who loves it there. Even as someone working in tech / AI with a strong desire to go back. If you have a family, it just seems impossible to make SF make sense right now. I could be missing something of course.

Curious what other SF or Sac tech parents have to say about all this. So much of this has had to be hypothetical on my end because I know so few parents with young kids in SF...

We've got a 5 month old here in San Francisco, and will attempt child #2 some time in the next year. The lottery system doesn't bother me as much about school as the fact that it seems to lack academic rigour. As for the prices, it's obvious that the relentless work of SF natives has had its effect: few can live here but the wealthy. They have been very good at achieving this effect, and the population is now at a median age higher than 40.

In time, those arriving here from elsewhere will remedy it, but the war SF natives wage on families will take a lot of work for the rest of us to fight.

Congratulations on #2! (and #1) You're right I think, I share the belief that the new arrivals will remedy the city council / zoning / housing stagnation issues one new development at a time. I'll miss what the Sunset was but a few new condos along 19th etc will make it feel a lot modern.

Thank you! Not yet there on #2. She's in cold storage for the moment :)

SF is fortunate as a city that it draws people from across the world. It's possible that with that it can stem the stagnation. One day perhaps you will find it worth your while to return!

I'm sure this won't change your situation, but the SFUSD lottery system has changed significantly since you were a kid, with the most recent big change being in 2010. Since then, 80% of families end up getting one of their top three school choices (all of which can be near home). Not a guarantee, but not bad either.

There's a new system that they've been working on since 2020, but implementation keeps getting delayed. The new system is zone-based, so instead of choosing from any of the district's schools, each family gets to choose from a smaller set in a geographic region near their home. That should in theory make it so pretty much every kid gets to go to school fairly close to home.

The racial integration goals of the original lottery system were well-meaning, but IMO frankly disastrous in its outcomes for many families, like yours.

I don't have kids, but several of my friends do. Some have moved out of the city once their kids have reached school age, but others have made it work. Unfortunately I expect they've had to spend a decent amount of money to make it work, though, more than they would've if they'd moved out of the city like many others do. And most (all?) of my friends with kids who have kept them in SFUSD (rather than going private) have moved out to the Sunset; the schools on the eastern side of the city still rank much lower from a student performance perspective.

If I do have kids, I would love to raise them in SF, and would very much prefer they get a public-school education, as I did (NJ/MD; I'm an east-coast transplant). But I definitely see that this can be challenging, to put it mildly.

> We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento

Hope you're keeping cool during the heat wave! I just drove through Sac on my way back to SF from Truckee this weekend, and my eyes widened when I saw my car reporting the outside temp at 108F. Looks like it's "only" 87F there now, but still!

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