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Comment by 2pasc | Hacker News Reader

I think that this argument about kids in San Francisco is totally wrong. There are tons of kids in San Francisco...just not in the neighborhood that he went! Go to the Richmond, the Sunset, the Marina, Cole Valley, or especially Noe Valley...and you will see tons of kids. But sure, in SOMA or Union Square/Financial District...not so much.

Why is that ? Because San Francisco is a very neighborhood-focused city - where kids stay in kid friendly neighborhoods, and where younger hipsters or developers live in more fun neighborhoods with typically less babies.

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Your impressions are incorrect. From a comment above:

   Persons under 18 (2010 Census)
   US 23.7% [2]
   SF 13.5% [3]

[2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[3] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

These two posts are not incompatible. That 13.5% of kids needs to live somewhere. I'd bet that a heatmap would show "kid locuses" in some neighborhoods and "kid voids" in others.

They are not incompatible only if by "tons" you mean "half as many". I would expect some areas of San Francisco to have more kids than others but overall the number is very low.

SF is a small region in a larger urban area. My guess is that you could easily single out dense, urban sub-regions in LA or Chicago that are as childless as SF. SF used to have more kids, but I'd guess that this used to be true of the dense, urban sections of other cities. The difference is, a kid who moves from urban chicago to suburban chicago is still counted in Chicago's stats.

Meanwhile, some districts in SF might have quite a high percentage of children compared to the average for areas of equal density. Not sure of this, but it would be interesting to see.

Well... Many families are also in the suburbs (South Bay or East Bay) as the weather tends to be better and you can have houses with gardens for the kids to play around (also the school system is less messed up there). Which does not mean that there are not kids-full neighborhoods in the city.

There is a lot of truth in this. SOMA and the Financial District are very much places to work, not places to live. I remember being in SOMA a week or two ago on Saturday at 5pm and everything was closed. I was there for an event at the museum of modern art (MOMA). Even Starbucks had shut down! It's a ghost town on the weekends. In fact, some San Franciscans don't think that SOMA is a real neighborhood, for exactly these reasons. The Embarcadero area is also kind of touristy, because the docks are there. If you want to see the real SF, you're better off going to someplace like Haight-Ashbury or the Mission.

The weird thing is that the west part of the city is effectively a suburb of the east part (but "suburb" is a dirty word in SF). Yes, I am oversimplifying here-- so sue me. I guess one nice thing is that the commuters can walk to work rather than driving.

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