Where Working-Age Americans Are Moving

Yes, your expected to give up all semblance of having a life outside your children once you have them.

American town planning has been a disaster since time immemorial.

On the urban planning side, American cities spend huge amounts of time and effort preventing the demolition of old housing and the construction of housing. This drives up the price of housing.

On the welfare policy side, American states corral all their poor people into their large cities. In Manhattan, riverfront property might be dedicated either to expensive condos (upper west side), or public housing (lower east side). The suburbs, for their part, go to great lengths to prevent the introduction of services for lower-income people.

In most cities, #2 is a bigger problem than #1. If you're willing to compromise on space, living in the suburbs often isn't dramatically cheaper. In theory, getting a 1,500 square foot house would be cheaper in the suburbs versus the city, but suburban municipalities tend to discourage the construction of smaller houses, so often the choice is between 1,500 square feet in the city, or 3,000 square feet in the suburbs, at not altogether dissimilar prices factoring in the cost of commuting and cars.

The biggest problem is schools. In most places, you have to pay for public schools even if you send your kid to private school. And public schools in cities are almost uniformly terrible, not because public schools in cities must intrinsically be terrible, but because as a result of #2, urban school districts are 90%+ low-income. Putting a bunch of poor kids all together in the same school is not a recipe for success. People like to paint it as a funding problem, but its a socioeconomic demographics problem. In Illinois, schools inside Chicago spend almost 40% more per student than schools outside Chicago, but perform far below those outside the city.

Now of course, even the most progressive parents aren't willing to send their children to schools where 90% of the kids come from welfare homes, disproportionately don't have fathers, etc. And they don't want to pay $10,000 per year (for parochial schools), or $20,000+ (for non-religious schools) to send their kids to private schools. So they move to the suburbs, where they can send their kids to socioeconomically homogenous public schools, and take advantage of the services for which they're paying for anyway.

I think the confluence of these factors is really unfortunate, and has an unfortunate impact on American families. First, I think it discourages people who might want kids from having kids. Second, it robs kids of the wonderfully enriching experience of living in cities, in close proximity to other people.

The neighborhoods with excellent schools and excellent bar scenes exist, but you and I mere mortals are priced out of them.

What encourages people to flee the city when they have a kid is that urban liberals are incredibly hostile to the idea of allowing school boundaries to be drawn along socioeconomic lines. Middle class parents don't just want to send their kids to schools that are adequately funded (as schools in most major cities certainly are), but to schools where the other kids are from families like themselves. They don't want their kids being influenced by kids whose dads are in jail for drug dealing. That's the politically-incorrect reality of parenthood. They can get this in the suburbs, but cities make it extremely difficult and expensive to do this.

For example, until recently San Francisco had this wonderful (from a social progress point of view), but terrible (from a parenting and urbanism point of view), policy of not having "home" schools based on geographic location, but incorporating some element of lottery selection. The net result was that middle and upper class people couldn't pick their schools by moving to a particular neighborhood. Of course, this created a tremendous incentive to just leave the city, and even ultra-liberal san francisco was recently forced to end the policy.

The problem is that school policy has been hijacked by teachers, so the debate always revolves around "more money." But throwing lots of money at a school where 75% of kids don't have a father in their lives isn't going to help those kids learn. Throwing money at things like Section 8, which might let those families move to suburbs where they can go to a school where they aren't surrounded by that culture, that could really push forward the cause of social progress.

Food for thought ...