Well, isn't that kind-of sad. Basically what I read into this is that when you need to provide for more than yourself, good luck being able to afford space in a desirable location. Off to riverside or sacramento for you.
I think this is much more important than rental prices.
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.
I just wish it was possible to live in a neighborhood which has good schools, nice neighborhood kids who you can trust to babysit, combined with somewhere within walking distance that's worth going to when you've got a sitter.
The problem with schools is that it is a very large entrenched organization, with lots of special interests (politicians, teachers, administration, etc) who don't want to give up monopoly power. The central organizations suck in a lot of money, and don't improve quality. There are ways to fight this (more charters, close bad schools, etc) but it's very hard and requires a lot of different folks in government willing to fight special interests.
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.
Funding schools based off of local property values creates a rich-get-richer scheme for school quality. It also encourages people to sprawl, which is what we don't want to encourage if we want vibrant, walkable environments. If every student in America had the same funding (cost of living adjusted) we wouldn't have as many failing schools or encourage people to flee the city when they have a kid.
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.
In cased you missed it, segregation is bad. It was bad 50 years ago and it is bad now. Parents that are trying to bring it back under they guise of 'think of the children' absolutely should be smacked down.
One way or the other, middle class people will send their kids to schools with the kids of other middle class people. The question is whether those schools will be in suburbia, or will be allowed to exist in the cities. It's almost certainly better for everyone involved if they're allowed to exist in the cities.
So clearly we should enshrine it in law. We better make sure that middle class kids never see anyone less fortunate then themselves.
I don't see that the mobility of the middle class is as easy as you paint it.
At least if middle class families live in the city, there is some hope of gradual integration. Through measures like Section 8, which often pays for low-income families to live in nicer neighborhoods, urban schools in wealthier areas can be 10-20% low-income. Parents will tolerate that. It's the 80-90% low-income schools, which make up the vast majority of urban schools, that they won't tolerate.
No I'm not. People will move (if they can or want to) for many reasons. That is not a reason to make sure you never deal with 'the undesirables' just because one of those reasons is the parents bigotry.
> At least if middle class families live in the city, there is some hope of gradual integration.
History disagrees with you.
Not sending your kids to a school that's 80-90% low-income is a rational choice. See: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/cps-alternatives-suburb... ("On the Program for International Student Assessment in 2009, U.S. schools with small proportions of low-income students did as well as schools anywhere in the world—while American schools whose enrollments were more than 75 percent low-income scored like schools in developing countries.", "Most important, many studies have also highlighted the importance of 'peer effects' in schools. They've shown that kids benefit from classmates whose parents have stimulated them cognitively from an early age, and who have helped them develop self-control and other social skills—the kind of parenting more common in middle-class homes than in poor homes.").
But you're totally right. Parental education, parental economic circumstances, the prevalence of two-parent households, etc, those aren't the important things when it comes to education. What really matters is that "every student in America ha[s] the same funding." That's why Chicago Public Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools both spend about $13,000/year per pupil, and have almost identical results to show for it...
Personally, call me an engineer, but step one is always identify the problem. If you think this is a modern-day form of segregation, you need to let yourself admit it is happening, and thereby identify the problem. Getting angry at people pointing it out and refusing to believe it is merely a way of guaranteeing you'll have no impact. Skipping over step one does not make problems go away.
(Or you could prove rayiner wrong. I suspect that's not really a feasible road here. Social policies are inevitably clumsy things aimed at thousands or millions; motivated individuals can often dodge around them quite well, and in this case, they are quite motivated.)
Certainly you can see the problem with then cementing in law or policy what is just because it is.
> step one is always identify the problem
Step two is not write policy so there no longer is a problem.
Not a reason to instigate such as policy.
Bussing has other problems anyway, usually that being very bad for the health and performance of the children being bussed.