Correction: Until they have school age children. It's not too hard to raise toddlers in the city and have a nice walkable lifestyle. Sure getting around to do

Correction: Until they have school age children. It's not too hard to raise toddlers in the city and have a nice walkable lifestyle. Sure getting around to do anything outside your immediate vicinity can be a challenge but it's not insurmountable if you have access to good public transportation. Once you have school age kids though, it's a different ball game. Private school in the city is expensive, and often puts you in an upper class income demographic with all the pros/cons that come with that. Public school can vary from being great in progressive, well funded schools to absolutely horrible and filled with violence, apathetic teachers, and rampant drug use in under-served schools. Often there's a lottery system to get into the good schools in many cities, too. Schools are the suburbs' trump card. Most of us that would love nothing more than to get out of the suburbs and away from our car-based lifestyle are pretty much held hostage by the school systems. The one "hack" I've seen become more common is home schooling, but this requires one person to stop working, thereby reducing the income to a point where city living becomes hard to afford.