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> The coffee is very different than the Italian one I've heard this many times :) His point about SF lacking children is very very accurate. SF basically forc
by bifrost 13y ago
> The coffee is very different than the Italian one
I've heard this many times :)
His point about SF lacking children is very very accurate. SF basically forces people with families out because its so expensive and the school situation is bad (your kids don't get to go to the neighborhood school). One of these days SF will wise up and at least fix the school problem, but until then the peninsula will get families and SF will get DINKs.
- MaxGabriel 13y ago"Dual Income, No Kids" (I had to look it up)
- spikels 13y agoNot a great place for raising a family: expensive, bad schools, disfunctional government, drugs on streets, and lots of crazies[1]. Pretty much everyone I have ever know who had kids in SF moved away within a few years. The demographics always reminded me of China where you did not see as many girls because of the one child policy. In SF children of both sexes (10% of population) are just missing: Persons under 18 (2010 Census) US 23.7% [2] SF 13.5% [3] [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pse50YZsyck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pse50YZsyck [NSFW: male nudity & mild violence] [2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html [3] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html
- antirez 13y agoThe census citation is pretty incredible indeed... About schools, that's something you could never tell just looking at the city that seems very civilized, and this usually correlates with quality of schools. I hope there will be efforts to fix that in the future.
- bifrost 13y agoI hope they fix the school situation, but its unlikely. There's a reason why SF is listed as one of the least well run cities in the world.
- geebee 13y agoI'm very late to this discussion, but SFUSD schools really aren't terrible, they're just very uneven. SF has an unusually high number of extremely highly rated schools, a large number of middling ones, and a notable number of failing schools. To see more about this, there's a site called greatschools.net. You can list the schools by API score (adjusted by expectations based on demographics as well). What you'll see is that SF has an unusual number of schools scoring 8, 9, and 10 out of 10. Below that, there are plenty of decent performing schools. And then, there are some 1's and 2's. Pretty grim. If you list schools in the suburbs, you'll find a similar situation. The big difference is that in the suburbs, you can convert a very high mortgage payment or rent into priority access for a top school. If you can't afford that, you're stuck in middling or poor schools. SF uses a lottery, where parents list their choices and then get an assignment. If you only list highly in demand schools, you do risk getting a default assignment to a very low performing school across town (you can still get on wait lists). These people often do leave. Prop H would have recommended giving priority access to district residents. It failed by a whisker. Probably the most interesting thing it revealed is that voters in good school districts favor priority access for district residents, whereas residents in poor school districts don't. Yeah, huge surprise there. I feel some ambivalence about this, because I do see advantages to neighborhood schools. However, there was an article in reason magazine making a very surprising libertarian case for SF's school lottery... http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-educatio http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-... Article is a little old, but I'd say schools have improved since it was written.
- kryten 13y agoSounds like London, UK where I currently reside with three children... Expensive: check. Bad schools: check. Disfunctional government: check. Drugs on streets: check. Lots of crazies: check. The thing I hate is that people wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Going to move out to the countryside I think... As for the nutter on BART, I got urinated on whilst on the tube in London .... twice. And no I was not on fire :)
- adw 13y agoSF is way worse (I used to live in Finsbury Park, now live in the Mission).
- kryten 13y agoSeriously? I lived in a crap hotel in Finsbury Park for a few weeks and it was a dive.
- adw 13y agoI was down nearer the Highbury end of things, but in terms of drugs/violence/random menacing on the streets SF is way sketchier.
- objclxt 13y agoYeah, I'd agree with that. I've lived in both. This is not to say that parts of London aren't dodgy, but SF is I think both subjectively and quantifiably worse. For example, London has around 500 people sleeping rough each night. San Francisco has almost ten times as many, between 3-5,000 (mainly because a winter's night in SF is rather more survivable than a London one). More subjectively, I think public transport in London far surpasses SF, both in terms of safety and quality (...Friday nights excepted, but I think that's par the course of any large city). [1]: London figures from here (http://www.thamesreach.org.uk/news-and-views/homelessness-facts-and-figures/ http://www.thamesreach.org.uk/news-and-views/homelessness-fa...), SF figures from here (http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/ http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/)
- moconnor 13y ago
- cmccabe 13y agoI agree, SF is a fun place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. I also don't like how some San Franciscans like to put down other areas. You can have pride in your city without insulting other people and places. As someone who grew up in a poorer area, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Most SF people are nice, but it's those other few people who ruin it for me.
- bifrost 13y agoOften the people putting down other areas aren't actually from San Francisco. There's a huge mentality in the coastal "progressive" communities that derides other ways of life, and its mostly fostered by non-natives. It is indeed sad and shallow.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- batbomb 13y agoI think Rent Control tends to hold people hostage from having new families (as turnover in larger houses is much smaller as a result, and there's no real benefit to waiting to have a family), and that's a part of it. While I'll agree that most families don't need a huge house to live, you at least need a 2 or 3BR house (especially as the become teenagers) to raise 2 children. At current market rates, you'd need $3k at least (in a decent cheaper neighborhood like the Sunset, Richmond districts) in order to raise kids right now. I don't think that's feasible with less than 140k gross family income.
- abalone 13y agoRent control is the ONLY reason we were able to stay in the city and have a child recently. It gives renters the housing security they need to put roots down and start families.
- batbomb 13y agoI believe that too, but I meant that also in terms that rent control punishes you for deferring decisions on moving. I have a very large 1BR apartment that can be 2BR if needed. I'm very reluctant to leave. If I had 2 children, it would be too small. A move up to an extra bedroom in my neighborhood would easily be $2k more for an extra room. 3 years ago it might have been a different story. If I was in a studio now, I'm not sure I could afford a move to a place like mine seeing how most studios are more expensive than my place now.
- abalone 13y agoWe have exactly the same kind of apartment. I'm not sure if eliminating rent control would make things more affordable. I am pretty sure that we would have constant insecurity every year, wondering if our rent is going to jump and we're going to have to move. The buffer from short term market fluctuations is a big factor is helping us stay and build a life in our neighborhood. But yeah, if we have a second kid it's gonna be tight. THAT IS WHY IM ON HACKER NEWZ 2 MAKE MILLION$$$.
- spikels 13y ago
- abalone 13y agoThat's comparing it to the US average. To compare it to other cities, Manhattan is 17.1% and that's considered a "baby boom" (source: NYT article from a few years ago). Anecdotally I see a lot more young families popping up in my neighborhood (Nopa / lower haight) over the past few years. Though i'm not sure if everyone can stay if the market stays this way when they need more space.
- subsystem 13y agoRegarding [1], I'd be more worried that there's only one guy helping out.
- Void_ 13y agoThis (no children) is what I hated about the city when I stayed there over the summer. And the smell.
- bifrost 13y agoUnfortunately we have a variety of smells, from the unabated bodily waste (homeless, drunks) to the poorly functioning sewer system. However, we know why the sewer system isn't functioning well - low flow toilets. Yes, the lack of water to move effluent down the system causes it to get stuck and then start drying and it creates a pretty horrible smell. The homeless situation is out of hand due to the unfortunate confluence of well meaning people and a lack of framework to deal with the chronically homeless.
- davidw 13y agoOne of the things that I really noticed when I moved from San Francisco to Italy was that here (Padua, Italy), there are young people, old people, rich people, and people not so well off. San Francisco is this kind of weird bubble where everyone has to have money to be there, so "regular people" don't exist. No kids, no old people, no people with sort of average jobs. I didn't like it, it felt too strange to me. I prefer to have a mix of people from all walks of life. Also, some people - a minority, but "anecdotally significant" - seem to be a bit smug: like living in San Francisco makes them better somehow. That said... I don't regret the time I spent there, and it's a city I heartily recommend to Europeans visiting the US, as it'll be a lot more familiar to them than something like Los Angeles, and it has a ton of stuff to do and see. And California in general has probably the most variety of any one US state in terms of geography, so if you get bored of the city, you can go the mountains, or the "lost coast" up north, or Death Valley, or pretty much whatever suits your fancy.
- physcab 13y agoI hadn't thought about the "people from all walks of life" aspect missing from SF before. I find that true as well. I haven't been to many other big cities but I'm curious how SF relates on that aspect to cities such as Seattle, New York, and LA. I wonder if SF actually does have quite a lot of diversity if you expand your definition of SF from anything within 10 minutes of Civic Center to everything from Outer Sunset to South San Francisco.
- davidw 13y agoI think part of the problem is just geography. A city like Boston or Seattle has a lot of room for suburbs, so if you have less money, you can go further out. In SF, you can only go South, otherwise you have to cross the bay. San Francisco, as someone else writes here, has a housing supply problem.
- philsnow 13y agoTake a walk around SF's Chinatown if you want one example of people who are a mix of: young / old / rich / not so well off. The outer Sunset and Richmond have lots of families and older folks.
- 2pasc 13y agoI 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.
- lakethun 13y agoYour 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 http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html [3] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html
- egometry 13y agoThese 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.
- lakethun 13y agoThey 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.
- geebee 13y agoSF 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.
- kaib 13y agoThe comment on schools is incorrect. The school system changed a year back and now you have a very high chance of making it to your neighborhood school. This is both from reading the system description and first hand accounts from friends with kids going to Kindergarden. Noe Valley is pretty nice and it's hard to say if it's more expensive than say Mountain View in the south.
- to3m 13y agoThe comment about lack of children in San Francisco reminded me of this piece: http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2007/09/rhythm-of-memory.html http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2007/09/rhythm-of-memory.html