From the Chronicle last year: “The city actually has 3,000 more children under 5 than it did 10 years ago, but has lost more than 8,000 kids older than 5.”
From the Chronicle today: “There are actually about 3,000 more children younger than 5 in the city than there were in 2000, but about 8,000 fewer school-age youths.”
Adrienne Pon, executive director of the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, said the city’s increasingly high cost of living is driving out families with children, poor people and African Americans. It is leaving San Francisco an older city than in the past, with a median age of 38.2 years old.
Pon said other city characteristics causing families to leave are its high density, perceptions it is unsafe, beliefs the public schools are mediocre, high cost of private schools, and lack of open space. Several officials pointed to the high cost and overall lack of child care.
Whether public schools are also driving families out of the city was a big question at the hearing. Public school officials testified that they are seeing an increase in kindergarten applicants and forecast a rise in secondary school students within the next several years.
[Supervisor Mark Farrell] said his friends using the public schools are happy with them and that City Hall should take an active role in trying to change perceptions about the school district.
The question remains will the mini-boom in kindergarten age kids roll over to secondary school matriculation, or as the trends suggest, is that simply the age at which families will continue to flee.
∙ Flight Of The San Francisco Families (Or At Least Kids) [SocketSite]
∙ Families’ exodus leaves S.F. with lowest pct. of children in U.S. [SFGate]
“perceptions it is unsafe”? People being stabbed and left for hours to die in the streets sounds like a bit more than “perceptions”.
As long as they continue to think this is a marketing problem, nothing is going to get fixed. People with kids leave the city for 3 reasons – cost, safety and the moronic public school system which makes it so there is no way to situate your kid to go to one of the better public schools. You know, for “equality”! Great job, guys.
There are no fewer than 4 public elementary schools within 2 miles of our home that we would be happy to send our daughter to (including the one in the ‘zone’ that we live in). Unfortunately we won’t know about where she’s going until a few months before she starts, and it could end up being an unacceptable school. We can deal with the uncertainty (we’ll just rent our place out and move to Lamorinda if necessary), but not everyone is similarly situated. That’s why there are no kids in SF.
I did an analysis on census data a while ago. It shows most population lost happens to the 0-5 year old cohort
http://tungwaiyip.info/blog/2011/06/23/sf_children_flee_city_before_entering_school_census_data_shows
Once the kid get pass the age of 5, they stay put. Their percentage is even increasing as they gets older.
From talking to a former SFUSD teacher, I ihave to say that the elementary school system is overall pretty good. It is the middle schools and most certainly the high schools that are exceptionally bad, and while this remains true, will be the reason that parents flee to the better public school systems such as Oakland’s.
Not to say that all the public high schools are bad, but good luck getting your kids into those ones.
I’m planning to stay in SF with my daughter for a long time, but I think it’s the public school system that would be most likely to drive me out if I had more than one child. With one I can afford private school as a backup, but that’s it.
I don’t understand the article’s focus on the lack of single family detached homes. For most living in SF those are totally unaffordable. I live in a 4 bedroom flat that works just fine, a single family home is an unnecessary luxury here for me and pretty much everyone I know with kids. A 2-4 bedroom flat or apartment near a park works great for the families I know. For anyone who appreciates city life this is an acceptable trade off. Since there is no way we could ever build a ton of affordable single family homes here it would make more sense to focus on just larger more family oriented housing.
The reality is that this is a city for the wealthy and the very poor. While people use the public schools as an excuse, it’s pretty hard to compete with the real estate prices in the burbs over the city. Many families don’t have a choice – paying $1800 a month for a 3 bedroom seems far more reasonable than shelling out double or even triple that here in San Francisco. However, I don’t think many people factor in commute time and its impact on your quality of life.
My spouse works in the City in your stereotypical long hours/high pay job. We can afford to live here in a nice house with a yard. We have great parks located within a 10 walk of our house and an easy commute downtown on public transport(under 20 minutes). We can walk to lots of things. We could move to the suburbs, where driving is the de facto norm, the commute time becomes much much longer, and my three kids would see one parent far less than they already do.
We made the choice to stay and we send our kids to public schools. We are not at a “trophy” school – just one of the many decent elementary schools in the City. Personally, I think that the city public schools need some sort of high profile booster to do a better job of marketing. In our experience, the horrid reputation is not deserved. There are some major benefits to living in the City with school age kids.
The concern over the shortage of detached single family detached housing is idiotic. There are also “shortages” of indoor shopping malls, amusement parks, coral reefs, and opportunities to build snowmen in San Francisco.
Public vs. private schools seems to be the factor that separates the wealth-off from the wealthy.
At two kids * $25,000/year you need to have $50K after taxes just for one year of education.
However, I think one of the keys that is overlooked is how people in this city pay very different income tax rates depending on whether or not the majority of their wealth comes from salary, stock options, or carry from hedge fund/private equity income. A hedge fund manager would only need to earn $50K/.85 = $58K to pay for private school (15% long term capital gains) whereas someone that is on a salaried position would need to earn say $50K/.67 = $75K or almost twice as much as the hedge fund earner. Note that I am using 33% Federal Tax Rate here assuming that private school tuition is coming out of your higher earning dollars and thus the marginal cost of those dollars would be the second highest rate of 33%.
Single family home is the stereotype the critics and bureaucrats sees. What they should do is take a tour to Mission Bay is to see all the toddlers stomping around. Plenty of families are perfectly happy with condo live.
We raised a son in SF who is now in a top tier private university. He went to public school – mostly. The ‘mostly’ is important.
Yes there are lots of good elementary schools. Yes, there are good options for high school. (Ever heard of Lowell?) But middle school is a real problem and I would advise all parents that private for middle school may need to be considered. My son went to private for middle school – and it was crucial.
But 12 years of sky high private tuition is most emphatically not necessary. Also our child was dreamy and unfocused at that point and just not suited to large classes, even in an honors program. He has many friends who are now at equally fabulous private universities who went to public middle school. Your mileage may vary.
There are countless demographic micro-trends as well. Case in point:
We have lived at the same Upper Haight address since 1979. In our building of medium to very large (4 real bedrooms) apartments, we saw our first pre-teens in the mid 1990’s, and our first stroller age toddler in just the last 5 years.
Granted you always see kids coming or going to the many public and private schools in the neighborhood. But I can remember in the early 1980’s when I first saw a child in a stroller on Haight Street, and thinking “dang, look there, never seen that before around here!”
So the number of small children in my little bubble of north of Haight 94117 seems to be growing as the bad old Haight Ashbury of the druggy 1970’s slips into history. At the same time, other parts of town have seen the departure of working class families and the arrival of single hipsters.
the pickle is, of course, that if you do send your kids to an SF public school, the CA child protection folks will see that as an indicator of child abuse/endagerment. How long your child stays in school is a delicate function of the income demanded by the teachers’ unions vs. the income necessary to run the child protection racket (also unionized). I hear that they negotiate in bulk for different schools.
“A hedge fund manager would only need to earn $50K/.85 = $58K to pay for private school (15% long term capital gains) whereas someone that is on a salaried position would need to earn say $50K/.67 = $75K or almost twice as much as the hedge fund earner.”
Yes, ignoring CA taxes & assuming all long-term capital gains – more likely applicable to PE folks (& if you’re a VC and some money from qualified stock – it’s tax free!)
Please note that middle and even high schools are getting better, in part because of the changing demographics in the city – e.g. vis valley and excelsior now look more like the Sunset, and the schools have seen an influx of working and middle class asians. So now Balboa High has dozens of AP classes which were unavailable 8 years ago. Same for Aptos Middle School which now has honors classes and attracts high achievers. I agree that cost, far more than schools, drives families out.
MDM – Not sure why you think that really matters. To have that 50k taxed at 33% Federal a couple would have to have a taxable income (after all deductions, plus the 4 exemptions) of $217,000 to $388,000.
In my own situation (without the two kids) my household “taxable” income was just 60% of the gross income after all the deductions, credits, and exemptions. And I did not have much in the way of deductions other then mortgage interest and taxes.
So your example is really dealing with people that are making between $300k to $500k a year. The difference of $17k additonal income in that range isn’t going to that significant.
intheknow
Your response to Cheryl using the term “idiotic” was disrespectful. She made a good point that many of the SF dwellings are not large enough for families.
Fred, I think you need re-read Cheryl’s post. She and intheknow seem to be in agreement and both appear to be addressing the article linked.
Cheryl: “I don’t understand the article’s focus on the lack of single family detached homes….I live in a 4 bedroom flat that works just fine, a single family home is an unnecessary luxury here for me and pretty much everyone I know with kids.”
Intheknow: “The concern over the shortage of detached single family detached housing is idiotic.”
@ Mark Ballew. How could you say that Oakland is an example of good public middle and high schools? Those are generally recognized as some of the worst all around public schools.
All the above complaints are just different ways of saying “it’s expensive to live as a family in San Francisco” and you’d hear the exact same complaints from folks trying to support a family in any dense city in the U.S., most notably New York City.
nowonderitcostssomuchhere is right about the public schools complaint as an excuse.
kddid comes as close as political correctness allows to plainly saying that a large motivating factor for parents sending their kids to private schools, and thus having complaints about the cost of it, is to AVOID having their middle and upper class children having to come into contact with (presumably “low achieving”) darker-skinned non-asian people’s children.
If you want exclusivity, and it seems that S.F. parents do, there’s a price to pay for that.
Brahma, I assume most of the people on here don’t care about skin color, except to say that I hope they are surrounded by skins of all colors. What I do care about more is surrounding my children with other children and families that come from homes where education, responsibility, and respect are valued, both for oneself and for others. On the one hand I feel empathy for the K of a family that doesn’t value education or respect others. But not so much that I want my kid sitting next to them in class.
“If you want exclusivity, and it seems that S.F. parents do, there’s a price to pay for that”
yes, and the price will get steeper as the poorer performing part of the populace expands at an exponentially higher rate than the better performing part; I bet years from now, the few remaining well performing burbs will command a giant premium – of course, most people living there will also pay 90% in taxes for various “services”;
the good news is that all of this, however, ought to last only until the revolution comes;
invest in HK/Tokyo real estate!
I’ve made a second trial on plotting the census data. This should be lot more clear. The key take away is San Francisco lost a big chunk of children in the 0-5 group after 5 years, but not so much on the older age group. Take a look and give some comments.
http://tungwaiyip.info/blog/2012/03/09/census_of_children_population_in_san_francisco_(2nd_trial)
schools have been getting better ever since the change in the lottery 2 years ago. for example, the number of schools that parents have clamoured to get into has doubled. not surprisingly elementary schools have gotten better first… as those kids get older, middle schools will improve. It will never be perfect, but if you value diversity, and want to live in the City, SF public schools are an improving option. of course with state-wide budget cuts, there are significant head winds.
I’d be interested to see how many twenty somethings live in San Francisco and for how long they stay. When I moved here in early to mid 90’s, it was not an inexpensive city,but it was possible to move here after college and make it work in a wide variety of neighborhoods.
Three things I’ve noticed since:
-For that group that moved here in the mid 90’s, as they approached the early 30’s and the dot com bust, a huge number moved away– back to the East or midwest or to Seattle, Portland or SF suburbs. It left a somewhat homogenous group of techies, banker types, and trust funders. A lot of people got to the age of getting married and having kids and decided SF wasn’t for them.
-The groups of post-college people who move here now seem to have to live multiple people in a 1BR in the outer Mission or more and more are living in Oakland or the East Bay. With rents where they are, what is happening with the post-college age influx? (I’m a bit too old to have a really good view into this). But for true diversity, I think the influx of this age group is important.
-Final thought: of the people older than I who bought homes or condos during the 90s, the vast majority could not afford to buy the house they currently live in.
Brahma –
Close, but not quite. I could have been more clear – schools that have a high percentage of low-income /impoverished students perform worse than those with a different mix. In SF that translates to schools with high percentage of AA and Latino kids from certain neighborhoods, because that is who is poor. Mix is important – many studies show that it is the concentration of low income kids in a school, not their existence (or race) that affects overall performance of a school. Demographics are shifting such that some schools in the southern part of the city are now drawing more middle class people. My kids’ school has seen this work in reverse – the percentage of middle class kids is declining, and test scores and general school performance is dropping.
The article does not mention the change in the school assignment system, and I think that will have a change on families leaving the city. If you search the SFUSD web site, you can find demographic info of children offered a space in kindergarten last year (the first year of the new system) and it’s a staggering change for many of the schools. We have a newborn daughter and we’re looking to stay in the city. Under the old system without neighborhood preference, I doubt that we would have.
I cannot find any evidence that SF is getting “whiter” as the article suggests. Every census in the past 70 years showed a smaller percentage of white residents in SF, including the 2010 one. It seems that the stereotype got precedence of the hard data ….
Only the real SF is getting whiter, its all micro.
they just mean that as white (& not only) folks age, they become pastier & pastier;
“Close, but not quite. I could have been more clear – schools that have a high percentage of low-income /impoverished students perform worse than those with a different mix.”
yes, though some poor schools perform better than others – wanna guess which?
Weather, no one has mentioned it. I was born here and my parents moved me to the suburbs when I was 11 to get out of the fog and cold and so I would have a place to play other than in the garage. The suburbs were warmer and boring and I hated it. However, I think that there are still parents with the concerns of mine.,
My wife and I both work in the City and own a SFH here. We have a toddler and have already started looking for a private school for her pre-K. Public schools here in SF SUCK! We are fortunate that we will be able to pay for private, but I feel sorry for those who cannot. If we couldn’t pay, we would have to move to one of the boring burbs. BTW, my personal experience is that my corner of SF is getting a big demographic change. More Asians and Hispanics than African-Americans. My street is now half non-African American, versus 10 years ago when it was almost exclusively so. Not that it’s relevant, but my wife is African American and I am Mexican American.
I think one things that’s being missed is that being able to pay for private school doesn’t mean that your kids are being admitted. I know several people who can afford $25k/year/child but couldn’t get in. After siblings, major donors, kids of alumni & scholarship students, only a handful of “regular” kids can get in (for private grammar schools).
The SFUSD board continues to be the feeder system for progressives more interested in lefty politics than education. That itself is an indictment of how the system works.
In the end, parents want control. Neighborhood schools is a great step in that direction, but the continued uncertainty is simply unacceptable. Yes, it’s more boring where I live now, but at least I know where my eldest will be going to kindergarden in a year and a half.
There are lots of great public elementary schools in San Francisco. You are not guaranteed admission into them though, just like anything in life, half of the students are below average. Almost everyone I know who stuck with it ended up in a very good elementary school, though one friend I know had to transfer mid-year to get into Claire Lillenthal.
There are increasing numbers of good or very good middle schools as well.
@rndn
I am 31-years old and have lived in the city for the past 5 years. My girlfriend and I live in a 2-bedroom apartment with a third roommate. (We share 1 bedroom). There is plenty of room for us three, but this is not sustainable, if we ever want to get married and have children. This is the exact problem. Apartments and condos are completely unaffordable for the middle-to-upper earners. I want to raise my future kids in SF, but it doesn’t look possible. I have started to look at the East Bay as well as most of my friends in relationships at my age.
As someone who moved to SF as an early 20-something roust-about, and am now a settled married 30-something raising a family in the City, I am continually baffled by the claim that SF is a more expensive place to raise a family than anywhere else in the inner Bay Area. I just don’t see it. Unless of course, you are comparing apples and oranges, such as by comparing the price of single family detached houses in SF and out, which is nonsensical. And when you add in the embarrassing wealth of interesting things to do out your doorstep here, there’s no comparison. Where else can you live in a walkable neighborhood with everything you need within a few blocks, a huge urban playground like GGPark with museums and everything a short walk, and easy transit access to everything else? And you never have to get on a freeway or sit in traffic to access any of this. Certainly not in any location that I know of in Berkeley, Oakland, the Peninsula, or Marin that I know. You might get one of those qualities, but everything else requires a drive.
“Weather,… my parents moved me to the suburbs when I was 11 to get out of the fog and cold and so I would have a place to play other than in the garage.”
really?
Having grown up in Minnesota…I can only shake my head and chuckle…
It’s funny that this canard that “suburban schools are better” keeps floating around. Maybe it was true 20 years ago but it is not true today.
San Francisco schools are in the 60th percentile of schools statewide, at least by test scores. Considering most of the top 25% by wealth in San Francisco end up in private school, this is nothing short of amazing.
Suburban schools tend to be about average overall, so San Francisco schools are better than the average suburban school. I can name at least half a dozen suburban school districts that are clearly worse than SF. Most of them are about the same. A few are exceptional such as Cupertino, Palo Alto and Orinda, but all of these are expensive places to live.
So for a middle-class parent to leave San Francisco school district to move to a middling East Bay or Peninsula district, say San Mateo or Redwood City on the Peninsula or Concord in the East Bay makes no actual sense if you are just looking at test scores. In San Francisco you are actually much more likely to get into a great school if you try.
I think it has a lot more to do with race, but no one is willing to openly admit that they want to send their kids to a school that is a white-majority school, so instead they code it and say “the schools are terrible.”
Staring at the school map sorted by rank, one thing jumps out though: the majority of the best performing schools are on the west side of town.
http://school-ratings.com/cities/San_Francisco.html
So if you are living in The Mission and have to move anyway, it probably makes just as much sense to move somewhere a bit cheaper with similar performing schools.
Schools are a whole lot more than just test scores. Besides, as your child progresses through the public school system, you’ll see just how many ways SFUSD “puts its finger on the scale” to make the low-performing kids score higher. Three times as long to take the test, special coaching, teachers “looking the other way” and outright giving the kids the answers when all else fails – you’ll see it all.
Don’t trust API scores when there are a significant (ie, greater than 10%) number of “disadvantaged” students.
Yes I have started to wonder about that. I did see that some teachers got busted for helping their kids score higher.
Do you really think it is more rampant here than elsewhere? The pressure on teachers to improve their schools scores is pretty huge everywhere.
The only thing that seriously disturbs me about SFUSD is the disintrest they have in helping high achieving kids excel. In general, things like GATE are really not a priority for the schools. Lowell seems to be the significant exception. If you have a really bright kid you are going to be on your own to keep them stimulated. This is where a private school might really make a difference.
This info is lifted from the SF Parents for Public Schools list serve. But relevant for this discussion:
“And I’m not that convinced that the private school sector is so much more academically challenging and rigorous. After all, what they need to do is please the paying customers (especially the highest-wealth ones, the potential donors) — which you don’t do by distressing their kids with burdensome homework, uncomfortably tough grading policies and stressful academic demands. In our family circle hanging out with the relatives in private schools, if I may say so, my SFUSD-educated kids were always the nerdy ones with their face in a book, and packing impractical, excessive numbers of books on vacations with the extended family.
And my SFUSD-educated son definitely attends college with the private-schooled children of the power elite, and no, he’s not overwhelmed by their vastly superior intellect and education.
I think it’s a given that families that have the resources DO provide enrichments for their kids — the huge challenge is families that don’t have the resources, of course. . .
This is the white percentage this year in each grade in SFUSD.
SFUSD- Grade: K 4,668 19.0
SFUSD- Grade: 01 4,590 18.3
SFUSD- Grade: 02 4,539 16.7
SFUSD- Grade: 03 4,332 15.7
SFUSD- Grade: 04 4,080 14.0
SFUSD- Grade: 05 3,833 12.0
SFUSD- Grade: 06 3,482 9.8
SFUSD- Grade: 07 3,454 9.6
SFUSD- Grade: 08 3,566 8.1
SFUSD- Grade: 09 4,085 8.1
SFUSD- Grade: 10 4,201 7.9
SFUSD- Grade: 11 3,994 7.7
SFUSD- Grade: 12 4,036 7.2
So this raises the question: Do these numbers mean that increasing numbers of white families are enrolling their kids year by year, or does it drop off because so many families leave SF?
^ source please…
with respect to schools, and the assumption that middle and upper class students will have to go to a private school or force a family move to the suburbs…I was reading an article in the WSJ a few days ago — The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation — and laughed out loud when I read this:
Emphasis mine, to tie this into the topic of the thread. Notice the way that either the author or the people being quoted (people who are new to The City) buy into the idea that moving to the suburbs is going to automatically mean an improvement in schools.
At least he’s not planning to sell after a two or three year hold.
They should have bought 583 Clipper which just went for 50,000 less than the 2004 price. Good luck on that “sell for more money in five years” concept! Tip for the nice, hardworking Indian couple, rent a great place for five years then move and buy a place where the schools are far better than SF, like Piedmont, Palo Alto, or several Marin towns.
^ don’t link unlike things.
Clipper was an overbid
on a thoroughfare.
and in five years time
Cesar Chavez will return
not as an apple