You live in a better neighborhood, you get a better education, you likely have healthier food available to you and grocery stores nearby, in addition to a school that probably cares a little bit about that sort of thing. There's still drugs in high school, but they are sold by the rich kids. There's tutors and test prep centers by your school. There's a lower probability of violent crimes and gangs. Sure, your family has to shop at the thrift store, you get hand-me-downs, and you don't get to go to Subway at lunch with your friends.
Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.
Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.
Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.
Yes, the lottery system which can land your kid who lives one block away from their preferred school but gets assigned to a school on the other side of town and 45 mins away in traffic is one big red flashing migraine for many parents.
Sf has a lottery system to avoid all the rich kids at one school, and all the poor kids at another. It’s well motivated but totally impractical from get-kids-to-school-before-work perspective.
Plenty of other factors too. No nightlife. Limited restaurant options. Schools that offer only the basics and may be failing. No public transit. Shitty and expensive Internet. No local job hopping opportunities. Limited extracurricular activities for the kids. Lots of anti-intellectual peer groups in the schools.
It’s not just the quality of the schools, it’s the lottery system. You have no idea where your kid is going to go to school, and there’s not a lot of control over it. While I understand the intent of making all the schools equivalent, in practice you don’t know if your kid is stuck in a school on the other side of the city or not. It’s super confusing.
We’ve been considering moving, but the lottery system keeping us from moving to SF. There’s other problems with the city too, but that’s the most serious one for us right now.
Its really the lottery system for the public schools that is the reason most of my friends with kids left SF. People buy houses in certain neighborhoods to guarantee which school their kids attend. Without that guarantee, there is not much incentive to live there.
Well, what it really is is families and non-millionaires looking to buy. I mean, you can buy studios/1br's for around $300k-$400k (my wife and I have a close friend doing this). But for the most part, it's all cash everywhere and a lot of it.
We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be:
a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you
b) bused to a crappy school across the city
but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one).
All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"?
So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools.
That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.
Well right, it's all related. The schools are good (largely) because the people sending their kids there are willing and able to pay extra to live near good schools. The houses cost more money because the schools are good. Feedback loop.
I mean, take a look at how the non-voucher system works in SF. Lottery system and if you end up with a crappy school, you either put your kid in a private school or try and game the system to get them switched. The parents who are poor don’t have the bandwidth or knowledge to do it so they just get stuck with whatever school. So you end up with the same problem. Crappy schools have kids of parents who don’t value education or parents who don’t have an option.
At least with vouchers the parents, rich or poor have a choice where their kids go.
It's difficult to overstate just how huge selection bias can get in the education space. I went to a high school in the Bay Area, one of a handful in my city. (1) Houses in our attendance area were ~$500,000+x more expensive than ones right across the street in another attendance area, because our school was "better". Why was it better? Because the parents paying an extra half million dollars to get their kid into a better school were going to make sure their kid did better, come hell or high water. So there were lots and lots and lots of after-school tutoring centers, where students would get taught the highschool material in advance, so that they would already know it forward and back when they were tested on it. Which makes the school test well, and thus look better than the other schools in the area, raising housing prices. x += $100,000; GOTO (1).
The actual quality of the education was substandard, but there is something to be said for being embedded in an environment where academic failure was simply not considered an option.
SF has a lottery system. With the wrong stroke of luck, your child can be damned to hours of commuting across the city every day, just to go to a crappy school, when a "good" one might be across the street.
That's an extreme example, and in the worst case scenario there are plenty of good private schools to send your children. But choosing to live in SF comes with such a set of pros and cons that many parents of school-age children who have a choice choose to live outside of it.
I'm going to need context for this. People will commute for hours per week to buy/rent a home in a good school district. I'm looking into school right now where homes in the neighbourhood are $1MM+. I can't afford that so I'll try and get our kid in through the special snowflake waiver.
People will spend ungodly amounts of money to move to an area with decent schools.
San Francisco uses a lottery for every grade, beginning with pre-K. This causes intense anxiety among many parents. But San Francisco doesn't struggle with the same problems as Baltimore, certainly not to the same degree. In the case of elementary school, other than the chance of not getting the closest school, the anxiety is largely unwarranted, IMO. I'm not looking forward to junior or, especially, high school, though. Unless we end up going the Catholic school route, which is surprisingly cheap--significantly cheaper than daycare.
Anecdote: A parent from our kid's preschool once told me they had a conversation with the principal of one of our neighborhood elementary schools and upon inquiring about the relatively early start time the principal told him, or at least insinuated, that the start time was designed to dissuade cross-town parents from selecting the school, effectively gaming the lottery system to favor neighborhood families.
And every single student who want to go to the public school in Tribecca have to have an address there to be zoned for it. If you want to talk about selection bias thats your case not a lottery.
Plenty of kids in Harlem goes to Success Academy. Most of the kids in Williamsburg comes from fairly low-income families. That was the very premise of the school and why it's popular.
Watch the documentary The Lottery on Netflix it's quite illuminating.
Bad schools have unmotivated teachers. They operate more on discipline than inspiration. They have poor infrastructure and outdated books. They're understaffed, poorly managed, and some even have lead paint in the walls. There are a good amount of schools that have these problems, and since school funding is tied to property values, then we have an idea why housing costs around the good schools are high.
Bad schools are not a high school zombie apocalypse of having to fight for your life against "black and hispanic gang members". That's the stereotype that needs to end already.
A lot of it is a function of economics. The schools are built to get kids into college so they can get 6 figure incomes immediately out of it so they can scrape by living in the area around the schools. If you aren't on that path, or don't want to be on that path, you basically move from your parents decent->really nice house into the slums with 5 other people. Especially if your parents want you out of the nest and "independent" as soon as possible. Its like walking a tightrope - mediocrity is not an option, because its ever increasingly hard to get by and live on what most people in the country would call average.
I've had several friends in the bay who grew up there struggle coming out high school - one wasn't really up for college at the time, and the only option to move out on the $16-ish an hour service job into a doubled-up apartment in a bad part of town. Surprise surprise, extreme depression. The other had their parents just paying for their rent - they got to mostly sit around and play video games, but mental health was fine other than just general lethargy.
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