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The Baby Boom in Cities
May 27, 2009
Posted by: Carol
Traveling around San Francisco over the weekend, I noticed that every cool coffee shop was surrounded by babies and strollers. (And many of the strollers were doubles.) Surely, urban leaders are seeing this new baby boom and planning to keep these young families in their cities, right?
Wrong, according to New York Magazine. The story is in the headline: "Why are Manhattan's elementary schools turning away kindergartners? How the Bloomberg administration missed the baby boom it helped create."
A colleague based in Brooklyn just won the lottery in Brooklyn to get her pre-schooler into a good school. While she was rejoicing at her good fortune, she was, at the same time, lamenting the fact that her friends were likely to leave the city because they were not so lucky.
This is dumb (really dumb) policy. Just as cities hit the jackpot of young, college-educated people wanting to raise their families there, urban policy forces them out by not providing the schools they need for their children. This time, urban leaders won't be able to blame federal policy. This one is squarely on their heads.
Wendy, May 27, 2009
While policy makers have perhaps been a little slow to see the new trend, to be fair to them this is the first time enough upper-middle-class families with children actually want to stay in the inner city. In the past, you could count on them fleeing to the suburbs. Vancouver ran into the same problem, building one new school along with all the condos only to have it be at capacity upon opening such that they are trying to accelerate creating school #2. Because no other city had seen this, and because most condos are 1 or 2 bedrooms of less than 1000 s.f., they figured numerous parents would leave before their kids hit grade 1 -- as happened in Manhatten and in Vancouver's other highrise neighbourhood. Not this time.
Link: allaboutcities.ca
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