Cities are great until you have kids and you care about their education, safety, and overall well being. That’s when suburbs start becoming really attractive.
Cities are getting worse year on year. I'd still be living downtown with kids if a homeless camp hadn't sprung up in a park near by. Suburbia by contrast is far enough from public transport that the homeless can't get there.
As I read this I wondered based on Texas and Florida bussing immigrants out of state - will cities just start bussing their homeless out to the suburbs.
Unlikely. Those solutions are generally undertaken at the state level. There's no way to piss off voters quite like moving homeless people out of a city into their suburbs, and if those suburbs are in your state, those people can vote against you. Maybe this works somewhere like NY/NJ where NYC has interstate suburbs...
But more practically, if you give a homeless guy in Manhattan $200 and a bus ticket to NJ, that dude is gonna come back. The distance is sort of necessary for the desired outcome.
It turns out our parents all had their reason, and it's still there.
There's a whole host of problems in cities that naturally result from so many people living close together, and our governing structures seem to be bad at most of them.
Sending them to a weaker school district does impact them negatively over their career. They aren't as likely to get the education+extracurriculars+references needed to get into target programs in target schools, which makes them less likely to start their careers at renowned companies (doesn't have to be FAANG, even unicorns, YC startups, and F1000s restrict new grad hiring to a handful of target programs), which makes them less likely to climb the ladder efficiently, which makes them less likely to be able to afford to buy a house or start a family. Plus they aren't as likely to have a strong alumni network that can help them open doors everywhere.
If I stayed in SFUSD I wouldn't have been able to reach the position I am at today versus the HS I went being one with a strong alumni network and the children of high net worth families.
My friends who stayed in SFUSD cannot afford to live in the Bay Area anymore and will probably never have a chance to ever afford living in California (they all ended up moving to Arizona and Texas) whereas by going to a target HS, I have a shot at those milestones in my 30s-40s.
It sucks, but America is a harsh society now. Most careers outside of Tech/Finance/Accounting pay shit, and Tech+Finance+Accounting jobs severely restrict entry now c. 2023.
This is why a lot of parents decide to take a 1-2 hour commute over a 20 minute one
It's hard to see all the demographic shifts 20+ years ahead, or the kinds of turns a life can take. I stayed in SFUSD. Still in the city. Made money in crypto, haven't worked in quite a few years. My brother also went through and took a more traditional academia-to-government contractor path, house, three kids.
All elite schooling does is put you on elite tracking. That is materially the best historically, but honestly, you can develop an amazing network and skillset online, too. That's mostly on the parents to realize that the opportunity exists - a lot of parents have difficulty keeping up with the interests of teenagers and just tell them to do their homework, but it's actually the moment where they can leverage a lot of wisdom and say, "no, actually the school assignment is nothing to stress over - just focus on building one good technical skill for yourself instead of the class, and if we don't know where to start we'll email some industry pros."
There is a long tradition in tech of some of the most successful people being, at the start, eager students who actively sought out expert advice and built their network by going directly to the source - not to the highest status roles that get bombarded with that stuff, but to the people a bit behind the curtain, in a critical doing-of-things role. When you get enough of those, you end up well oriented to the actual challenges of the field, and school can melt away into the background as a how-to-get-there detail.
At the individual level, I agree with you. We are both products of K-8 education in SFUSD, but a couple notes/clarifications
1. Target School =/= Elite School.
CS@University of Utah is in no way elite, but is a major recruitment target for Adobe and graphics oriented companies. Same with SJSU (most SJ companies), Oregon State (NVIDIA/Intel), and UT Dallas (telco/networking). Even getting into an <affordable> T70 CS/EE/CE program is increasingly difficult as programs haven't expanded headcount, and getting significant scholarships require a 1450+ SAT at this point.
2. Target Role =/= High Status Role.
I can safely state that MIT and Harvard CS students are having a hard time finding entry level roles at even "Ok" employers like Proofpoint or Sophos let alone internships. This causes pressure downwards as now there is increased competition for a smaller and smaller amount of roles.
I'm a Product Manager at a niche late stage startup, and for my PM Intern roles I'm getting applications from MBA students at HBS/Tuck/Wharton who straight up told me the only reason they're applying to my role is because McKinsey and Bain revoked internship offers.
1 year ago, I was having difficulty getting interns who even did a BSBA at Haas, but now I have the pick of the litter. The same thing is happening everywhere across all levels of companies.
Entry Levels roles are much more competitive in the 2020s than they were when you and I both attended college (I'm going to assume the early-to-mid 2010s). Every entry level role assumes internship experience now, whereas that was much less common in the early-to-mid 2010s (you could go to SFSU without an internship and still land some entry level SWE role somewhere).
3. Macro-Level College Readiness
You and I both did well and did K-8 in the same school district, but did the majority of our 8th grade and/or 12th grade class do well? For the sake of this discussion let's assume "well" is defined as on track to a white collar position earning $110,000 a year by 30 ($110k in 2023 is comparable to $90k in 2010).
This benchmark requires higher education within Tech+Accounting+Finance, and school districts like SFUSD have a College Going Rate (includes Community College) rate of around 68% compared to a wealthy district like Los Gatos Unified (88%).
And then when you factor in tests scores (used to determine scholarship and program admissions) this gets even more stark, with the median SFUSD and LGSHUSD SAT scores being 1230 and 1330 respectively.
With all these factors combined, it has become harder to get your foot into the door. There will be smart outliers always (a good friend of mine in college was the only kid in his inner city HS to be college bound and we attended an elite T10 program), but at the macro level, you have less chances and the margin of error is much higher. Make one bad mistake and you won't have a safety net to land on. And that's what alumni networks are at the end of the day - professional safety nets that help us find new opportunities.
When I have kids, I'd want them to have an easier time succeeding in life, and this means giving them as much of a safety net as possible, that way if they don't have the ability to hustle, they can still be set for life.
PS - which SFUSD hs did you attend? The outcomes at Abe Lincoln or Lowell are different from Mission or Ida B Wells
Thank you for taking the time to help me understand your point of view. You and I have clearly led very different lives, causing us to focus on different concerns about our children's futures: but I appreciate the sense of responsibility your thinking shows.
For my part, I know what long commutes do to me, and I am certain my eleven-year-old is better off with a happy, engaged, lively papa they get to spend a lot of time with, instead of the tired, often-absent grouch I'd be if we moved to the suburbs.
Neither my wife nor I have pursued the kind of competitive, ladder-climbing career maximization you describe in our own lives, so that's not a focus in our child-raising either. While we are trying to ensure that horizons remain broad and options remain open, we see our responsibility as less about building some specific path to success and more about supporting our child while they grow the skills they need to pursue whatever kind of life it is they will come to value.
Thanks for the compliment. And I agree with you - as a parent being close to you kids is critical.
Also, the experiences I wrote about come from being Asian American in the Bay Area, where there are no "average" school districts anymore - everything is either underfunded with horrible success rates or hypercompetitive districts that rank in the top 500 nationally (a lot of this was racially driven - Cupertino's school district saw a massive white flight when Asian parents started moving in, and the HS I went to saw the same thing).
Also our public higher education system is defunded, so it's often harder to get into CS@UC Davis than it is to get into EECS@Mich. I've had good friends get rejected from UCD and get into MIT. Hell, I got rejected from UCLA and still got into a T10 national university.
Living outside of CA and Washington (they face the same issues as CA due to rapid population growth in 20 years but almost no change in funding) you don't need to make the same kind of hard decisions that I mentioned above - there are still decent average school districts with engaged staff and little to no rat race, so you could work as an sofrware engineer at Cummins or Honeywell and still have a 9-5 and send your kids to a decent public school district.
I moved from the Seattle area back to the Midwest, and the suburbs are great.
There is something very relaxing about seeing kids walking home from school with a variety of crossing guards, no homeless camps, parks that fill on weekends with families, well maintained roads and google fiber.
Probably at double the price. I had a friend who moved from Phoenix to Bellevue for work and paid twice as much for his apartment as he was for his house in Phoenix.
That’s true. You are also likely to make a lot more money there (or if one can’t get those jobs, living in those places is not really an option).
Having lived in a Midwest suburb as a kid (Sylvania near Toledo), they seem cheap because the jobs to support a booming real estate market just aren’t present.
Wasn't great based on your criteria of no homeless camps, good schools, crossing guards, parks that fill on weekends, well maintained roads, and good internet (Century Link fiber is great when it works, and works often)? Are you sure you were living in the same Bellevue that I was living in?
Bainbridge island is nice, but I wouldn't really call it a suburb of Seattle. Also, needles are what you get when you are living in a conifer heavy climate zone.
I was referring to syringes at so many parks. Everytime I brought family out, it was embarrassing.
I was close to the downtown cores of both Bellevue and kirkland. I'm sure there are pockets that are nice, but now imagine a significantly larger area where the problems are exceptions rather the the rule.
I feel so many people have Stockholm syndrome when it comes to the area.
I lived just off main in Bellevue before moving to Ballard. The downtown park (< 5 minute walk) filled up all the time. I saw a syringe in Bellevue once though, not at a park but in a run down strip mall parking lot. I’ve never seen a syringe in bainbridge on any trip there with the kid (we often hop on the ferry in the summer). That being said, I bought a house/moved to Ballard because I wanted a more urban lifestyle for my kid (now kindergartener going to a SPS school). Bellevue is clean, but boring.
These days, syringes are pretty much gone, as addicts have moved from heroin to fentanyl. I would be shocked if Toledo (and sylvania and the other suburbs I knew) was missing that somehow.
Suburbs are where the common citizenry beat a strategic retreat - the war for the cores of our major cities was lost long ago to the allied forces of the ultra rich and homeless drug users. I don't even think the war analogy is sensational...we were literally pushed out of our own inner cities by an invading army.
Short of nuclear war, I don't see the number of homeless drug users ever declining in major US cities, ever. There are more today than last month. There will be more next year than today. We lost, they won. But we have to live somewhere.
Soon the best suburbs will be gated if not already....gated communities don't have homeless drug users. In the next ten years I predict there will be a membership-only suburb with a population over 100k.
Dense urban environments are overrated. They became popular with industrial revolution, when large numbers of workers needed to work at factories every day. With rise of WFH and online shopping, dense urban environments no longer make sense.
I am sort of baffled at the idea of reducing the appeal of city living to commuting and shopping?
I live in DC, can easily bike anywhere, and it is to me about visiting friends at their homes, parks, going to museums, relaxing on the waterfront, going to the bike trails, hobbyist meetups, catching a train to visit Philly or NY, all within easy reach.
Really the issue, to me and most other people, is how hilariously unaffordable it is due to the incredibly high demand for housing in cities.
