That's small children, not necessarily school aged children, which is why I'm still wait-and-see on this. I attended public elementary school in SF in the 70s, which surprises a lot of the parents I meet now (I have a three year old). I don't, unfortunately, have very encouraging things to say. It was a rough environment. Fights (and by that, I mean fist fights) were extremely common, even among eight year olds. Then again, a lot of people didn't enjoy school, so I'm not necessarily saying things were all peachy in Marin or Palo Alto.

I have to wonder if the middle-class people will stick around once they are faced with difficult decisions about school. San Francisco still uses a lottery to determine school assignment, while wealthy suburbs guarantee you access to the "free" wealthy local school.

I know a lot of people with three year olds, and I really like these folks, but very few of them grew up here, and I wonder how they'll react when the city tells them they've been assigned to a poorly performing school across town. Will they accept the assignment (hard to swallow)? Pay $17K+ for private schools (hard to do when you're struggling to make the mortgage payments)? Or will they just move out of the city? Keep in mind that SF is very expensive, just as pricey as these tony suburbs.

It could be that city centers become wealthy, safe playgrounds for singles, retirees, and young couples who stick around until their children hit school age.

One of the worst Public schools in town (William Cobb Elementary) is being transformed into an AMI certified Montessori school with complete replacement of the staff. I have no clue how this is happening here politically, but it sure is encouraging. A nice side effect to the certification requirement is that all the old teachers don't qualify :)

The new direction started with a pre-school program with the support of the top international Montessori school in Marin. The Cobb Montessori program now has a 5 year track record with glowing reviews from parents. We are enrolling our 4.5 year old there now. I never dreamed of having our child in public school until I found this one.

But you sure do need to be committed. The numbers just don't look good for SF. If you rely on private schools, you are looking at about $17K/yr for the K-8, followed by $25k/yr for the high schools. The numbers boggle the mind. I have one kid and another on the way. That means that tuition would run me between $34K-$50k a year. It's not tax deductible, so this actually translates into about $50-$70 in salary. I know some two income families that could swing it without too much pain, but unfortunately, I'm not in one of them.

But even if you can afford it, imagine if you moved to a good school district in the suburbs and invested that money instead. The education is "free" - and in a way, you make money on it. You have to pay taxes to support it, sure, but you'd have to pay them in SF anyway. And because houses in good school districts tend to hold value or appreciate more rapidly than others, the tax becomes, in a strange way, an investment (ie., you're essentially buying a share in a school district when you buy the house). Living in SF must be very important to these folks, because I wouldn't be surprised if they're walking away from well over a million in lost revenue over a lifetime.

Lastly, SF's school district is in particular trouble because of the deals it cut with the unions in more prosperous times. I read about this in the chronicle a couple of years ago (sorry, no link). Anyone who worked for five years for SF Unified (in almost any capacity) gets subsidized health care in retirement. In other words, someone who worked as a janitor from age 19-24 before moving on to other things is on the pension and health care plan.

Because it's a relatively old school district (newer suburbs simply don't have retirees to support, because they didn't exist 30 years ago), this problem is compounded. SF will spend a huge amount of its school budget simply supporting its pension and health plan obligations.

In a way, it's almost a relief that so many childless people live in SF - because of these obligations, we may need a much larger tax base to educate the same number of students as a suburban district.

It's the fistfights between 16-year-olds that indicate an area has problems.

I really don't know how it was elsewhere. It irritates me when people think they know me better than I do, and I don't want to be guilty of acting that way toward someone else.

When I transferred to private school in sixth grade, fights essentially vanished. Believe it or not, there was never a single fistfight in my high school.

My suburb's been gentrifying along with the rest of the Boston area, though. When I was in school, there was still a sizable working-class population here, and I considered $400K to be a really expensive house. Now you can't find housing here for less than half a million, and the house around the block just sold for $1.2M. It's changed the character of the neighborhood a lot.

I'm sure that people can't really understand what those housing projects were like, but to give you a couple of examples--people use to snipe at police men and paramedics from the top of the buildings in the Cabrini Green projects. Cabrini Green was about 2 square miles of 10 story slums, and within those two square miles, there were two full police precincts. Paramedics would not enter the Cabrini Green projects unless they were escorted by one or two police cars.

I worked two ER's within a mile of Cabrini Green. It was an adventure to say the least. One of them was a small 16 bed ER, and we staffed 6 security guards for our department. Every single ER stretcher had restraints to tie patients down, chained to the frame of the stretcher. There were a number of times that I got called out to the entry way to see a car parked, riddled with bullet holes. The driver and passengers usually had couple of holes in them as well that needed to be patched up.

And, the Cabrini Green housing project was about 1 mile away from the "Gold Coast" of Chicago, which was one of the most expensive zip codes in the nation when we lived there. Mayor Daley slated Cabrini Green for removal, and last I heard, they had built a hip new development for the neo-urbanites moving in.

So, they relocated thousands of the cities poorest people. And, they removed a bunch of gangs in the process. The crime rate went down quite a bit after that, but those people took their Section 8 vouchers to the local burbs. Those local burbs just don't have the resources or the tax base to deal with problems. Just Google for images of Gary, Indiana if you want to see what those local burbs are becoming.

But, even back in the 90's, there was a lot of gentrification already occurring. One of the things the article didn't mention was how beneficial to the city it was to have a large gay and lesbian community. Some of the first areas of Chicago to get gentrified were because gay and lesbian couples who didn't have kids and didn't have to worry about the school system. They moved in to neighborhoods in Chicago like the Halstead neighborhood and Andersonville, and really turned them into hip, trendy and safe areas to live.

I now feel like a whimp.

Thanks for the detailed writeup !

Buy me a beer some day, and I'll tell you about the time my friend Sue was an hour late for work because she and her paramedic husband were trying to revive her next door neighbor who had just been shot 3 times in the chest.

I'm 6'6" and 300 pounds, and I'm a complete wuss compared to Sue.

Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in.

As far as I'm concerned, this defeats the point, unless there is excellent public transportation to the suburbs.

Another commenter mentioned Pittsburgh, and yep, this is even happening here. The developers, however, are very much pushing this toward "young" (read: single, or married without children) people. I don't think we'll see an influx of families/children into the downtown area (which is quite small by comparison) because there are very distinct urban neighborhoods with things like trees and grass within 5 miles of the city center. I can be in downtown Pittsburgh on my bike in 20 minutes, and I live near one of the rivers, have two parks within walking distance, and own a house that costs a fraction of what they are charging downtown. There are at least half a dozen other neighborhoods like this, too. Most of these neighborhoods also include a small business district with enough amenities to keep people in the neighborhood (and out of their cars).

A side effect of having singles or newly married folks is children. Families with children don't so much "influx" into new neighbourhoods like that as "spawn" there naturally.

The neighborhoods of Pittsburgh make a nice compromise of being city life yet affordable to families.

Cities, even during periods of prominent trendiness, should have cheap domiciles on account of the various methods of bulk housing construction used. Things like rent control provide a scathing impediment to the expansion and cost effectiveness of urban areas. Rent control, for example, is a hugely negative incentive for an entrepreneur to throw up a high rise. For my sake, I wish this were not the case, but I know I'll make it anyway.

is your city doing this, or do you have a plan for how that can be incorporated?

In a capitalistic society a trendy area of "high value" will push the prices up unless some sort of socialistic program like rent control steps in, no? My question was what's your take on how cheap residences can coexist in a trendy neighborhood.

Rent control actively pushes prices up for everyone by discouraging new development (unless you win the rent control lottery).

Of course, there will be certain ultra trendy neighborhoods that will still be out of reach for all but the wealthy. But allowing developers to build new residences in urban areas make it more likely that poor, just out of college graduates will have some place they can afford to live.

And if you think it is not possible to build new residences in already urban areas: note the article says that residences in lower Manhattan have doubled to house 50,000 people since 2001.

But I disagree that we can "just build more". It isn't just simple supply and demand because land, and hence living spaces, is finite. You can't just increase production until everyone is happy. And in a good neighborhood all new residential developments will be priced completely out of range for college grads and the likes. Availability isn't affordability. [edit: And I certainly believe in build-and-rebuild in urban areas. I've been to Hong Kong where the speed of urban renewal makes ones head spins. But all subsequent new projects are progressively more expensive than the existing projects. Building more units never made anything cheaper unless they were specifically slated as "social projects" funding by the government.]

With regards to lower manhattan: are residences cheap there?

Anyway. Sorry this turned into somewhat of an argument. The point is: it is impossible to have a trendy desirable neighbourhood with cheap residences.

The difference between city housing and a MacBook is that there is no restriction on how much you can sell a MacBook for after buying one.

Potential living space is not limited to a horizontal plane.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22growing+vertically%22+%22l...

There is a reason that San Francisco buildings are notoriously short, and the reason is rent control.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-274es.html

Isn't that The Hill (or am I not following your geography)?

Kelo v. New London

"Here is where [Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day] O'Connor asks about the specific plans for the homes before the court, and Horton pulls out his Pareto-optimal town-planning schematic, and everyone on the bench briefly contemplates buying a new condo in Fort Trumbull, Conn."

http://www.slate.com/id/2113868

The main reason they moved is that had begun to feel unsafe in their previous neighborhood. Apparently a lot of poorer people have been moving out to the suburbs, some of them bringing crime and gangs.

I'm glad that they enjoy their new house and neighborhood. But I wonder if it will still be a nice place to live when gas is $15/gallon.

I could tolerate living in a suburb if there was public transportation to reach some decent restaurants. It would need to be a streetcar, train, or bus that runs every 20-30 minutes until midnight.

Oddly enough, we also had some local ordinance that you couldn't ride your bike on the sidewalks, which removed the last use we really had for them.

I disagree with this idea. As we have seen on the Internet, the more people that one can reach at low cost, the more niche the needs a business can successfully fill. The best candidates to fill such niche needs are small startups, not corporations.

If people with money are moving into the city, then by definition, more people can be reached at a lower cost. If these people have money, then they will be willing to spend it on something that improves their lives.

The argument is really easy when you just look at shops today. Even without a rich population, the denser downtown areas are full of small businesses. In the suburbs, where people are more spread out, chains rule.

In Europe, where the author claims this gentrification has already occurred in several places, are there not small town book stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and even shoemakers?

I'm really curious what made the author even add this comment to begin with. It was like he was too afraid of saying that city life in the future is going to be wonderful, so he had to throw something negative in there.

Part of that is zoning.

But, how many of those stores are bookstores? How many of them would have sold food if Webvan hadn't screwed the pooch?

Frankly, I don't see the appeal of small stores, especially for things like drugs and food. The prices are higher, the selection is smaller, and they tend to have lousy hours (unless they're liquor stores). If they employ anyone outside the owner's family, they don't pay much and they don't pay benefits.

I can confidently say: Detroit sure hasn't inverted.