Family In The City
Funny, the SF-based Tanners never had these issues in Full House -- the Chronicle ran an interesting set of articles yesterday detailing the problems that San Francisco-based families face when trying to stay in the city.
The articles profiled a couple who live on Guerrero Street and their two kids (5 and 1) -- on the one hand, an affordable area because of the high-density housing and street traffic, but on the other, not the safest place for kids to play. They relate the classic San Francisco tale of woe: having to drive their kids across town in traffic to get to the better schools on the west side (or scrape up over $10,000 in private school tuition), cars speeding down the road, and other families in their neighborhood fleeing for bigger yards and more bedrooms in the East Bay.
So it seems that as of late, many families that want to stay in San Francisco end up leaving the east side of town (the Mission, the Marina, the Haight) and going over to the more suburban-y parts of town (the Sunset and West Portal spring to mind). But what about families that want to stay in an urban environment? What if you don't really want a yard and like having a lot of people around? They (sort of) make it work in New York, don't they?
Embrace city living with kids -- after the jump!
The Chron cites approvingly the denser areas of the Richmond as a model to follow, with housing built along transit corridors, and proposes that we do something similar on the east side -- maybe build housing along Market Street, or widen Guerrero and make it more of a boulevard (but look at Octavia -- success or failure?). And the Chron didn't mention this, but it also seems like improving the profile of the local public schools, particularly on the east side of town, might be a good incentive to keeping upper middle class Mission/Castro families near Tartine Bakery a little while longer too.
What if you want to have kids, but also want to live near a Pakwan? We don't have kids, so we don't know -- is this naive of us to want? Couldn't we take them to the park on Saturdays to bike? Get involved in the PTA? Hang out with other like-minded parents and their kids? It just seems like the idea of raising kids in San Francisco would be so cool. (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's Michelle Tanner excepted, of course.)