Why we’re raising our kids in this dangerous dystopia, San Francisco
A few months ago, a viral video showed a group of teens and tweens getting off a crowded San Francisco Muni bus, only to encounter a gantlet of junkies splayed out on a city sidewalk. This video wasn’t intended to inspire sympathy for people suffering from addiction and homelessness, but horror that children would have to see them.
It’s not always easy being a kid or a parent in SF. Some of our problems are more acute than they are in other metro areas, but these problems are growing increasingly universal. Although San Francisco is a self-consciously unique place in the world, many of our problems — housing affordability and homelessness, public financing of schools, sclerotic local government, failed policing, opioid and meth addiction — have become commonplace across the country.
Plenty has been written about the challenges of being a kid in San Francisco, more so than most cities. Parents feel these challenges, too.
The 2020 census showed that just 13% of San Francisco residents are children. That gives us the smallest child-age population of the 100 largest cities in the USA. By comparison, other Bay Area counties have child populations in the 20%-23% range. Miami, the city where I grew up with its own affordability crisis, is currently at 17%.
Like everything else, this is unevenly distributed. Only 5% of residents of Nob Hill are under 18 years old. The southern neighborhoods (where we live) are more like the broader Bay Area, at 18%-21%. Since visitors and media spend more time in the northeastern core of the city, they may see many desperate, mentally ill adults but not many kids.
Our public school enrollment also dropped by an astonishing 5% this school year. Why? Well, for a number of reasons, but the biggest one was that our schools were closed for 18 months for COVID, in spite of one of the USA’s lowest transmission rates and highest vaccination rates. Parents who could afford to do so transitioned their kids to private schools, or moved to other counties entirely. No surprise that we recalled all three eligible school board members by ludicrous margins last year.
Anyone thinking about having or adopting children in San Francisco has some big decisions to make, and those decisions aren’t always easy.
Urb or Burb?
My wife and I each moved to San Francisco in our mid 20s, as many young people have over the past century. Years later, after we’d met, co-habited, and married, we asked ourselves: Do we want to start a family in SF? Do we want to raise kids here? Do we want to raise kids in any city?
This is a narrative and a choice shared by millions of couples across America. Two adults meet in a city, and eventually face the urban-or-suburban decision when they plan their families. Would you rather be Fleishman or Libby?
One major question for us was affordability. A primary reason why SF has so few kids is because this city is f***ing expensive. By most measures, SF is the third most-expensive city in the USA compared with incomes, trailing only Manhattan and Honolulu. Buying a home certainly seemed out of reach for us in the mid-’00s, even with two good-enough incomes, unless we wanted to engage in one of those cursed zero-down adjustable-rate mortgages. (We didn’t.) And by the way, the suburbs are expensive, too.
Another question was much higher on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: What were SF-raised people like? As adults who’d both grew up in the southeastern US, we had to ask ourselves: “How might kids raised in this City eventually turn out in life?”
And then we had SF’s urban challenges, which were already quite apparent 15 years ago, if not as extreme as today.
So, why not do the “normal” thing, and just flee to the suburbs before spawning?
The Purpose of a Childhood is to Grow
Parents decide where and how to raise their kids based on a number of emotional factors. Some parents are obsessed with security for their own reasons. Others mostly want “good schools” (which could mean a lot of things, including segregation). Others just have a vision of what they want “home” to mean for their kids, which often reflects how they feel about their own childhoods. Some people just want a new house with fresh paint, a carpet-like lawn, and a garage big enough for a pickup and an SUV.
My wife and I each had mixed feelings about our own childhood environments. So after envisioning our futures in other regions, we decided to stay here. We had two kids in our rental apartment as we waited for the ’00s housing bubble to deflate. And finally, with our older one getting ready for kindergarten, we took the plunge and bought a house. In the City, not the suburbs.
More than a decade later, we’re still here, with one kid in high school and the other in middle school.
So, why are we raising our kids in this failed city? Well, here are a few reason why we’ve elected to raise urban kids. None of these should be seen as a judgment of parents who chose otherwise.
(1) San Francisco is the real world
San Francisco is highly diverse, inhabited by 49% people of color and 34% immigrants. My son, himself mixed race, attends a wildly diverse public middle school with 41% Latino, 30% Asian-American and Pacific Islander, and 8% Black children. More than 56% of students there are considered Economically Disadvantaged. The monolithically white tech bro San Francisco has been greatly exaggerated.
Every day, my kids encounter people who are ethnically and socioeconomically different. They navigate their lives knowing that communication isn’t necessarily clean and easy, that they will often find themselves in situations where they’re not in the cultural majority. This means they make friends who are growing up very differently, and in school they often need to confront moments of cultural and economic resentment and misunderstanding.
Also, my daughter is taking a very impressive high school Ethnic Studies class that would be literally illegal to teach in Florida. San Francisco, like some US cities more than others, confronts the ugly parts of its history instead of burying it.
For all San Francisco’s uniqueness, it looks more like Real America than a lot of the places we think of when we say “Real America.”
(2) Safety today is danger tomorrow, and vice versa
In spite of what advertising tells you, safety doesn’t come from a giant all-wheel-drive vehicle, an alarm system, or a loaded gun in your nightstand. Safety is something you learn from experience.
Quick story to illustrate: One night in my younger days, I went out dancing with a friend and some of her childhood buddies. They had all grown up in a lovely, wealthy town and together attended an affluent private school.
It was 2am downtown, and the bars and clubs had just closed for the night. We were standing near a small crowd of young men agitating around the street, hollering vulgar and belligerent words at each other. It was immediately clear that these were two squads, maybe gangs, and the energy was hostile.
The people in my group wanted to watch what would happen, as if this were some mild confrontation in a high school hallway. But I grew up in Miami in the 1980s, and I sensed danger. I suggested we GTFO, growing more insistent as I recognized how serious this situation was about to get.
A moment after my group reluctantly started moseying away from this escalating scene, we heard gunshots behind us. Their disappointed walks urgently accelerated to panicked sprints. My friends’ inability to recognize a threatening situation had put them in danger.
Growing up in an urban public school system taught me a lot. The violent crime rate back then was significantly higher than today’s, and the city’s drug trade and deep corruption were especially fraught.
The kids I knew back then have carried their street smarts into adulthood. I’ve seen it throughout my life: people who grow up in cities and public schools know how to sense dangerous situations and maintain their safety. And at the same time, they’re fearless about diving headfirst into new, enriching situations outside their comfort zones.
Many Fox News viewers these days are absolutely terrified to set foot in a major city. They may believe that to walk on a sidewalk today is to risk a needle in your foot or maybe bullet in your head.
That’s called paranoia, the fear of almost everything and everyone. Don’t raise your kids to fear the world.
Street smarts are different from paranoia. They’re about distinguishing a truly threatening situation from mere ugliness, and knowing when and how to get out of it. Over the years, I’ve switched subway cars and left bars when I sensed dangerous vibes. I’ve learned that the best way to maintain safety is through flight, not fight. Emergency rooms (and morgues) are full of people who felt compelled to confront a danger for their own pride or status.
And in the end, San Francisco and most cities are safer from random violence than you might think. You probably won’t ever get attacked on the sidewalk; your kid probably won’t ever find fentanyl in the playground. When you do the math, unless your child is involved in crime or they frequent chaotic parts of town after hours, they’re not really in much danger. Especially if they learn to recognize a threat before it endangers them.
And both your kids and you will learn that paranoia is no way to live.
(3) Cities make kids self-sufficient
I had a pretty typical middle class Gen X childhood, which meant once I was able to dress and feed myself, I mostly did. Society called us “latchkey kids.” My dad called it “benign neglect.” It was… a pretty good way to grow up.
Like most Gen Xers, I had free reign to explore outside my home, a territory that grew with my confidence on my bike. But because Miami-Dade County is a vast sprawl, until I could get a driver’s license and access to a car, that available radius was highly limiting. I was, in summary, dependent on my parents or friends’ parents for most transportation.
And yet, compared with today, that was a golden age of transportation access. Some of today’s suburbs are not walkable at all; many don’t even have sidewalks. Newly built communities are designed like mazes with dead-end cul-de-sacs. In 1988, I could walk through someone’s yard without a concern; that is not the case today. And today’s motor vehicles are far larger and heavier, so pedestrian/bike collisions are deadlier.
What this means is that today’s kids are more dependent on their parents than ever to get out of their houses. Many households today start almost 100% of their trips in their cars, which means kids and teens require an adult driver to go anywhere. Affluent, two-career households often have to hire a nanny or au pair whose primary responsibility is driving.
This is not the case for city kids.
When my older child reached middle school (sixth grade), she started walking to friends’ houses after school. Soon she learned how to ride our BART and Muni rail and bus systems to travel all over town. She and her friends, without driver’s licenses, make plans across all corners of the city. Today her plans and interests are not limited by where and when mom and dad can drive. Parents don’t have to encourage their kids to do this; it just happens.
If you know people who grew up anywhere with mass transit, they may have similar stories.
But public transportation isn’t the only benefit. Plenty of parents today lament that their kids can’t just “go out and play” anymore. It’s not because society is more dangerous for kids; it’s because we’ve built spaces where homes are designed to be fortresses, and neighborhoods designed to be traversed in SUVs.
In most neighborhoods of San Francisco, kids actually do go out and play. Yes, it’s true. I live near a city park, and every day I see kids walking to the park with other kids to hang out or shoot hoops, often with no adult chaperones. (In 2017, SF became the first US city where all citizens could walk to a park in under 10 minutes.)
Now, this isn’t without risk! For all the attention people pay to Walgreens shoplifting and the prevalence of hard drugs, the greatest risk in SF is being hit by a car. Every parent has a responsibility to teach their kids pedestrian safety, especially since SFPD stopped enforcing traffic laws around 2019.
This is more than just convenient for parents. This directly aids the health and development of kids. Children in San Francisco have one of the lowest rates of obesity in the USA. It’s not because they love vegetables; it’s because they walk and move.
This is also about kids developing a sense of independence. They decide what they want to do, they figure out how to get there, and they go. Independent navigation is a life skill, as much as doing your own laundry or packing your own lunch.
Now, some parents find real meaning in laundry and lunch packing. That hour a day in the car may be the highest quality time they have with their kids. In many households, the commute is the new family mealtime.
Like everything else above, it’s a choice about tradeoffs.
(4) Serendipity
Finally, cities are built for cultural enrichment. It’s not just the museums and street festivals, it’s the serendipity that comes from walkable, non-commercial public spaces.
Sometimes you go out for lunch, and you find a dragonboat race, a concert on a blocked street, a pug party.
For all the “SF has more dogs than kids” jokes, this city has a lot to offer children. Any parent here can draw you a map of where the best playgrounds are, or direct you to kid-oriented museums, or take you to Sunday Streets.
Cities, even small ones like SF, encourage cultural exploration. It’s hard to replicate in the controlled commercial environments that many people consider “safe for kids.”
No, this isn’t for everyone
OK, so I hope I’ve successfully explained why we and others have chosen to raise a family in San Francisco, a city with a permanently dubious reputation. So far, it’s working out. Our kids are healthy, well educated (mostly) by public schools, independent, and compassionate towards others who are different from themselves.
But this city is also kind of broken and lawless, not in a “you can smoke weed in the park” kind of way. And a burrito starts at $10 in most neighborhoods. You pay the costs to get the benefits.
Even during some of the dodgier moments in this town, I’ve never regretted our decision to stay. I see it every day in the people my children have become, and the parents my wife and I are today.
Thank you for helping me raise my kids, San Francisco. And thank you to my fellow SF parents, even the tech bros.
