patrick.net

Jimbo, I agree with you about the many strollers in Noe Valley. I look at them though and wonder if they'll still be living there in a few years when their kids want to ride bikes and stuff and they have to haul them to the park to do it. We stay in the Sunset every time we visit, and while there may be lots of kids there, the only time I see them is when they're walking to and from school. It's just kind of depressing to me to see neighborhoods where kids never play outside, but I guess that's the norm in most places now.

But with regard to SF being a kid-friendly place or not, I actually think it does have a great deal to offer kids, more than many other places--the ocean, Golden Gate park, the Academy of Sciences, the kid-friendly museums, the playgrounds, the public transportation... In my 5-yr-old son's view, the city is one gigantic amusement park.

For me though, I need lots of sunshine and lots of greenery, and I love being able to let my kids ride their bikes and their hundred other ride-on toys right outside my house (we live in a suburban neighborhood), and go looking for leaves and bugs and rocks right out in the front yard, etc.

I think both suburban and urban places have pros and cons for raising a family, but with my kids at their current ages, I personally think the burbs are the easiest place to raise them (not that I have a choice though, since the army decides where we live at the moment). Still, if it were up to my husband and son, there would be no better place to live than SF. If it were up to me and money were no object, I'd head straight to Marin.

I don't mean to make this sound like it's contradicting my earlier post--my point then was that when we're in the city, I don't see many other families walking around together. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. :-)

Come down to 24th Street next time you visit then. You will see teenagers hanging out in front of the Starbucks, trying to look bored, families walking together back from dinner with their children and young (and not so young) couples with their baby strollers. Along with the occasional 20 something hipster spilling out of a local bar and an even rarer panhandler. It is quite a mix.

I live on a relatively quiet street and the kids from across the way play in the street. It is still too buy for me to believe that it is safe, but they do it. They watch out for cars, but still...

Every playground is full of playing kids on the weekends. Check out Douglass playground (26th and Diamond) next time you are here.

Noe is kind of looked down on by much of the rest of The City as being boring and unsophisticated, full of "breeders" but it suits me just fine. I have to admit it is the most "suburban" in character, but that is just because the children are the focus of the community here, something that is extremely rare in urban America.

I often wonder why I don't see more children outside in The Sunset as well. I think it has something to do with the mostly immigrant community there not wanting to let their kids run wild, but I am not really sure.

Generally, love this blog, and I love eavesdropping on the chatter. But while Vancouver may seem cheap to you, please take a gander at van-housing.blogspot.com. The median house price here has hit half a million. Median income around 60K. Median house price in Toronto, a fair city for comparison: 350K.

I agree that housing prices in Vancouver are very expensive. Cost of living (other than housing) is still a lot cheaper though. This may explain why retirees like to live there. (I hope to retire there too.)

Don't get me wrong. There is definitely a housing bubble in Vancouver. IMHO prices will correct significantly.

blue, do you think the Olympics in 2010 has anything to do with the bubble?

Jack

I think you've nailed why my husband and I are still in Ca even though we get so frustrated with the housing market. Right now the area I live in is becoming increasingly pretentious and annoying as everyone is tooling around in their new Escalades patting themselves on the back. But the area was really fantastic not too long ago. Fortunately this particular area has not been overwhelmed with all the building that has gone on everywhere else around here. So I think we keep hanging on in hopes that the level of pretention will go down with the price of the homes. We'll see.

Jimbo, Noe Valley sounds great. I'll definitely give it a closer look. My husband lived in that neighborhood when he was very young, but we haven't spent much time there since I've known him. Just have had brunch at a couple of good restaurants there, names of which I can't remember.

Flak, prices in Vancouver may decline soon but I think the big bust will occur after the Olympics. When anticipation ends, prices tend to converge with the fundamentals.

Jack, you can use some NIMBY laws. :mrgreen:

The “new” guy across the street is a nice enough guy and everything, but he just about clear-cut his whole lot. This is a rather forested hillside by the way. He said he moved to this town to “enjoy the good life”, which is great. He loves the “ambience” he says, opening his arms in reference to the surrounding beauty on the hillside, (Then he eliminates almost every tree on his property, thereby gaining a great view of the three-story broadside of his neighbor’s house and roof, and a stunning telephone pole as well. But he “has a better view now”)

Egad! The rest of the neighborhood must hate this guy unless, heaven forbid, they are cut from the same cloth. What was it Prat said? Oh yeah, Tool, complete and utter.

Any law preventing you from cutting down every flipping tree in a heavily forested area is not a NIMBY law --it's an anti-idiot law. And I'm all in favor of that.

Margie

You ROCK for not following the herd and using something not often seen these days...common sense. :)

My home is almost paid off. I’m so happy to have my equity all tied up! I have peace of mind… The economy can go south in October but I can still find a job paying $7.50 hr if needed to pay the bills.

I'm with Jack --that's my definition of "rich".

You know, I really have to be careful how I put this, but I think what are seeing in micro here (young families leaving, more and more priced out) is a direct result of population pressure. Which in California, is caused by immigration.

I have lived here, on and off, my whole life and I can tell you that the quality of life statewide has steadily gone down. More crowding, longer commutes, less natural beauty, more expensive home prices, yadda, yadda, yadda. All obviously caused by a combination of increased population and poor planning. Sure, some of my vision of the past is tainted by the inevitable nostalgia and it is certainly true that the air in Riverside is better than it was when I was a child, but I remember when there were orange groves and swimming pools and kids used to walk around alone or with other kids and everyone was okay with that. Okay, maybe a lot of nostalgia, looking back at that phrase, but I still maintain that population pressure is making our lives more difficult here.

And I am of two minds about this: one mind says that is great that people want to move here and great that we are attracting the best and most ambitious from around the world and great that we can share our bounty with others but the other mind is pissed that Native Californians are being priced out of our own damn state and pissed that even with relatively high taxes we cannot seem to maintain our infrastructure and schools adequately and pissed that the crowding and congestion is making what used to be a laid back California into a permanently grumpy one. And it is not even our own fault: native birth rates here are barely adequate to even replace the population, much less cause this massive population boom that is now into its sixth decade. Why should we have to pay for other nations unwillingness to deal with their population problem?

I am sure there must have been an entry dedicated to immigration but I could not find one. Perhaps that is an idea worth of discussion.

I can certainly understand the Marin NIMBY model of saying "the castle is full" and pulling up the drawbridge to further development, but that inevitably leads to extremely expensive housing as supply and demand have to meet up somehow. And the Southern California model of paving everything in sight leads to traffic jam hell. So what is the solution? Closing the borders? Probably not, not at least without some sort of modification to the existing immigration laws, so that we can attract the labor we need. Actually, that is what I would prefer to see: greater enforcement of the existing immigration laws plus an expanded way to both make legal the people already here and legalize the ones that we allow to come in the future. This current exploitation of the millions of illegal workers here is just not right, as well as screwy economically.

Would this help solve Californias overpopulation problem? Absolutely. Which would lead to cheaper housing as well as innumerable other benefits.