Quote:
Originally Posted by west-town-brad
If you can find a way to include more Single Family Homes in neighborhoods with good schools, then you will retain families in the city.
When parents say they are moving to the suburbs or whatever for the schools, that is only part of the equation. They want good schools and an affordable (for them) single family home.
Because there are plenty of affordable housing options in neighborhoods with top public schools, but not single family houses that many people can afford.
I'm speaking as a parent that hangs out with a lot of other parents... sure, maybe one family out of ten will live in a duplex down condo for the long term but most will not.
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You can't go the whole way all in one step.
If a three bedroom condo is competitive price-wise with a suburban SFH in the burbs, you'll hold onto a number of those movers.
And if a SFH in a neighborhood with good-enough schools remains affordable to fairly affluent parents because the nearby supply of condos and apartments is high enough, you'll hold onto some of those parents too. This helps strengthen the "good enough" school to "pretty good", increasing demand for homes in that district, thus increasing property values and sending spill-over to the next neighborhood over that has "good enough" schools.
I mean, five Chicago public high schools are in the top five in the country, above New Trier. I just talked yesterday to a middle income family that moved from the city to Des Plaines
after the kids graduated because they were in a good school in Chicago. We just need to keep that virtuous cycle rolling.
We can't just make the schools good all at once. In much of Chicago, the reason the schools are poor is because all of the nearby families are poor. People who are considering moving to Willmette for the schools simply aren't going to send their kids to high school with classmates who have a parent with extremely low socio-economic status.