Where Goes the Middle Class?

The middle class is leaving Boston. That fact was a key issue when Thomas Menino first ran for mayor 12 years ago. And today, as Menino tries for a fourth term, it's still true. Despite better schools, thousands of units of new housing, a stunning drop in crime, cleaner streets, greener parks, and even a requirement that compels city workers to live in Boston, the middle class is still moving away. A 2003 analysis of Boston by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, found that the number of families with incomes in the middle continues to decline. There has been an economic "hollowing out" that is leaving Boston a place of just the rich and the poor, according to David Luberoff, executive director of Harvard's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston (where I sit on the board of advisers).

So what's the solution? Even more of the seemingly endless policy refrains of education, housing, safety, amenities, and residency? Or is it perhaps time to admit that the loss of middleclass families with kids isn't some temporary, fixable phenomenon. It's permanent.

Indeed, a new pattern seems to be emerging: Middle-income residents move fluidly between city and suburbs. The young live in the city. Once they have kids, they move out. When their children leave home, they return. It's a cycle: in-out-in, one that has happened already in many other American cities and one that is now happening here.

The reasons for the exit are easy to understand. The suburbs are cheaper. Modestly sized downtown homes are costly and getting more so, putting them out of the reach of all but the most affluent. Moreover, suburban living is easier. There's more green space. Playmates for children are everywhere. "The kids can run from house to house. You could never do that in Boston," says Patricia Malone, a onetime West Roxbury resident who now lives in Natick with her husband and three children.

And then there's education. Boston's schools have improved, yet, over the last decade, the number of middle-class children in them has declined. The suburbs seem to offer a measure of excellence and stability that Boston can't match. Parents think it better to get out when the kids are young than deal later with the trauma of a move if their children can't get into one of the city's few high-quality schools.

"What was quirky and fun as an adult becomes difficult as a parent," says Susan O'Connell, once of Mission Hill, now living with her partner and daughter in Canton. "It's not that we couldn't raise our children successfully in Boston," adds Daniel Cence, whose family left Brighton for Medway, "but our chances for success are better in the suburbs." Perversely enough, the very things that make a city a city - its pace, complexity, and intensity - are the things that drive out families with kids.

It's also what draws them back.

Once the children have left home, many of these reluctant suburbanites have little reason to stay. They feel wealthier because their houses have appreciated and their expenses have dropped. And Boston - exciting and safe as a result of its dramatic success at cutting crime - is much more interesting than retiring to Florida or the Cape. And so the idea of the suburbs as a place of transition - a temporary, not a permanent, home - has emerged. Thinking this way makes the move out easier; urbanites feel they are not abandoning Boston as much as they are taking a breather.

The implications of these changes are wide-ranging. Some may see them as leading to a new, and not necessarily bad, future - a different and better relationship between city and suburbs. Others worry that the middleclass departure leaves Boston with a lack of civic involvement and a growing economic division. They fear that the city is turning into a mere playground for adults. These are all real concerns. Yet the middle class continues to leave. It's a truth that needs to be confronted, rather than simply wished away.

Thomas M. Keane Jr. is a freelance writer and former Boston city councilor. E-mail him at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.