The Departing
When young, middle-class families with children flee for the suburbs, a city is robbed of its heart and soul. San Francisco is embracing radical new ideas to stop this urban flight. Shouldn't Boston be doing the same?
Stephen Michener is a man with a plan. He hands it to me as we sit on the couch in his second-floor Jamaica Plain condo – a slim white binder with the words Boston Metro Evac handwritten with a Sharpie on the spine. Following that, in parentheses, is written simply: (Plan B). "We started putting this together two years ago," he says. "We're still adding to it."
The binder is already an impressive blueprint for someone wanting to leave Boston in a hurry. An architect with close-cropped hair and black Prada glasses, Michener has put the same care into this project as he might into a gut-rehab. Tabbed sections hold notes on work necessary to sell his house, color-coded maps of Brookline that mark locations of playgrounds, bus routes, and school districts, and printouts of current homes on the market there.
"With Brookline, at least we could keep the same kind of lifestyle," he explains. "If we go out any farther than that, we might as well go to Ohio." Michener and his wife, Deb, have built a comfortable life in Boston over the last decade. Through the window I can see the ball field that abuts the condo's small side yard. Each morning, Deb walks downhill to take the subway to the city center to a landscape architecture firm, while Michener bikes to the Montessori school with his sons, Nate, 5, and Jacob, 2, before heading to his nearby office. "We love the little spot we live in, right next to the bike path and the park," says Michener. "We can go for family swim. We can walk to the zoo."
Their bubble popped two years ago, when they began looking for schools for Nate, who is eligible for kindergarten this fall. After a disappointing slog through public and private schools all over the city, they found themselves considering leaving altogether. "Before that, we never thought twice about it," says Stephen. "You never realize it's going to happen to you."
The family isn't alone. In the past decade, Boston has reversed decades of population loss to draw middle-class and affluent residents back to the city for luxury condos, restaurants, and upscale boutiques that have sprouted like mushrooms after rain. But there is one thing these newcomers have not brought with them: children.
Boston ranks sixth from the bottom of the hundred largest American cities in its percentage of children, with just 19.8 percent of its population under 18 in 2000, down more than 10 percent from its high point of 31.9 percent in 1970. While accurate population figures since 2000 are unavailable, school enrollment in Boston has fallen 6 percent in that time, from 84,720 to 80,161. That outpaces a decline in the birthrate, suggesting families are continuing to move away. Unlike in previous decades, now the exodus is often not by choice. "In the past, it had a lot to do with the pull of the suburbs. People liked the idea of having the barbecue in the backyard," says Barry Bluestone, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University. "Today, we are seeing more push from the city," largely due to real estate costs. That theory seemed to be confirmed by an informal telephone survey last year by The Boston Foundation, in which about half of Boston parents said they were "somewhat or very likely" to leave in the next five years, despite the fact that two-thirds of those surveyed had lived in the city a decade or more. Ask any young urban parent, and you'll get an earful on why: skyrocketing housing prices, lackluster city schools, and a rising rate of violence.
All of this begs the question: What does the city lose when the stable heart of its population – its families – ups and leaves? Other cities around the country have begun to respond to a similar situation, experimenting with family-friendly recommendations on housing and schools. Leading the charge is San Francisco, another city on the water with sky-high real estate prices and a booming high-tech economy. There, the mayor has made "family flight" his signature issue; back here, despite similar demographics, Boston is lagging behind, though it has aggressively stepped up efforts to improve and promote its schools. After talking with parents, teachers, and city officials in Boston, I got on a plane to see what we could learn from San Francisco's attempts to help families make urban living work – before they leave to pursue their own Plan B's.
I don't come to the issue without bias. As a young parent in Jamaica Plain, I hear one topic of conversation at the tot lots and cocktail parties frequented by fellow urban breeders: How long are you going to stay? The reason I know Michener, in fact, is because my older child, Zach, goes to Montessori school with his youngest.
On a recent night, my wife and I had made dinner, put our two kids to bed, cleaned up toys, polished off a bottle of wine while putting away the dishes, and were preparing to go back to our laptops when I blew up. "Why are we living in a city when we can't enjoy it?" I ranted, railing against the pressures of working overtime to afford a condo that will be too small for us in a year, not to mention day-care costs (and, in a few years, a mortgage on a bigger house and private school). It didn't help that, a few days before, we had opened up the Jamaica Plain Gazette to the headline "Toddlers Flee Gunfire," about shots fired at a playground a block away.
For the next hour, we went over our options – moving out to a college town or smaller city like Portland or Providence where housing is cheaper, or, like the Micheners, waiting a year or two to move to an inner suburb where housing might be more expensive, but at least we wouldn't be shelling out for private schools.
That's the course taken by Jamie Cohen, whose 13-year-old daughter, Nikki, used to baby-sit Zach. Then, I never thought to wonder why she was only available on weekends. "We live in Jamaica Plain," says Jamie Cohen, before correcting herself: "We lived in Jamaica Plain." Two years ago, the electrician and her daughter left after 28 years to move in with an aunt in Newton during the week so Nikki can attend public school there. "She had the choice of four languages, she gets home ec, art, music, technology," Cohen gushes. "It's hard to say no to all that." The back-and-forth arrangement is far from perfect, however. "We live out of my truck," she says. "We are transients."
Cohen knows more than one person maintaining a foot in both worlds. Her friend Nancy Marks, a single mom in Jamaica Plain working as outreach director for a human rights organization, tried public schools when her daughter, Taylor, was younger. When it came time for high school, however, she was assigned to English High, a school that lacked the sports that Taylor plays. Marks decided to sublet her apartment and rent a place in Brookline for $500 more. "This is not a ‘Woe is me,' " she says, "but people should not underestimate how hard it is to tear yourself away from life and community." Marks participated in Open Studios, in her neighborhood crime watch, and in the local neighborhood development corporation. "I feel like I am one of the kinds of people that Boston would want to keep, someone invested in community building."
It's more common, however, for parents to give up the city entirely. "I would have said I'd be in the South End forever," says Leslie Kaplan, who runs an advertising agency and who moved to Brookline when she and her husband decided to switch their son out of an expensive private school in the Back Bay. "It's ridiculous money when you think about it. I was talking with people going on vacations and taking their kids to Paris. If they didn't go to private school, I could do that with my kids."
Private school wasn't even an option for public school teacher Andy Rushford and his wife, who sacrificed their urban lifestyle in Roslindale Village to stretch for a small house in Wellesley so their 6-year-old son, Matthew, could attend public school there. "We're starting to adapt to where the restaurants are out there," he says. But, he says, in Wellesley and in Framingham, where he works, he misses the diversity of Boston. "It's interesting to see the difference when you just have one or two Metco kids brought in from the inner city."
The question of diversity cuts both ways for parents. White parents may live in Boston because they want their children to feel comfortable with all races, but many will say privately that they feel like a minority in the public schools, which are only 14 percent white. The issue is even more vexing for middle-class families of color, which, according to a study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, are often more apt to stay in the city for the sake of diversity, even though they may be inclined to leave for other reasons.
"We wouldn't be comfortable living just anywhere because of who our family is," says Marie Cora, who is white, and whose husband is Latino. "I can't see us living in Newton or Brookline because of the racial element." They were both big believers in public school education until they sent their son, Paolo, to kindergarten at the Ohrenberger School in West Roxbury. "My hair stands on end when I think about that year," Cora says. "The incredible sea of children coming from unprepared households" left the school spending too much time on discipline, she says. "I couldn't do anything for 21 of those kids, but I wasn't going to sit there and not do anything about my son." The Roslindale couple pulled him out to attend the Kingsley Montessori School in the Back Bay, with its $18,200 tuition. Now they're considering leaving the area altogether.
Diversity is one reason that graphic designer Cathy Richmond Robinson and her husband, Darryl, a software consultant, have stayed in Dorchester for the past nine years. This year, however, the African-American couple have had more kitchen-table conversations about leaving the city. Their dissatisfaction doesn't come from the schools, but from the increasing roughness of their neighborhood. The tipping point came a couple of months ago, when Darryl was in the lobby of the local YMCA in the early evening and someone burst in to say there had been a shooting outside. "It really spooked him," his wife says. Lately, they have been researching open houses in Milton and considering homes in Dedham and Canton. Their main concern is finding a place where their 4-year-old son Jared and 6-year-old daughter Yasmine would feel comfortable. "I went to primarily white schools growing up," Cathy says. "I think, ‘I did it, my kids can do it.' Definitely by middle school, we'll be moving out one way or another."
Like many big cities, Boston's population saw its biggest declines in the 1950s and 1960s, when new roadways made it possible for the middle class to get their backyard barbecues. Thanks to a healthy birthrate, however, the percentage of children in the city increased at the same time. Housing was relatively cheap compared with surrounding suburbs, and many schools, particularly in white neighborhoods, were plenty adequate.
The growing disparity between public schools, however, led to a controversial decision in 1974 to bus children of different races to schools outside their neighborhoods. Angered by the breakup of communities, many white parents enrolled their children in parochial schools instead or pulled up stakes and moved away from the city, leaving a disproportionately poor population of children of color. Ironically, then, busing created a less-equal situation than the one it was intended to replace.
Boston hit its nadir in the 1970s, with a hollowed-out urban core and an increase in crime that led to further white flight into the 1990s. Adding to the difficulties today is the high price of larger homes, which are in short supply. According to city tax data, Boston has added only 800 single-family homes in the past decade, but nearly 14,000 new condos citywide. Even among condos, three- and four-bedroom units made up just 12 percent of downtown condos on the market in 2004; the average price of a large downtown unit is $850,000, nearly double the $450,000 median price for all condos. In recognition of the obvious, Boston loosened its requirement that city workers – including police officers, firefighters, teachers, and support staff – live in the city.
The families who have stayed are, on average, poorer, less likely to be white, and more likely to be immigrants than those of a decade ago. (Indeed, if it weren't for the large rise in immigrant Latino families primarily in East Boston, the city would probably have seen more of a decrease in children and families.) These trends are not unique to Boston – cities all over the country, including San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., have seen similar dips. A recent Brookings Institution study found that the number of middle-class neighborhoods in US cities declined from 58 percent to 41 percent between 1970 and 2000.
Without those middle-class families to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, the very identity of a community can get lost, argues Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History, who has coined the term "boutique city" to describe the new focus on downtown restaurants, condos, and hotels at the expense of residential communities. "We're seeing the Vail-ization effect, where cities become productive resorts. They are not a place of upward mobility for the vast majority of people."
Not everyone would agree that losing families to the suburbs is necessarily a bad thing. After all, when urban dwellers move out of the city, they take their values with them – making the suburbs more vibrant. "They have cafes and stores that are gathering places during the day, and increasingly gourmet food, without having to go back in the city," says David Luberoff, executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Rather than demonizing each other, he says, the suburbs and the cities can have a symbiotic relationship, with people cycling back and forth. And it's not a stretch to think that the improvement of city services that has spurred a renaissance in city living could eventually prompt families to return as well.
Some city governments, however, have decided that they simply cannot wait any longer.
On the shuttle bus from the airport, I am surprised to see how much San Francisco has changed in the decade since I lived there. Having grown up in a suburb outside Boston, I moved to San Francisco after college because it fit my image of what a city should be – cultured, edgy, diverse. Now, as I drive past blocks where I remember seeing grungy bars and dollar stores, I see wine bars and gleaming new condos. San Francisco has become the epitome of Kotkin's "boutique city," with the country's lowest percentage of children, at 14.5 percent, and some of the most expensive real estate in the country. It has also become the city leading the charge to get families back.
The next day, the sound of trumpets and trombones echoes off the convention center's marble ceiling as a youth jazz ensemble drowns out the voices of registrants for the Second Biennial State of the City's Children Summit. Minutes later, the city's charismatic mayor, Gavin Newsom, takes the stage in a dark suit and gelled-back hair. "I represent ‘family flight' directly," he tells a crowd of some 1,500 city workers, advocates, parents, and children. Newsom's mother had moved him and his sister out of San Francisco for the schools and cheaper housing, he says. "That example is that of tens of thousands of families in this city."
Three years ago, Newsom hired one of the city's most insistent advocates for family issues, Margaret Brodkin, to head a new policy council on family flight. The council wrote suggestions for family-friendly housing, stipulating not only numbers of bedrooms, but also proximity to day-care centers, parks, and restaurants, and availability of laundry facilities in the buildings. The mayor's office is now moving to require that 20 percent of new housing in the city fits those requirements, starting with 7,000 new family-friendly units for all income levels.
Today Newsom is announcing the launch of a unique website to hook families up with activities and services. The city has been even more aggressive in trying to bolster the public school system. In 2004, San Francisco voters passed a measure called the Public Education Enrichment Fund to provide $60 million annually to the schools through 2015. The money is divided into three pots: $20 million for sports, libraries, and arts and music programs; $20 million for free universal preschool for 4-year-olds; and $20 million for other school support. More recently, the mayor signed a memorandum of understanding to provide an additional $40 million to support investment in after-school programs, teachers, and preparing children for the workforce, among other things.
"When you lose your children, you lose your soul; you lose that spirit of imagination and the quality of life they provide," Newsom tells me as I follow him out of the building. "The struggle now is finding enough to satisfy all the requests for funding." The next day, I head out to see where the mayor's money is going. At one after-school program I tour, instructors work with teachers to drive home lessons with hands-on learning – for example, supplementing writing instruction for third-graders by having them write letters and walk to the post office to mail them. At a high school, I visit a school wellness center funded by the mayor's office and the city health department, designed to proactively deal with the issues that lead to discipline problems and poor academic performance. Something in the combination of approaches seems to be working. "I am thrilled to tell you this is the first year that we have more kids enrolled in kindergarten this year than last year," Brodkin tells me.
San Francisco is the most visible city dealing with the issue, but it is by no means the only one. Chicago, Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C., have all put together some combination of school assistance and family housing. Perhaps no city has been as successful at drawing back families as Vancouver, British Columbia. Back in the 1980s, the Canadian city made a conscious decision to revitalize its downtown by replacing commercial development with family housing. The city drew up a 25-page set of guidelines dictating everything from storage-space sizes to required schools or play spaces, then required all developers to meet them for 25 percent of their units. "There was no negotiation," says Larry Beasley, the city's former director of planning. In less than 20 years, the city went from having next to no children downtown to having more than 7,000. "A city that really goes after it and wants to make it happen can make it happen," he says.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy cities are alike; each unhappy city is unhappy in its own way. None of the proposals that have helped other cities increase their population of families is a perfect fit for Boston. Vancouver achieved density through building skinny apartment towers surrounded by parks, a difficult strategy for Boston's congested downtown. Boston has permitted some 17,000 units of new housing since 2000, 25 percent of which are considered affordable. But, unlike in other cities, you won't find the word "family" anywhere in Boston's master plan.
Boston Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Susan Elsbree defends Mayor Tom Menino's record. "I have sat at a lot of meetings where he says, ‘I want those family units,' " she says. "He is always talking about how we need to give families reasons to stay." In spite of that, the city's main response has been to deny family flight is happening – pointing to new census estimates showing that the number of families has increased since 2000. Those estimates are notoriously unreliable, however, compared with the hard numbers from the 2000 Census or the stats from the school department showing that enrollment is decreasing. Either way, Boston's percentage of child residents is still far below that of most other American cities.
What Boston seems to be banking on is a risky thought: that middle-class parents, when faced with a mortgage and private schools, may be more willing to consider the city's public school system, including its pilot schools, rather than moving to the suburbs. "A lot of my friends say we love this house, we love this neighborhood – let's look at the public schools," says Elsbree, who sends her daughters to the Curley School in Jamaica Plain.
To the city's credit, parents who do look at Boston's public schools are often surprised to find that the school system is considered to be one of the best urban districts in the country and was the winner last year of the Broad Prize for Urban Education after a decade of reform under former superintendent Thomas Payzant. (Though it still ranks far below nearby suburban schools.)
The public schools in Boston have not lacked for money. Since the schools came under mayoral control in 1992, per-pupil spending has nearly doubled. Still, many schools lack the extracurricular activities that most middle-class parents want. As of 2004, for example, less than half of the city's elementary and high schools even had physical education. To fill the gap, individual schools partner with colleges and cultural institutions or rely on parents to write grants and raise funds for the school.
In the South End, Neighborhood Parents for the Hurley School have partially funded a science specialist and a music teacher, renovated the gym, and added a new library. "It would be wonderful if we had more funding for the schools, but I think it takes a bunch of good schools and involved parents to make that happen," says South End resident Ethan d'Ablemont Burnes, who is president of the Hurley parents' organization. He says he went to public schools in the city and wanted his child to do the same. "My daughter goes to school with a lot of kids from her neighborhood, and that's something that we value."
A partnership between the Boston Public Schools and the YMCA, cheekily dubbed Y/BPS, hopes to institutionalize this kind of parental investment by recruiting more middle-class families of all ethnic backgrounds through workshops and house parties with current public school parents. "We are not sugarcoating things," says Laurie Sherman, the effort's co-director and a policy adviser to Menino. "But we say, Let's compare and contrast. Our class size in kindergarten is 22 – that's as good as or better than surrounding communities. Private schools might have 16, but is that worth $15,000 a year?" Most of the parents who opt out, she says, never even visit a school, dismissing them out of hand because of poor test scores. They forget the things that were important to them in school, like enthusiastic teachers, challenging curriculums, or a diverse student body.
In the program's three years, it has already seen success. At the Haley School in Roslindale, the percent of middle-income students increased from 12 percent to almost 50 percent. "The Haley, the Curley, and the Philbrick that are now all the buzz, nobody would even look at a few years ago," says Sherman.
I take her up on her offer and attend a welcome session for new parents at the Haley. A former bowling alley located on American Legion Highway, the building couldn't be less attractive. Inside, however, the lobby is brightly lit, with plants and ambient classical music. We pass hallways tarted up with murals of the solar system and lined with student science-fair projects – evidence of the school's partnership with the nearby Mass Audubon's Boston Nature Center. A team of parents has been involved in writing grants for a new track and a fence to be designed by students at Massachusetts College of Art. That impressed Dale Schneider, a single mother and attorney, whose daughter will be attending Haley in the fall. "It looks like a top-rated suburban school. The children are engaged; there is no pandemonium." That's not to say it was easy to navigate the school-choice process to get her daughter there. "We have a running joke – you need an advanced degree to figure out the system and a part-time job to visit all the schools you need to," she says. "There are huge differences."
Dorchester parents Karen and Tom Hocker, both teachers in the Boston public schools, got one of their first choices, the O'Hearn, but it still wasn't enough for their son, Ryan. "He already knows his letter sounds, and I said, ‘How do I get him to learn how to read?' " says Karen. "They said, ‘He'll do that next year.' " The Hockers reached their breaking point when Ryan was bitten twice by a special-needs student. "There are a lot of disruptive kids, and I don't blame anyone, because their hands are tied." They ended up sending Ryan to parochial school and have been discussing moving to the suburbs.
Even schools that have benefited from parental involvement are not perfect. Author of the guidebook Boston for Families, Roslindale resident Kim Foley MacKinnon knows better than anyone the benefits the city has to offer. She got her daughter, Sadie, into the Haley school two years ago, joined the parents committee and volunteered, but was constantly frustrated by the lack of resources. "I have more books in my house than they have in their library," she says. "We were having to raise money to buy pencils. I think parents should be strongly involved, but I don't want to sacrifice Sadie's education to do it." In the end, she and her husband, Rob, ended up paying $16,000 a year to send Sadie to a private school in the Back Bay. Now they pin their hopes on her getting into Boston Latin, one of the city's high-performing public exam schools. "We're taking the gamble early," says Rob. "We know someone in West Roxbury who is taking the gamble late, sending his kids to public schools and saving money for private high school, because he figures that's what gets you into college."
As for the Micheners and their plan B, the family looked at more than two dozen schools, ranking them on a spreadsheet. When the dust had settled, Nate had gotten into the Haley as well as several private schools. In the end, they decided that Nate would be better waiting a year for kindergarten, knowing he'd still be eligible next year.
"I'm 99 percent sure we are not going to do Boston Public School for elementary," says Stephen Michener. "It came down to the fact that, as an architect, the facilities started driving me nuts." Even so, after looking at a few houses in Brookline, they decided they wouldn't move, either – at least not for now. "There are so many things up in the air, we had to limit something," he says. "The places we looked at just weren't as nice as where we live now – the size, the fabric of the neighborhood. We thought it made more sense to commit and go to an independent school." Michener is already preparing a new spreadsheet.
As for me, I'd love to say that the people I talked to have persuaded me to rally behind my community's public schools or risk seeing our urban lifestyle nose-dive while we shell out for private education. For now, we are waiting, hoping that when the time comes we'll be able to work it out, or that city leaders will do more to entice us – and thousands of parents like us – to stay. If not, I can only hope they've got a Plan B of their own. 