San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
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The sight of a stroller leads most Americans to expect a glimpse of the baby within. But those of us habituated to the streets of San Francisco know any apparent infant transport is just about as likely to contain an annoying little dog.
It turns out there’s statistical support for this impression. Recently released 2020 census results show that of the nation’s 100 biggest cities, San Francisco ranks dead last in children.
College towns, retirement enclaves, rust belt relics: None beats our city for sheer barrenness. Portland has about a third more children per capita than San Francisco; New York City has over 50% more.
From this perspective, it’s no wonder the city’s school board keeps devolving into petty political misadventures bearing no relationship to its ostensible raison d’être, which it famously spent much of the past year neglecting. Children and parents just aren’t much of a constituency around here.
Not to pick on one small, sclerotic city. As is often the case, San Francisco is just the most extreme example of what’s happening across the region, which is in turn pointing the way of California at large. The rest of the Bay Area has more children than the city, but its population got older faster over the past decade.
It doesn’t take a cohort of crack demographers to sort out why. The Bay Area is so price-prohibitive that any ordinary family is hard-pressed to support its adults, let alone any freeloading children taking up precious square footage without pulling down a Big Tech salary.
One recent study put the income a family of four needs for basic necessities in the region, astonishingly, at six
Bernal Heights, a San Francisco
San Francisco is so unaffordable that the strollers patrolling its streets are more likely to contain dogs than children.
figures. The analysis, by the United Ways of California, estimated that one in four Bay Area households — more than 600,000 — can’t really afford to live here.
That doesn’t include all those who have already been forced to decamp to the hinterlands in search of subsistence. The statewide portrait drawn by the study is, in fact, worse: One in three California families, and one in two with children under 6, doesn’t make enough to get by, and that was before the pandemic. The struggling families are disproportionately Black and Latino and overwhelmingly include a working person.
The greatest burden they face is, of course, housing, which consumes more than a fourth of what a Bay Area family needs to survive.
Again, no mystery here. Consider what the census data revealed about
neighborhood beloved and desired for its “communal,” “small town” feel. That may be because despite being in the heart of a major employment and transportation center in the world’s fifth-largest economy, Bernal Heights possesses all the dynamism of a walled Balkan village. In the past decade, The Chronicle reported, the neighborhood has not gained one building with more than four housing units — or, not coincidentally, added a single soul.
This is not because of any shortage of demand to share in the pastoral glories of Bernal Heights’ improbable resemblance to a remote mountain hamlet. It’s because its residents and representatives, with all the vigor of our most xenophobic advocates of border security, have succeeded in strictly suppressing housing supply. As a consequence, the median price of
a home in the neighborhood has more than tripled over the past 20 years, to $1.6 million.
Thus the Bay Area increasingly exiles all but the wealthy to places farther from their jobs and closer to the consequences of climate change, such as wildfires and extreme heat, which they in turn exacerbate by driving more — or, worse, forces them to sleep on couches, in cars and on the streets. This in a city and region where nearly everyone claims to care deeply about the environment, equality and humanity.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s grotesquerie.
Where are the Bay Area’s supposed values? They’ve gone, with its strollers, to the dogs.