Best Places to Raise Kids are surprising bland and colorless....

[billy ross]

You don't need money. All you need is vision, courage, and determination. My two older kids were born in my first home. When I paid $25k for it, it was the last 'white' house on a block between the projects and North Philly. My friends were appalled when they picked me up. Now it's on a $200k plus block, and many yuppies and their kiddies are all around. Alot has changed in the 19 years since I bought that house, and my optimism has been justified. While the neighborhood school is still weak, the handwriting is on the wall. The adjacent grammar school is considered to be highly desirable, and there are charter choices now that didn't exist when I bought that house.

You don't need to pay through the nose for "certainty". You can live cheap and well if you're smart about it.

I agree there. But Michael Nutter is only as good as his city council will allow him to be.



well I think the good neighborhoods are slowly turning. The more section 8 housing creeps in the worse things are. My sister in-law lives off of cottman avenue near montour street. She moved in there in 1997. It was nice then. Now its getting bad. Her house has been broken into a few times in the last 3 to 5 years. the apartments across the street are now all section 8 and the people living in them are *******s. The quality of life is not the same.




I lived closer to simpson playground. but I used to drink at Walts tavern too. Was in there a few years ago.



yeah it is. Summerdale/Oxford circle does not have the same quality of life that it had.





well for those who do have kids like me, quality of life and good schools are extremely important.
HR Edmunds and Frankford are not the good schools they once were.




how did we digress to center city?





well let me state again.....if the quality of life was what it was 20 years ago as well as the schools I would have stayed.
For people to suggest I left because I "don't like those people" as one person on the board suggested in another thread, they have their heads up their asses and they themselves
have moved out of the northeast for the same reasons ( thought they state otherwise ) for rich areas like society hill or other parts of center city.
I know black people who lived in Frankford that I went to school with since kindergarten that left for northen delaware because they agree the section 8 housing has
screwed up the neighborhood.

The NE's racial demographics have changed dramatically. In addition, I think it has lost ground socioeconomically.

Unless you have different information, I believe Sec 8 vouchers have been capped at around 14,000 citywide for some time now. I don't believe any area has had major increases or decreases in voucher distribution over the last ten years. Sometimes property values go down and old people die off, relatively poorer people move in.

Apart from a handful of areas, I don't see radical differences in the vast majority of the NE from now at 2005. Which is to say that it still has a good quality of life and isn't a bad place to raise a kid. My girlfriend graduated from a charter school in the lower NE in 2007 and frequently returns to her home neighborhood. It's mostly as she remembers it.

Most of the NE is as much a suburb as the inner neighborhoods of Portland (or Kansas City for that matter) are "city".

[annie]

In my research for a school guide our real estate sales team maintains, I found a couple of schools near Center City whose students (a) do quite well academically (b) are mostly from low-income families. One of these is just south of one of those great public schools not named Penn Alexander, and the civic association of the neighborhood it partially serves has taken an active interest in strengthening it.

The Notebook is reporting that Nebinger's test scores in 2012 fell 25-20%. I mention only because you seemed to be using PSSA scores as the metric to determine what counts as "quite well" (I happen to disagree with that use of the scores). Some of the drop may be attributable, especially in the lower grades, to the sudden decision by the state 10 days before the testing starting for teachers not to proctor their own classes, grades or subjects. But if you continue thinking PSSAs signify performance, you may want to keep an eye out for the PSSA scores.

[Hospitalitygirl]

2 injured in robbery at Bucks Co. house party | 6abc.com

If this is the sort of child being raised in the suburbs, with the sense of entitlement and privilege that seems to afflict so many of them, I am really glad I raised my daughter in the city, using local schools and exposing her to many of the good and bad things about society.

[Geno]

2 injured in robbery at Bucks Co. house party | 6abc.com

If this is the sort of child being raised in the suburbs, with the sense of entitlement and privilege that seems to afflict so many of them, I am really glad I raised my daughter in the city, using local schools and exposing her to many of the good and bad things about society.

****ing subhuman animals! I cry every time I drive through once beautiful Falls Township.

[thoth]

You don't need money. All you need is vision, courage, and determination. My two older kids were born in my first home. When I paid $25k for it, it was the last 'white' house on a block between the projects and North Philly. My friends were appalled when they picked me up. Now it's on a $200k plus block, and many yuppies and their kiddies are all around. Alot has changed in the 19 years since I bought that house, and my optimism has been justified. While the neighborhood school is still weak, the handwriting is on the wall. The adjacent grammar school is considered to be highly desirable, and there are charter choices now that didn't exist when I bought that house.

You don't need to pay through the nose for "certainty". You can live cheap and well if you're smart about it.



The NE's racial demographics have changed dramatically. In addition, I think it has lost ground socioeconomically.

Its median income dipped a few grand, but it's still probably 90% middle class. Racial demographics are not a terribly good indicator of QOL. Go up there and look for yourself.

[NJbound]

The thing of it is, I grew up and experienced the uban life. If it were not for some of things that went drastically south in the lat 20 years in the city I would probably still be there.
I would love for my child to experience what I did growing up in the city but it has become less safe not to mention the schools are piss poor compared to when I was a kid.
Sure there are pockets of the city that are still somewhat stable but they are starting to shrink unless you have alot of money and can afford to live in areas that cost alot of money(chestnut hill) and you do not mind paying taxes for city services that are dysfunctional.

Well said.... And true...

[FKD19124]

tell that to the Queen know it all.
what cracks me up is that people here automatically make it all about race. And what I said earlier, I know of black people who lived in whitehall at one time, now live in northern delaware because
THEY saw what section 8 has done to FKD and the surrounding areas.

Well said.... And true...

[StatesRights]

My kids will be raised right here in anti-family Philadelphia.
... I'll send their asses to Roman Catholic in chastity belts with instructions not to believe everything they hear.
Problem solved.

So tuely heart-warming.

[MarketStEl]

I agree there. But Michael Nutter is only as good as his city council will allow him to be.

I'm not sure he used his political capital effectively either.

well I think the good neighborhoods are slowly turning. The more section 8 housing creeps in the worse things are. My sister in-law lives off of cottman avenue near montour street. She moved in there in 1997. It was nice then. Now its getting bad. Her house has been broken into a few times in the last 3 to 5 years. the apartments across the street are now all section 8 and the people living in them are *******s. The quality of life is not the same.

I described the block of Alma Street on which I now live to a friend of mine who lives in West Philly. His response? "Oh, bourgeois proletariat."

I've heard enough comments of this type, not all of them from white people, to not dismiss them out of hand. But there's a housing project up Oxford from here that's been there for years. It's my impression that, at least in this particular pocket of the lower Northeast, only the faces of the residents have changed. However...read on.

well for those who do have kids like me, quality of life and good schools are extremely important.
HR Edmunds and Frankford are not the good schools they once were.

That I really don't doubt. My point was that the public schools here are not uniformly bad. Their quality varies widely. The ones I knew about (Masterman and Central High aside) that are good are all in or near Center City, hence my comments. This, however, may reinforce rather than refute your prior comments, for if there are Northeast residents who move to Center City or East Passyunk because of the schools, it's the same as moving from the Northeast to a suburb from a Northeast perspective. (However, it probably also means they're doing well in other areas, for the Northeast, even the better-off parts, remains cheaper than any Center City neighborhood.)

annie: Point taken on the PSSAs, and I've heard stories about how teachers can game the system. (There was a charter school in the area I surveyed that had unbelievably high PSSAs across the board. It was also the only charter school about which I could find very little information online aside from those PSSAs. If the school were really as good as its PSSAs suggested, I figure parents would be clamoring to get in the way they line up for the Independence Charter School lottery.) But what other uniform comparative metric do we have?

how did we digress to center city?

See above.



well let me state again.....if the quality of life was what it was 20 years ago as well as the schools I would have stayed.

For people to suggest I left because I "don't like those people" as one person on the board suggested in another thread, they have their heads up their asses and they themselves
have moved out of the northeast for the same reasons ( thought they state otherwise ) for rich areas like society hill or other parts of center city.
I know black people who lived in Frankford that I went to school with since kindergarten that left for northen delaware because they agree the section 8 housing has
screwed up the neighborhood.

Spoken like my (black, female) next-door neighbor. Except she wasn't referring to Section 8 tenants but people who have moved into some of the houses and apartments around here recently.

And at the gas station yesterday, I saw a guy with a "Stop Snitching" T-shirt on. Maybe I do need to pull out the worry beads.

[MarketStEl]

Most of the NE is as much a suburb as the inner neighborhoods of Portland (or Kansas City for that matter) are "city".

I assume you took a look around the block I grew up on. In terms of spatial arrangements, it's more "suburban" than where I live now. And that's one reason why I'm not likely to return to my hometown to live - though there are districts in Kansas City that are more urban than my East Side neighborhood.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's relative. Much of Upper Darby Township resembles the Northeast in form. We all agree that's a "suburb." But it has lots of transit and an ethnically diverse population now as well. Perhaps we should call it "the suburban city" if I call the Northeast "the in-city suburb"?

[Malloy]

I've heard enough comments of this type, not all of them from white people, to not dismiss them out of hand. But there's a housing project up Oxford from here that's been there for years. It's my impression that, at least in this particular pocket of the lower Northeast, only the faces of the residents have changed. However...read on.

The area was always lower class, lower middle class. However, the area used to be generally clean, maintained by it's residents and without a lot of violent crime and serious blight. My friend rented on Alma St just over 10 years ago. The area is a dump now in relation.

[PhilaCap]

The lower NE is a toilet.

[Eastcoast]

If this is the sort of child being raised in the suburbs, with the sense of entitlement and privilege that seems to afflict so many of them, I am really glad I raised my daughter in the city, using local schools and exposing her to many of the good and bad things about society.

It still comes back to who raises you not where.

[Naveen]

I grew up in a semi rural (not even a suburb) part of Illinois and it was a great childhood. Do I think I suffered because it was a community that was probably over 90% white? Would I have had better life experiences as a kid if I had to make sure all doors and windows were closed and locked before I left the house? Did I suffer culturally because it took my parents or school field trips an hour to go to Chicago to take me to museums as opposed to a 20 minute public bus ride? Would I be a better person growing up hearing about a murder a day on the news? Did I miss out on education by not going to high school that had to have specific violence policies, metal detectors or a special classes because such a high percentage of the female population gets pregnant?

The silly suburbs vs city battles are just two sides of the same coin. One side tries to feel superior over one because they can wash their hands of inner city issues and the other side tries to feel superior by giving a level of legitimacy to urban issues by embracing it as some sort of life experience.

Guess what, the world would be a better place if we were able to live in the best of both worlds.


Let's just all agree that there are pluses and minuses to both suburban and urban living that fits the desires of individual families and people and it is ok as long as none of the choices involve New Jersey.

I think what Adam says is spot on.

Here's what I would add to the general conversation:

I think there is a great desire to live in urban spaces. People like the walkability, the connection to their neighbors, the amenities, the general character and charm of city living. Even people who live in the suburbs generally acknowledge the benefits of these things. And few people regard the post-WWII suburb as having these qualities. Rather, the bland, characterless nature of the suburban cul-de-sacs and strip malls are the trade-off for all the benefits they do offer (cleanliness, lower crime, better schools, more space).

For a lot of people though, the trade-off isn't worth it (especially as suburban sprawl reduces some of the benefits of suburban life). Many of us raised in the suburbs have chosen to make urban spaces our home. In the process, cities are being redefined, neighborhood at a time (some cities and places more than others).

This inevitably leads to certain areas becoming more "livable". Houses are maintained better; streets and sidewalks become cleaner; quality of life complaints decline; crime goes down, and eventually, the public schools improve as well.

This doesn't mean city living is for everyone. But it is becoming increasingly viable, even for families. For a time, city living wasn't even an option for most middle-class families. Most cities depopulated, and the lucky ones shifted their populations to other places (see: Northeast Philadelphia). Indeed, thirty years ago the default for even a young, single, 20-something individual was to live in the suburbs. That changed in the 90s, and for 30-somethings, I think it's changing today.

All of this doesn't mean we're going back to the 1940's, when our middle class was firmly embedded in urban spaces. It just means that our cities are getting better again, and as our country's population grows, if our middle class is strong, urban spaces can fill in and we can go back to a time when city living was viable in more than just a few gentrified neighborhoods, or areas disconnected from the inner city.

[MarketStEl]

All of this doesn't mean we're going back to the 1940's, when our middle class was firmly embedded in urban spaces. It just means that our cities are getting better again, and as our country's population grows, if our middle class is strong, urban spaces can fill in and we can go back to a time when city living was viable in more than just a few gentrified neighborhoods, or areas disconnected from the inner city.

Big IF, Naveen.

And in this case, by "middle class," I think we should make it clear we are talking about that "bourgeois proletariat" my friend tagged as living around me. People from this socioeconomic background made up, and IMO still make up, the bulk of the population of Northeast Philadelphia.

This isn't the "creative class" Richard Florida identifies as the salvation of our cities. Those people are upper middle class. (I'm one of them in profession and temperament but not in income as of now.) Instead, these are the people whose aspirations, hopes and fears shaped the culture of America in the 1950s to a large extent. (The houses on my block were built in 1946. Coincidence?)

A lot of these people make up the Tea Party. The problem is, neither the party they left nor the one they're attaching themselves to really speaks to their economic concerns. It's sort of like Orwell: the High and the (Upper) Middle are fighting in the name of the Low to see which becomes the new High.

I see lots of signs around me that the people in this segment of the middle class are indeed losing ground. And they know it. And those above them really don't care. This bodes ill not only for the fate of the places they live, but for the country and polity as a whole.

[mixiboi]

1984 reference is made..which is the perfect northeast identity...

[Naveen]

Big IF, Naveen.

Yep. Very big if. Which is why I put it in italics. The fate of our country hangs on this class, IMO.

[3rd&Brown]

This isn't the "creative class" Richard Florida identifies as the salvation of our cities. Those people are upper middle class. (I'm one of them in profession and temperament but not in income as of now.) Instead, these are the people whose aspirations, hopes and fears shaped the culture of America in the 1950s to a large extent. (The houses on my block were built in 1946. Coincidence?)

I know plenty of people in the creative class who are not Upper Middle Class. You're using an income identifier to label a degree of educational attainment. In many fields, particularly creative fields, they're not correlated. Plenty of creative, educated people make little money.

And "Upper Middle Class" is the most overused label of them all. It makes people feel simultaneously poorer and richer than they are.

I have plenty of friends with combined family incomes in the $500K plus range, and they identify themselves as "Upper Middle Class"...perhaps to make themselves feel more humble about their degree of wealth. They are not. Similarly, I know a lot of people who make $100 a year and use the same label. IMO, the latter is firmly in the "Middle Class" category while the former is rich.

[annie]

Similarly, I know a lot of people who make $100 a year and use the same label. IMO, the latter is firmly in the "Middle Class" category while the former is rich.

$100K/year is ~1,000% of the federal poverty guideline for a single person. I hate this endlessly looking up the ladder and deciding the next rung is rich while determining one's own is middle class. It sucks.

But I don't know that anyone can beat Inga Saffron in terms of sheer stupidity in defining middle class:

@ScenicPhilly @arockar Isn't everyone who has to work to pay the bills middle class, even if some bills bigger? Yes, schools, parks R impt!

[raider.adam]

$100K/year is ~1,000% of the federal poverty guideline for a single person. I hate this endlessly looking up the ladder and deciding the next rung is rich while determining one's own is middle class. It sucks.

Rich is the person that makes more than me. Duh.