The problem of young families

A friend recently moved away from Beacon Hill. She and her husband had one child, with another on the way. They found a house in Newton with double the space they had on Beacon Hill, not counting the Newton house’s finished attic and basement.

Their 1250-square-foot condominium had parking, a laundry and a small balcony. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It was so good they sold it for about $200,000 more than they paid for their new house, even in today’s less-than-ideal real estate market. Their mortgage payment per month is 35 percent less than it was in the city.

So we shouldn’t feel sorry for them.

We should feel sorry for us. We lost productive members of our community. How can we keep young families in the city with financials like this?

It’s true that some downtown areas aren’t as expensive as Beacon Hill, so the numbers wouldn’t work the same way. But the problem remains—it’s cheaper in the streetcar suburbs of Boston than it is downtown.

It wasn’t only the expensive living space, however, that did in downtown Boston. My friend said schools were the strongest factor. Would her child get into the public school she wanted him to go to? A couple of friends’ children had not. There was no guarantee he would get into a private school either, even if they could afford it. Although she doesn’t work right now, her husband has what anyone would consider a well-paying job.

She said she also felt with no public and only two private schools in her neighborhood, her child would most likely have to take a bus or a car pool elsewhere to go to school. That was the big problem. His playground friends would be dispersed. He wouldn’t have the sense of community she wanted for him—a sense of community she had enjoyed living in downtown Boston.  “We had to leave to keep the feeling of community we had enjoyed while we were living there,” she said wryly.

Her new neighborhood is convenient. The elementary school, the playground and a best friend are all within walking distance. The children her son now meets at the playground will be his schoolmates. She’s not missing out on the walkability, safety, convenience and community we value in our downtown neighborhoods. The big change is for her husband. Instead of walking the entire distance to work, he takes a bus and then walks part way. It takes him a bit longer than it did.

It’s no wonder that with such competition Boston currently ranks 94th out of America’s 100 largest cities when it comes to the percentage of households with children, according to Common Boston, an organization associated with the Boston Society of Architects, which in June sponsored a panel that addressed this problem.

With empty-nesters moving into downtown, young professionals sticking around for 3 to 5 years and young families moving out, it feels as if we’re living in an old folks’ home with some young professional attendants. I don’t want to live with only a bunch of old fogies, nice as you are.

Expensive housing is an intractable problem. There’s little space on which to build, and the BRA doesn’t require developers to build enough units large enough for families.

Creating neighborhood schools would help keep families in the downtown. The success of schools in Charlestown, the North End and Chinatown, with not enough room for all who want to go there, shows how popular such schools. But neighborhood schools brings up a host of political problems that must be solved before they can be fair to all Boston kids.

I have no answer to the question of how to keep young families in the city. It’s a goal that all our leaders express. But there is precious little being done to make it happen.

City Councilor John Connolly held hearings this past year on how to make the city more livable. Except for him and Common Boston, no one else appears to be paying more than lip service to solving this problem.

If, however, keeping young families in the city is their goal, I’d like to see mayoral and city council candidates, as well as anyone else out there who fancies him or herself a city leader, figuring out how we can accomplish such a thing.

Otherwise, just call us assisted living on the harbor.