Please Think of the Children
Today, the Washington Examiner returns to a theme we've noticed (and scratched our collective temple at) a number of times over the past year. It seems that Fannie Mae and the Urban Institute have conducted a survey showing that many District families are leaving the capital for the suburbs, due, according to the Examiner piece, to poor schools, excessive condo construction, and high housing costs. Says the article:
Most housing booms are “primarily driven by the fact that those neighborhoods have great schools,” said Stacey Stewart, president and CEO of The Fannie Mae Foundation. “Washington’s boom hasn’t been accompanied by the strengthening of the school system. If we really want to achieve balanced growth, we need to focus on improving the school system.”I don't think anyone would argue that the District needs to improve its schools, which remain an embarrassment to the city, but to suggest that schools are the fundamental driver of housing booms, and not job growth, is ludicrous. People would and do live in places with tons of great jobs but iffy schools, but no one moves to an area with no work but good schools. It's also not clear what might constitute balanced growth, whether D.C. lacks it, or why such growth might be important. Between 1990 and 2000, according to the Census Bureau, average household size fell in Washington (as it did nationwide), but the percentage of children in the population rose, from 19 percent to 20 percent. The percentage of "family households" fell, it's also true, but from 49% to 46%--hardly a biblical exodus. And who cares if there are fewer families with children anyway? Much more important to those interested in keeping the city vibrant and diverse is change in the city's income distribution.
And in that sense, the conclusions reached in this study are in many ways completely backward. It is not correct, for instance, to think that an increase in the number of families wishing to live in the city would lead to an increase in construction of single-family homes. Data from the Urban Institute (PDF) show that median prices of single family homes increased as much as or more than multifamily homes over the past ten years (in 2005, the percentage increase was an astonishing 7 times higher). Demand for single-family housing is there, and yet developers focus on condos for the very good reason that potential sales gains for multifamily construction are so much higher.
Neither is it clear that city residents should be demanding that single-family home construction keep up with condo building. In a growing city with an increasingly strained transportation system, building dense, mixed-use developments is the solution, not the problem. Such construction might turn off families with children and it might not, but the city shouldn't pretend that recruiting parents with the promise of bigger homes doesn't have a real cost: increased congestion and a reduction in the city's capacity to grow.
Which leads to the last misconception in the piece. If families are concerned about cost and space, then the central city will remain an unattractive option for many of them, regardless of the school situation. As we recently discussed, space near the core of the city tends to be more expensive because it is close to the economic activity and amenities of the central city. Children add to a family's need for that expensive space, but they don't add (or don't add much, at least) to the family's need for proximity to the city's activities. In other words, for a family with children to have the same indifference to city life as a family without children, the schools in DC would have to be better than, rather than merely as good as, schools in neighboring jurisdictions. Given the fine school systems encircling the capital, that seems like a tall order.
Which isn't, we must reiterate, a reason to stop trying to improve schools. A good public education system is a service any jurisdiction owes its taxpayers, and good District schools would help to solve many other problems that plague the city, from crime to economic inequality. But it is foolish to think that families moving to the 'burbs is a crisis for Washington, and it would be a mistake to shift policy toward recruiting them back.
Picture taken by Grundlepuck.