Diana is Right | Feb 12th at 3:40pm
There hasn’t been too much discussion of housing in this session, so I’ll throw out something. Cities with unaffordable housing stocks tend to have a bimodal income distribution—you’ve got the rich and the poor. Middle class households largely decamp for the suburbs. And what one finds is good public schools in suburbs, good private schools in cities, and bad public schools (for the most part, certainly there are some counterexamples) in cities. Part of the solution to fixing urban school systems is to rebuild the urban constituency for good schools—that is, middle class families that are in the central city by choice, and which have the ability to provide the tax revenues and time to support a thriving school system.
There is a chicken and egg problem involved, of course, in that middle class families will be reluctant to move into urban neighborhoods, affordable or not, if the schools aren’t any good. But the other side of the coin is that well-crafted urban school reforms will fail to help retain and attract middle-class households if the housing stock remains unaffordable. Which suggests that part of the solution to urban education problems is an increase in the supply of quality urban housing, and an increase in the provision of amenities that middle class families like (which also happen to be ones that poor households like, but lack the political influence to obtain). This means quality green space, safe neighborhoods, mixed-use neighborhoods such that needed retail is close at hand, attractive streetscapes, and so on. And of course, it wouldn’t hurt to devote more public infrastructure resources to dense areas, rather than to exurban highways.
This has to be a large-scale and national effort, however, because local improvements in urban schools will make local areas more attractive—and more expensive. But a national commitment to healthier, affordable cities with more balanced income distributions could drastically improve the nation’s urban school systems, benefiting low-income households in the process.
Ryan Avent is an economics writer living in Washington, DC. He authors The Economist's economics blog, Free Exchange, and covers environmental and urban policy issues for Grist.
Doug Pascover in Altadena, CA on Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:16pm
A lot has been done with magnet and charter schools. There’s an interesting question in why alternative schools seem to be the best way for cities to offer good schools.