Paradox by the Bay: Kids Aren’t Welcome

To raise children in this city is to need a kids’ sweatshirt on short notice and to find yourself surrounded by stores that only sell play clothes for dogs. It is to look for a house, only to have the real estate agents for one seller after another tell you that, gee, they don’t really know much about schools in the city. It is to walk into the neighborhood pizza joint, only to see, “We welcome well-behaved children” posted next to the “please-wait-to-be-seated” sign.

It is to hear advice like this well-meaning counsel, from a real estate agent in Silicon Valley: “Don’t do it! Don’t buy in San Francisco! For God’s sake, don’t do that to your kids! Trust me. I grew up there. The weather alone. . . .”

Here, she shuddered and took a long, calming pull on her latte. Actually, she had a point. This was back in December--in the midst of a family move involving two parents, three kids, a dog, a cat, a sitter and the sitter’s daughter--and even as she spoke, ice-cold rain was pelting the most yearned-for, romanticized--and adult-centric--city in California. Not that you could actually see the ice-cold rain--the ice-cold fog obscured it--but it was there. Pelting. It felt like December in Nova Scotia. Meanwhile, 20 minutes to the south, on “the peninsula,” as people here call the stretch of upscale suburbia between the city and Palo Alto, the sun was so yellow, you could have painted a Happy Face on it.

Tidy neighborhoods of tech workers unfurled seamlessly into each other, neighborhoods that were closer to the new jobs that had prompted this disruptive, midlife relocation. Neighborhoods with good schools and huge supermarkets and mighty SUV carpools. Neighborhoods like any suburban neighborhood, except that, whatever homes cost in your old suburb, here they cost that . . . plus $1 million.

To raise children on the peninsula, it became clear on that day, was to become the poorest po’ folk in Silicon Valley. And to commute there from some farther-flung suburb was to spend so much time in gridlocked Bay Area bridge-and-tunnel traffic that those kids might as well be orphans.

“If you move to San Francisco, your children will never forgive you,” the Realtor promised.

“If we move to San Francisco, will they have Cartoon Network?” the children asked.

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According to the 2000 Census, San Francisco’s populace lost more than 4,000 kids during the past decade, the result of high housing costs and the influx of child-free yuppie hordes. Actually, the former feels less to blame than the latter. Prices are breathtaking everywhere in the Bay Area; there are places far more expensive than this storied city of gingerbread Victorians and tourist attractions--places that, for all the financial obstacles, teem nonetheless with children. To the people who live here, San Francisco’s dearth of children seems to stem from something more cultural.

The kid-unfriendly attitude shows up not only in the serious, large-scale matters--the delayed park bond issues, the barely functional public school system--but in the small, everyday ways, which are more telling. In one neighborhood, the maitre d’ at a checked-tablecloth bistro has managed, strangely, to have a table every time my husband and I stop by as a couple--and to be suddenly booked until 9 p.m. every time we stop by with kids. At a swimming club near the Embarcadero, the attendant felt it was just fine to pine aloud for “the golden years” before the club launched a drive to attract more families. In a furnished home where we rented briefly, the landlords allowed a corporation to hold an annual, wine-soaked party for scores of adults, but worried--sincerely--that our fourth-grader’s Razor scooter might ruin the brickwork on the patio.

People here curse aloud, a lot, the way people do when they’re young and self-centered, or old and it’s been years since they’ve had to watch their language. In cafes, every pause seems to bubble up with the plaints of 20-somethings who still “hate” their moms and dads. Dog owners snatch up their animals when children come near, not because they fear for the child’s safety but because they’re afraid the kid might scare the pet.

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It’s comical and paranoid, and occasionally irritating in this city that spends so much energy on the parallel play of adults--and so much time confusing mass self-absorption with social tolerance. And yet, there is also an unintentional upside to the way children are treated in San Francisco, which may explain why it still hasn’t been written off entirely by families: For good or for ill, the city is so small that people have to engage here. The kids who stick it out get to learn to be a part--rather than the center--of something. Their life is not a kids-only theme park.

Nobody is going to hover over them (a fact that drew suburban kids here during the ‘60s by the parentally repressed thousands). San Francisco children understand, in a way some people never will, that they were neither born to be waited on nor put on Earth to make somebody else’s life perfect. They’re simply one worthy constituency among many. The big downtown arcade, the Metreon, is aimed at youngsters, but also hosts corporate retreats and cocktail parties. When we moved into our new neighborhood, the neighbors dropped by with brownies and cookies--and so did their kids.

And if raising a family in San Francisco is sometimes like trying to entertain a pack of toddlers in a maiden aunt’s parlor, it is also, to stretch the metaphor, like stumbling with your child into that maiden aunt’s magical attic. San Francisco is a city in which, for example, children can ride vintage streetcars out to a Pacific beach that is as pristine now as it was when the city was born. A kindergartener’s birthday party here is as likely to be held at a landmark bowling alley as at Chuck E. Cheese’s. The city has soccer leagues and summer camp, just like the suburbs, but it also has museums and aquariums and zoos and Chinese New Year parades a kid can walk to and Irish step-dancing contests and Italian grandpas playing bocce ball.

It is a city that--so far at least--has hung onto a critical mass of its natives, many of whom turn out to be the parents of the city’s remaining 112,802 or so kids. When they ask each other “Where’dja go to school?” they mean high school. They look out for each other’s families. The other night, at a school function in the Sunset District, the children suddenly disappeared. “Oh, they’re out in the church yard,” one of the parents said--and indeed they were, playing tag in the twilight around a statue of a saint at the Catholic church next door, as if it were 1950 instead of the 21st century in a metropolis.

This, in fact is the paradox about the kid thing in San Francisco: For grownups, it’s a big city, a sophisticated and charming playground. But for the children growing up here, it’s a village--their village. And without them, San Francisco may be a gem of a destination, but it will be less and less a hometown.

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For a related news story about San Francisco’s dwindling population of children, please see A-1. No Welcome Mat for Kids