A City Losing Its Children

The first Gold Rush to shape this region of rolling hills and sparkling water was peopled by a rugged breed of fortune hunters--mostly young, mostly single, mostly male. San Francisco in 1849 was a playground for the hale and hearty, no place for families.

The second Gold Rush--150 years later and fueled by technology--has also had a profound impact. San Francisco in the 1990s became “the Club Med of American cities,” says state librarian Kevin Starr, “a nice city to be young in, if you’ve got the money. Conversely, if you’re a soccer mom . . . it’s a terrible place to be.”

In the last decade, though the city of St. Francis grew by 52,774, it lost children--4,081 of them to be exact--the only metropolis of any size in the state and one of few nationwide to see such a net change in its youngest ranks, according to recently released census data.

Always adult and always expensive, San Francisco became even more so in the last decade, as the city effectively ignored its most troubling policy issue--the dearth of affordable housing. Young adults increasingly doubled and tripled up to afford escalating rents. The median age jumped to 36.5 from 35.7 10 years ago. Bucking state and national trends, the number of single mothers with children--often a city’s poorest residents--dropped dramatically.

San Francisco now has a higher percentage of adults than at any time in nearly a century. In fact, the total population is greater and the number of children smaller than at any time since 1920. Even Manhattan added children between 1990 and 2000, and 17% of its population now is younger than 18, compared with 14.5% in San Francisco. The median age around Rockefeller Center? Nearly a year younger than around the Transamerica Pyramid.

So what does it mean when a city loses children, even as its population as a whole grows? When a place that treasures diversity in race, culture and sexual orientation finds itself morphing into an enclave of increasingly similar men and women in their peak earning years? When everyone wants to live here, but so darn few people can afford it? When grown-ups trump kids?

So far, San Francisco offers a mixed picture of what life is like when adults are so dramatically front and center. The theaters are great, but the schools are troubled. The foie gras comes seared with wild mulberries, salt-cured on brioche or cloaked in a deep crawfish reduction, but the parks went 50 years without a bond measure to pay for repairs.

The symphony is world-class, but complaints about landlords discriminating against families jumped about 40% in the 1990s. One recent letter from landlord to tenant said: “Your little girl is causing a lot of noise. . . . At this time perhaps you should look for a place where you won’t be bothering the people around you.”

There are more dogs here than there are children, and more shelter space for troubled animals than homeless families. Dog owners and parents square off regularly over who has the biggest claim on scarce open space: little Barbara or the bichon frise.

Advocates Call for Civic Introspection

“When it becomes a transient city, when people leave when they want to have families, it has a profound impact on a city,” says Margaret Brodkin, executive director of Coleman Advocates in San Francisco, which works on behalf of children’s issues. “What is required is some civic introspection so that we together decide this is a terrible trend and collectively do something about it.”

A group of child advocates and city leaders plans to meet behind closed doors today for its first discussion of the dropping child population, what it means for San Francisco and what could be done about it.

“We shouldn’t let it happen without our noticing,” says school board president Jill Wynns, who plans to attend. “It behooves public policymakers to take it seriously. I’m taking it seriously.”

What makes a city good for anyone to live in is, in many ways, wildly subjective. In 1999, Money magazine named San Francisco “the best big city,” with a few big caveats--earthquakes, schools and high housing costs among them. By 2000, Portland, Ore., had pulled ahead.

Also in 1999, the advocacy group Zero Population Growth named San Francisco the second most “kid-friendly” big city in America after Seattle; the city got high marks for its slow growth, its air quality and its low infant mortality rate, among other things. Voters here did endorse the so-called Children’s Amendment, which earmarked a chunk of property tax revenue for children’s services.

Yet just last year, a poll of the city’s voters showed that although 92% of them believed San Francisco was a “great” or “good” place to live in themselves, only 56% thought it was equally positive for children, and 78% thought that in the last generation it became increasingly difficult to raise a family in the city by the bay.

Although some demographers project that the San Francisco Bay Area will be the oldest region in the state by 2040, the 2000 census painted a nuanced picture. San Francisco lost children but also residents between ages 60 and 74.

At the same time, every age group between 25 and 59 grew, with the greatest spikes in 25- to 34-year-olds--the hard-working and hard-playing--and 45- to 54-year-olds--baby boomers likely to have grown children.

To such people in their active and affluent years, San Francisco’s attractions are legion. With its morning fog and storied bridges, rolling hills and grand vistas, the city that calls itself “The City” is visually stunning. Sailing, hiking, camping and skiing are in easy striking distance. Even with the softening economy, the unemployment rate was only 3.8% in April--lower than the state and national averages.

San Francisco has more restaurants per capita than any city in California. For the last four years--the life of its annual survey--Bon Appetit magazine readers have picked San Francisco as the best place in America to dine out. Its international counterpart? Paris, of course.

“The weather, the beauty of it, the international sense of it, the European city feel, all of that attracts people who think like Europeans, who enjoy cities you can walk around in,” says Elisabeth Ramsey, co-owner with her chef husband of the Financial District restaurant Elisabeth Daniel.

Chris George, single and 37, moved here from Chicago in 1998 because, he says, “it was time to have an adventure.” George, the creative director for a public relations firm, notes all the different neighborhoods of young singles: “You have the whole Marina--the straight 20-something part of town,” says George, who describes children as “just so low on my radar screen.”

“You have the Castro, which does the same thing for a younger--20s, 30s, 40s--gay audience,” he says. “And the opportunity of being an urban pioneer South of Market or in the Mission District.”

What else could anyone need?

A place to live would be nice.

Competing With Affluent Newcomers

Surrounded on three sides by water and the fourth by the San Mateo County line, San Francisco has little room to grow. Housing comes dear, and in the 1990s, lower- and middle-income residents were forced to vie with an influx of affluent newcomers drawn by the technology boom and the growth spurred by a hot economy.

Who won the housing war should come as no surprise.

“San Francisco has become completely unaffordable for the average family, particularly families with kids and particularly lower- and moderate-income families with kids,” says Richard DeLeon, professor of political science at San Francisco State University.

DeLeon describes the city as “hostile” to families. “I just don’t see any kind of integrated policy connected with planning and land use that hinges on provision of affordable housing,” he says.

The median home price here is $550,000, and homeownership is a measly 35%, compared with 57% statewide. Even with the slump in the New Economy, two-bedroom apartments rent for $2,557 a month on average, compared with $1,187 in Los Angeles County. Nearly half of all housing has either no bedrooms or one.

Between 1990 and 2000, nearly 20% of all new housing built here fit into the category of live-work loft. Critics said many of those units were actually used as offices and did nothing to help the housing crunch. And those in which people actually lived were a far cry from family-friendly, in part because they were largely built in the semi-industrial South of Market district--home to restaurants and clubs, warehouses and freeway on-ramps and a good chunk of the city’s drug-dealing.

More San Francisco households are composed of roommates living together than there are husbands and wives living together. “People are doubling up two and three incomes to rent apartments, and they’re driving out families,” says Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC.

“It’s not so much you have more gay couples as you have desperate roommates,” Myers says. “I talked to a waitress in Noe Valley a few years ago who was leaving the city. I still remember what she said: ‘Around here, even lawyers have roommates.’ ”

Dramatic Change in Blue-Collar Town

Historian Starr, a San Francisco native, notes that his formerly blue-collar hometown changed dramatically after 1962, when tourism became the No. 1 economic sector.

San Francisco, Starr says, “began to concentrate on its looks.”

Sandra Stewart, 33, grew up in the earlier version of the city’s Sunset District with four siblings, an electrician father and a mother who occasionally worked as a medical receptionist. They could afford to own a house.

The last time Stewart lived here, she could barely make the rent on the one-bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin for herself, her partner and her three children. When her 10-year-old son came home talking about how cool the neighborhood drug dealers were, she knew she had to leave.

Now she commutes to her job at San Francisco’s Department of Family and Children’s Services from Richmond, a working-class East Bay city. She is a single mother and makes more than $54,000 a year.

“What really bothers me is that, to give my children what I had when I was growing up, I had to leave San Francisco,” Stewart says. “I’ve just traded one ‘hood for another. [But] it’s better than the Tenderloin . . . We have a yard. My kids have their own rooms.”

For those families who stay, renting here became increasingly troublesome, according to the city’s Human Rights Commission, which documented an increase of 35% to 40% in housing discrimination complaints filed by families during the last decade.

For the last several years, complaints by families to the commission’s fair housing unit have evened off at 20 to 25 a month, said Ed Ilumin, a compliance officer. Such families are threatened with eviction when they marry, when children are born or when their children make noise.

Susi Levi-Sanchez and her husband, Daniel, left their North Beach apartment and bought a home in San Francisco’s Sunnyside neighborhood after their daughter Rebecca was born. Their landlord had sent them a letter, she recalled, that said, “Now that you’ve had a child, you’re going to be using more water, so we need to raise your rent.”

Levi-Sanchez called the district attorney, who said that such an action was illegal and notified the landlord on the family’s behalf. The landlord backed off. And when the Levi-Sanchezes moved to more family-oriented Sunnyside, they figured their problems were over.

They were wrong. Yes, they got away from what the former stage electrician called their “kid-hating landlord,” but they strolled right into the middle of another San Francisco family controversy: Kids, dogs and who owns the parks.

The Sunnyside Recreation Center in the family’s current neighborhood is one of several parks citywide where dog owners and families are in conflict. Hundreds of people have attended public hearings on the issue; some of these meetings degenerated into shouting matches.

The dog owners look at this built-out city’s 227 parks and say that their animal companions should be able to run free in more than just 19 of them. The city is considering doubling the number of officially off-leash parks and will announce a new policy in the near future. Sunnyside is one park that could be in for a change.

The parents look at the city’s busy streets and rare backyards and insist that their children deserve a place to play where they are safe from cars, dogs and strangers.

Battling factions in the Sunnyside District have become so estranged over their park’s future that Levi-Sanchez worries the small open space with its outdated equipment will never get a much-needed new play structure. Meanwhile, there’s a shiny new drinking fountain with a special, ground-level bowl for dogs.

Becky Ballinger, spokeswoman for the parks department, firmly believes San Francisco has a lot to offer children and says “some community people are trying to make this an issue between dogs and kids. It’s not. . . . There’s no reason they can’t coexist. But they need to be separated.”

Shortage of Service Workers

For the city, the changing demographics pose difficult questions on many fronts.

On the business side, San Francisco is still awash in “Now Hiring” signs, particularly for service and support jobs. The biggest culprit is the tight labor market, but the loss of young people adds to the problem.

According to the state Employment Development Department, 31% of all low-wage work statewide is done by 16- to 19-year-olds; those aged 15 to 19 dropped by 5.7% in San Francisco in the last decade. An additional 17% of such work is done by 20- to 24-year-olds, a group that dropped by 5.2%.

And then there’s the issue of services for the elderly, as this already older city ages. P.J. Johnston, spokesman for Mayor Willie Brown, says San Francisco is a wonderful place for children and adults, but he acknowledges that senior housing is “something the city’s got to deal with.”

“There are 10,000 seniors on the waiting list to get [affordable] housing or vouchers in San Francisco,” says Jane M. Graf, president of Mercy Housing California, a not-for-profit developer that just opened an affordable housing complex for seniors here. “They do die before they get housing.”

The census snapshot of a child-losing San Francisco was taken at the height of the dot-com boom, in April 2000. And already the city is changing again, as start-ups fail, techies in their 20s and 30s bail out and “For Rent” signs blossom where once there were none.

Still, economists and demographers see such change as relatively short-term. And they do not believe that the housing market that shoved working-class families out will ease enough to let them back in.

Although San Francisco used to have enough good-paying manufacturing jobs to support blue-collar workers, most such plants disappeared in earlier decades, and land is too scarce for them to be replaced.

“In order to get diversification, you’d have to get a blue-collar community, and it’s not going to happen,” Starr says. San Francisco will “take on a certain characteristic, a Monte Carlo kind of characteristic. . . . When [people] get married and have families, they won’t be there.”

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The Trouble With Children

In the 2000 census, San Francisco grew by 52,774 people, but lost 4,081 children compared to 1990. The percentage of the total population under 18 has been gradually declining since the 1960 census, figures show: San Francisco 1950-2000

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