[quote=yamashi1]As a millennial we grew up in an era where the growing majority of households had two working adults; and for the most part not raised by our parents but by daycare providers or no one at all! Personally, I remember walking home at age 6 with my younger sister to an empty house, preparing a PB&J sandwich and either throwing on the TV or jumping on my bike to go play with the neighborhood kids. I miss those days, but as an adult I’ve come to realize that I don’t want to be like my parents. I created children because I want to be with them, want to spend time with them and watch them grow to become responsible adults. For the first time in human history, technology has enabled us to do all of this.[/quote]
[quote=yamashi1] . . . My wife and I work downtown and I am able to enjoy it, but probably not a great place to raise children. I’m sure that I’m not the only one that feels this way. It seems pretty normal for young professionals to live in the city and move to the suburbs once they start having children. Options for me are sending my kids to private school and living in the city, or moving to the suburbs and going the public route. I chose suburbs cause my wife was a product of private and is not a fan.[/quote]
yamashi, I take it your kids ARE currently in daycare/afterschool care?
And were you aware of this public (K-8) school about 3.5 miles north of dtn SD?
This school currently rates a “9” and could have gotten your kids thru to HS, at which time they could choose from Mission Bay High or SD High (which has a renowned IB program) OR you could have applied for a zone transfer for them one-by-one, which isn’t as difficult to successfully obtain with a Hillcrest or Mission Hills address. Once the first kid gets admitted to a particular HS in SDUSD, it is MUCH easier for the other kids in the same family to follow.
There are a few more very good elementary schools within ~10 miles of dtn SD (rated 8 or 9).
Just sayin … there WERE alternatives for you to moving out to a suburb/exurb when you really didn’t want to be there. Even if you thought it must be “normal” to do so at your “stage of life.”
[quote=yamashi1][quote-bearishgurl]And btw, my kids were NEVER “latchkey kids.” They went to afterschool care thru the 6th grade and then a homework assistance program in 7th grade and transitioned back to extracurricular activities/home in 8th grade. They are far apart in age so my “child-rearing years” spanned a longer period of time than that of most parents.[/quote]I never meant it personally. I’m just speaking for my generation. For the most part, we were the first group to grow up in single parent/dual income households. Latchkey kids/afterschool care became the norm. Because of this, housing prices and sq ft. of homes and mini mcmansions increased exponentially further complicating the problem as single income families were priced out of good areas and therefore dual income became a requirement.[/quote]Actually, yamashi, millenials weren’t the first generation to have both parents working. I myself (and my siblings) grew up in a household in the ’50’s, ’60’s and ’70’s with both parents working and we weren’t alone. We never had daycare (nor could we afford it) but my mom didn’t work FT until my youngest sibling was in 1st grade and one of us had to walk him home from school.
If you’re speaking here of CA housing prices, yamashi, RE prices didn’t go up over the years in CA due to the composition of working parents in Big Development’s supposed “target buyer” households. Residential RE prices exploded (esp in CA coastal counties) due to the scarcity (and as a byproduct, cost) of acquiring and developing buildable land and the steady rise of the cost of construction materials. It costs a fortune to set up a CFD and develop an entire “master-planned” community in the manner the developer has agreed to with the respective city or county it is located in. Not only that, it takes YEARS to finally break ground, which may or may not include litigating several lawsuits with environmental groups, etc. The proliferation of “mini-mansions” today is simply a compensating factor for the typical small size of SFR lots subdivided by and offered for sale Big Development since the inception of the creation of CFDs pursuant to the Mello-Roos Act (mid 1987 and later in SD County). At the same time, the concept of “master planned communities” was created by “Big D” to make buyers feel better about buying a newly constructed larger-than-standard home crammed onto a smaller-than-standard and even minuscule lot (in comparison to residential lot sizes in long-established neighborhoods). The more square feet the home had, the higher price they could command for it … lot size be damned.
If your theory was true, then established city neighborhoods (where you state that millenials generally don’t want to raise their families in and which may instead be full of “retirees”) would not have escalated in value at such a rapid rate over the past two decades. Developers DON’T CARE how many jobs are in a buyer-household. They only care about 1-4 things in qualifying a buyer, depending upon terms of sale (1) total of buyers’ monthly household income, exclusive of occasional overtime; (2) total of buyers’ recurring monthly debt; (3) FICO score for all borrowers who will be listed on the the deed; and, (4) how much the buyer will be putting down. In the case of an “all-cash” buyer, all they care about is proof of certified funds. They don’t give a rat’s a$$ how many people in a household are bringing in income … only what the total of that (steady and customary) monthly income is in relation to mortgage size applied for. Ditto for sellers of resale homes.
No one is “conspiring” against millenials (or any other generation) to “price-fix” on “mini-mansions” in the distant suburbs because they perceive “both parents” are working in a household with minor kids at home. Believe me, developers (or any seller, for that matter) would rather accept a (competitive) all-cash offer than bother with a buyer who must qualify for a mortgage as a condition of their purchase offer. Nor do any developers of “mini-mansions” CARE one whit what the composition of the household who will buy it from them is (or whether they will actually occupy said dwelling … or not).
