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Originally Posted by Investing In Chicago
I grew up in Manhattan (Washington Heights) in a multi unit building. As a young kid (up until 12 or so) I found myself to be quite board. I grew up on this block: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.8347...7i16384!8i8192
We didn't have many options for stuff to do right outside our building, play time was essentially on the stoop.
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yeah, manhattan is a total density outlier in the US.
very, VERY,
VERY few urban places in the US have densities over 150,000m ppsm like where you grew up in washington heights.
and i would agree that level of extreme density is a different sort of animal when it comes to child-rearing than america's regular old city neighborhood like lincoln square where i live.
in most of the US outside of NYC, an urban city neighborhood is MUCH more likely to fall into the 20,000 - 50,000 ppsm range. a
FAR cry from manhattan, to be sure, but also a far cry (an order of magnitude, in fact) from the schaumburgs and the planos of typical american sprawl-burbia, where 2,000 - 5,000 ppsm is the norm.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Investing In Chicago
While I certainly agree that surrounding Children with others that are not like them, will pay off later in life, I sort of have an issue with the mindset of "I want my kid to go to school with lower income kids"; I was the "lower income kid" in my high school "went to high school in Westchester County (commuted an hour everyday from Wash Heights) with a bunch of kids from Rye, NY because NYC HS in my area were complete shit.
15 year old me doesn't like the idea of being a life lesson from some upper middle class kid.
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i agree that busing poor kids dozen of miles away from their homes to be some wealthy suburb's "token disadvantaged children" is generally a bad idea.
but, i'm not talking about that. i'm talking about a regular old K-8 neighborhood school where everyone lives within a 1/2 mile of school and you have real-deal economic diversity at the neighborhood level where some kids are rich, most are middle class, and some are working class/poor.
no one is anyone else's token anything. it's just a bunch of different kids who come from different economic backgrounds, but who all live in the same neighborhood together and therefore go to school together.
that's the way it should be, IMO. and my wife and i were very intentional in seeking that out because our own childhood schooling experiences were 95%+ upper middle class white.
that kind of neighborhood-level economic diversity is light years harder to find in the burbs because many burbs are specifically designed through exclusionary zoning and other means to maintain a certain economic class of people and to exclude others.
in my city neighborhood, you can have a $2M SFH next to an upper middle class bungalow, next to a middle class 3-flat, next to a working class section 8 apartment building.
generally speaking, america's burbs simply do not allow that kind of housing type diversity all mixed-up and on top of each other like that, and the schools tend to be much more economically monolithic because of that.