I would absolutely raise my (hypothetical) kids in my hometown. I lived in Petaluma, California from age 8-18 and again from 21-23. It’s a nice, upper middle class town of 56,000 people about 35 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. It’s not terrifically exciting, but there are a zillion things going on in the Bay Area, the weather is usually fairly pleasant, and the schools are good and safe. It’s also (and I don’t think I realized how rare this is until recently) a fairly old town, especially by California standards - it was incorporated in the 1850s and the downtown is full of buildings dating back to the 1870s or so, an amazing thing, considering its proximity to the epicenter of the great quake of 1906 (about 20 miles). Although the east side of town is typical housing tract suburbia, the west side of town, where I grew up and where my family still lives, is full of well-maintained wood houses and tree-lined streets. Also, like the rest of the Bay Area, it’s quite liberal politically, which I like.
The downsides:
soooo whitebread. I had forgotten how homogenous the town is until I was thumbing through a yearbook recently. It was a shock, compared to the diversity I see regularly here in Chicago. However, that’s definitely changing, and the Bay Area is very diverse as a whole and it would be a simple thing to make sure my kids were exposed to various cultures.
The biggest downside, and the one most likely to keep me away is that it’s prohibitively expensive to live there. The average house in Sonoma County costs $500,000, and considering how rural a lot of the county is, I’m sure it’s significantly more in the towns.
I grew up in Perth Amboy, NJ and I now live in Arkansas. Major difference. I don’t have kids, but if I did I would NOT want them to grow up there. Not now. Now there are too many gangs, and crime. It’s a pretty place to grow up (on the waterfront side), but it’s much more violent now. It’s changed a lot since the 80’s.
It’s still home to me, and I do miss it terribly, but not a suitable place to raise kids.
I grew up in the Kensington neighborhood in northeast Buffalo. During the time I lived there, it was a racially diverse, white-collar, lower middle class to middle class community. It was considered a good place to buy a first hosue, and many who could afford to move to the suburbs stayed as long as they could.
The neighborhood’s racial mix passed a delicate tipping point in the late 1980s, and the transition transition continues to this day. Kensington is probably about 70% black, 25% white, 5% Asian now. It’s starting to take on the look of an urban ghetto; businesses with handpainted signs that look like graffiti, check cashing stores, and the occasional boarded up house with a large FBI warning on the front door. It’s not a dangerous slum, but it’s heading in that direction. There are a lot of absentee landlords now, and property crime is now a problem.
I want to raise my children in an ethnically and racially diverse environment, but not a place where they’ll have no peers. No, I wouldn’t raise my kids in Kensington.
I grew up in the upper-middle class city of Carmel, Indiana. (Fellow Hoosiers, please don’t hold that against me.) I recently drove through the city and visited old haunts I hadn’t seen in 15 years. There’s been an amazing amount of growth and progress, but…
I wouldn’t want to raise my kids there. I hated my young years there (ages 4-14; moved to California in 1987)–the kids were one dimensional and viscious. My family had moved from West Virginia–freakin’ hillbillies!–and the not-fitting-in thing haunted all my time there. To give you an idea of how absurd it all was, I remember being mocked in junior high because I didn’t have a Gucci purse like everyone else. I stood up for myself saying it was stupid for a 12yro to have a $300 purse, but that didn’t fly well. There were basically two social classes–in and out, rich and poor, wearing the right clothes and not. Moving to Southern California was a real (happy) culture shock to find there were all types, and most fascinating, a hippie chick (who looked like what a “poor kid” in Carmel looked like) was cool and accepted by the soche clique. You mean…they…they INTERMINGLE??
Carmel has a wonderful education system, and the area is gorgeous and has minimal crime. But that isn’t enough for me.
BTW, Carmel housewives have been the subject of ridicule for decades. This is typical of the jabs made at them. There’s some element of truth in that hyperbole.