Perhaps abolishing the whole idea of school districts and assigning kids to schools via address as opposed to parental decision. The whole pay for schools via property tax and local levies has a pretty big negative impact on students from low income neighborhoods. Its classism baked into the system. Backpack tuitions would right a lot of wrongs in the education of our children.
I think I'm aware of this, and it is often not what the parent's want used as a determinate. If someone says they have moved somewhere to get their kids in a "good" school district then the system has failed.
> In California, the schools are funded equally based on property tax collected at the state level. Schools are funded based on how many students are sitting in class, not on where they are located.
Except for districts where local property tax portion exceeds the funding formula levels since the property tax is kept local to the district. Also, CA schools are funded on more than property taxes such as having an income tax share.
The problem is that development is so tightly restricted in most areas, that new residents have few options.
In short, you are blaming the market for the results of zoning and land use restrictions.
I also abhor zoning and what it does to cities. But look at Japanese cities to see what good, minimal zoning can achieve, without prohibitive height limits, nonexclusive zoning etc.
More on Japanese zoning: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
Persuade people to want mixed use, rather than trying to force it down the throats of home owners, and you will have much better results.
Developers are perfectly happy to deliver want buyers want. If you want better cities, have a population of people who want better cities. If the city you live in is not good enough, first try persuading your peers, and if that does not work, go somewhere more like minded.
It is not an excuse to cripple everyone in this trap of zoning and regulation that has stunted growth in almost every sector across the entire country.
I didn't blame the market for anything. You have reading comprehension issues. Fix that.
Why would people with children move to a place without schools?
Some portion of people with children may not care at all about them. That's one reason why there's public education, to prevent parent's lack of concern being something that cause a child to have nearly no future. Of course, such considerations seem to be already going away, so sure we'll have whole housing developments for home schooling nuts.
Yet people living in one of the most populated cities in the US apparently live too far away from schools and shouldn't be allowed to build.
As one of those kids who got up at 04:00 to catch the 04:30 bus that arrived at school at ~07:45, (and repeated the trip -but in reverse- starting at ~15:00) I can confirm the truth of this statement. [0]
[0] I was literally the first child on and last child off of that particular bus. :/
As far as I can tell school districts arose at a time when it was completely impractical for children, other than those whose parents were wealthy enough to send them away to boarding school, to attend a school that was not local, and at a time when it was generally believed that local government should be responsible for local services (sanitation, roads, water, schools, etc). I don't see how at that time they could have been used for racist and classist purposes, so doubt that their origin was such.
The 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. Among these facilities were public schools, often located just miles apart, which separated white and colored students. In almost all instances, schools which educated colored students were underfunded, extensively degraded, and/or lacked the necessary materials to rigorously challenge the students. It was also estimated that the amount of per capita expenditures devoted towards colored students was 40-50% lower than for white students, further deepening the educational inequality between the two ethnic groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_diversity_in_United_Sta...
Whether classist, racist, or coincidence, the results are obvious.
And I didn't ask for one. I want one on the origin of school districts. As you noted, neighborhoods were segregated. As a consequence of that, everything local was de facto segregated, but that doesn't mean you can infer that everything local has a racist origin.
For instance, since neighborhoods were segregated a neighborhood's sewers were generally only available to one race. Do you conclude that public sanitation has racist origins?
I'm surprised segregated/poorer neighborhoods having worse services is up for debate.
Segregation had racist origins. Segregation was by race. But I concede, not everything local has a racist origin, obviously.
Is the next school 20+ miles away?
The school district has designated this new area as unassigned, meaning the children will have a seat somewhere, but no guarantee of a close neighborhood school.
Within that domain, this new source of housing has not been factored in to the balance of how to divide resources. (Think of classroom seats as hyperthreads and teachers as processor cores).
The kids going to different schools (lack of CPU affinity) is the issue as differently aged kids might go to different schools, have to travel needlessly far to get to a school with free resources, and potentially even two kids of the same age from the same family might not go to the same school.
> but you can't blame developers for that.
Wild grow with little planning for transportation and water. It's a complete mess. You can sit in traffic jams in the middle of nowhere. And the crazy thing, they are still building like crazy so it's only going to get much worse than it is now.
I've been visiting the area for 15 years (my Dad lives there), and each year I go back I'm amazed how much worse it is. 15 years ago it was lush forests. Now: mall and housing developments are everywhere, and the roads are mostly the same--there have been some upgrades to roads, but not nearly enough.
Still, removing parking requirements might be a good thing if creates incentive for public transit. Removing single family home mandates seems like it would be great for avoiding sprawl. But as you say, just these two.
There's a reason we have housing inspections at so many steps in the building process.
Zoning and building codes are two vastly different things. Zoning controls how buildings can be used, what types of new buildings can be built, and, in some cases buildings' overall shape and size. Building codes specify how buildings can be built, and what quality and safety standards the construction has to meet.
Like many other pro-housing-affordablity people, I believe we should massively relax zoning laws in most places (though not necessarily abolish them entirely). I do not think we should change building codes in any way.
The original comment: If you want to fix the country then remove all limits, let developers develop whatever and whereever they deem there is demand.
Compare SF to unzoned Houston instead.
That's a bad idea, too. For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school.
Also, there are serious environmental impacts that need to be considered every time you build a new housing unit.
Outlawing zoning completely is a bad idea too: you'll end up with housing units built next to noisy factories or smelly plants, and then the people in the new houses will complain to get the factory shut down, even though the factory was there before they were, and it was making noise when they moved in.
Furthermore, when you build new housing, you need to consider how those people are going to get transportation, water and electricity (and heating in most places). You can't just throw up a housing unit anywhere and expect those things to be built magically.