I am not sure what part of town you are in. Can you open google maps and tell me how much "green space" you see? More than I grew up with. Hint, there is a rather large rectangular one on the west side of town.

But I have noticed (and been criticized on HN for claiming) that the parenting cultural bubble in SF seems completely unknown to many other subcultures. It is indeed a very good community, though.

Sure, but good luck easily getting to Golden Gate Park if you're, say, coming from Mission Bay. And if you can afford to live in the hillier parts of town the odds are good you probably have decent (albeit small) neighborhood parks. The problem with SF is that the public schools suck, the streets in a lot of the "urban" parts are rife with squalor, and the city is a lot bigger than it looks when you're trying to get from one side to the other. I mean, if you live in the Outer Sunset you may as well be in a "suburb".... I think SF requires a pretty specific mentality for one to intentionally raise children there [for people of such means to be able to choose to stay or go].

Most of SF west of the Mission is actually pretty good for raising kids - Noe, Twin Peaks, Forest Hills, Sunset, Richmond, and Lake Merced are all pretty family-friendly if you can afford them.

You're right that they're practically suburbs though. Somebody did a transit-scaled map of SF and it actually takes longer to get from the Outer Sunset to downtown than from Mountain View, 50 miles to the south. One of the biggest problems with SF is that the public transportation system sucks, since it's such a patchwork of independent agencies. (Residents of these areas might consider this a feature rather than a bug, though, because it keeps the homeless, poop, drugs, etc. out of their neighborhoods.)

> Sure, but good luck easily getting to Golden Gate Park if you're, say, coming from Mission Bay

That doesn't take very long on the N Judah.

I know hundred-millionaires raising kids in San Francisco and Oakland. They, of all people, have a choice of where they could raise their kids. And they do it in the cities.

When I was a kid I grew up in a rural area, an urban area, then a rural area, then an urban area. They were both super cool, but I had more friends I could hang out with in the latter and so my life was automatically better.

That's more just SF though