Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Liberal Utopia

Gay-friendly?  Check.
Cosmopolitan?  Check.
Diverse?  Check.
Rent control?  Check.
Mass transit?  Check.
Liberal almost to the point of being fascist?  Check.

San Francisco sounds like liberal utopia, but who actually lives there?  Who can afford to live there?  Well, Business Insider tells us who can't afford to live there:
Housing in San Francisco is expensive.

So expensive, in fact, the city's schools can't hire enough teachers because the cost of living is so onerous.

According to a report from KTVU in San Francisco, the city's school district needs to find 51 more teachers in the 2 weeks before school starts, but is having trouble hiring due to the high cost of living.
This won't be a problem for long.  People with families can't afford to live in San Francisco; this story may be old but there's no reason to believe it's not still true:
There are an estimated 120,000 dogs in San Francisco, according to the city's Animal Care and Control department. There are anywhere from 108,000 to 113,000 children, according to U.S. census figures from 2000 and 2005. 
Anyway, no one wants a long commute, especially on public transit and especially when they're forced to for economic reasons.

Shangri-La has become Paradise Lost.

Update:  here's some more recent information:
Just 13.4 percent of San Francisco's 805,235 residents are younger than 18, the smallest percentage of any major city in the country. By contrast, San Jose's percentage of children is 24.8 percent, Oakland's is 21.3 percent, Boston's is 16.8 percent and Seattle's is 15.4 percent, according to Brian Cheu, director of community development for the Mayor's Office of Housing. Even Manhattan is composed of roughly 15 percent children, according to Dan Kelly, director of planning for San Francisco's Human Services Agency.
Eventually the teacher shortage problem will solve itself. They won't need any teachers in San Francisco.

2 comments:

maxutils said...

Palo Alto solved the problem b building teacher 'dorms' and paying them a lot ...

Pseudotsuga said...

Easy solution:
Make all schools in SF into boarding schools, where the teachers and students live side by side in a rich educational environment!
We can have Eton, or Hogwarts, by the Bay!