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When city loses children, it hurts schools and more Leaders wonder if they can reverse a 9-year trend toward suburbs

By TODD MURPHY

Issue date: Fri, Nov 11, 2005

The Tribune

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Pam and Dan Sandall once lived in the heart of Northeast Portland.

Now they sit in a nice new home in Lake Oswego, comfortable in their neighborhood, ecstatic with their children’s schools.

“My husband and I look at each other every day, and say: ‘Why did we wait so long to do this?’ ” Pam Sandall said.

Cynthia Callaway and her daughter, Brianne, once lived on Portland’s eastern edge, but still within the Portland school district.

Now they live farther east, outside the Portland district. And Callaway is happy to be away from the meth houses of their former neighborhood, and euphoric about her daughter’s new elementary school in the David Douglas School District.

“I went to a Portland public school, and I loved it then,” Callaway said. “But as I look at it now … I don’t want my kids going there. It’s not what it used to be.”

They are two very different families, telling very different stories. Yet each could be speaking for thousands of Portland-area families — the thousands of people who have left Portland during the past several years for the reality, or the perception, of better schools, safer streets, cheaper housing, greener lawns.

What’s been happening in Portland during the past decade or so, intensifying during the past few years, is hardly unique.

Families with children have been leaving city life for the suburbs since William Levitt bought a chunk of potato fields on Long Island in the late 1940s and built row upon row of houses for post-World War II families fleeing the brownstones and concrete of New York City.

But Portland, as it often does, always prided itself on being a bit different.

That’s in spite of this reality: Portland has been losing kids for more than 40 years. In 1962, the Portland school district had a staggering enrollment of 81,000 students — almost twice what it has today.

Still, for much of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s, many poor families and middle-class families and wealthy families stayed in Portland and sent their children to the city’s schools. That was many more than in a lot of other American cities. The result has been a central core of neighborhoods that has remained vibrant and alive.

But the Sandall family and the Callaway family represent a trend that’s now maybe nine years old, judging by declining school district enrollment, and shows no signs of abating.

Even as the population of metropolitan Portland continues to increase, the Portland school district, which nine years ago enrolled 58,000 students, now enrolls fewer than 47,000. Two in five Portland households once were composed of families with children. That number now is one in five.

Portland — or just about all parts of it west of Interstate 205 — is losing its children. And even as the city thrives in other ways, a range of leaders worry about what the loss could mean for the city’s future.

“To me, it’s a tremendous concern,” city Commissioner Dan Saltzman said.

Society looks different

The reasons for the trends in Portland are varied. Some are simple demographics. Others are not unlike what caused similar trends in other cities decades ago.

The main culprits:

• Demographics. Families have fewer children today than families did 40 or even 20 years ago.

More important, there are fewer young couples in their 20s and 30s having large families than there were during the baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s.

That means three- and four-bedroom homes in some of Portland’s close-in neighborhoods that once housed four or five kids now house one or two. Or none.

“If you walked house to house in the 1950s, probably half of all of those homes had a kid in them,” said Barry Edmonston, director of Portland State University’s Center of Population Research and Census. “Now, it’s probably one-fourth.”

• Housing costs and housing requirements. In September 1994, the median price of a Portland-area home was $119,600. By September 2005, the median price had more than doubled, to $250,000.

Meanwhile, the median household income in Portland during that time increased from about $41,000 to $67,900 for a family of four, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Today’s prices mean that many fa milies can’t afford to buy a house in Portland big enough for even a family of three or four. And they certainly can’t afford to buy a central Portland house with the large yard and other amenities that families often want.

“People with kids who are wanting and needing larger housing — larger and cheaper housing — are moving to the places where it exists,” said Scott Stewart, research director of the Portland Multnomah Progress Board, a group established by Portland and Multnomah County leaders to track important community trends. In other words, they are moving away from the center of Portland.

• Perceptions about quality of schools and quality of life. For years Portland school district officials have proudly pointed out how the district had bucked the trends that existed in many cities: Middle-class and upper-middle-class families were not fleeing to the suburbs but were keeping their children in the city’s schools, helping to keep them and the city strong.

But as the Portland school district continues to deal with what officials believe is unstable and inadequate funding from the state, (JB: Funny how it's the states fault about funding. Seems like more ADULTS less KIDS equals MORE FUNDING. I think the fact is the budget grows faster then even the substantial growth in tax revenue) and as the district deals with the financial and other effects of declining enrollment, some parents are reacting.

The Portland district — and thus living in the city — looks less attractive than it once might have to families moving to the Portland area from another city.

These families often come “with a preconceived prejudice (against city schools), especially people coming from the East Coast,” said Brian Allen, president and co-owner of Windermere Cronin and Caplan Realty Group. “People coming from Detroit and Philadelphia … there’s been urban flight for years.”

Many in Portland still believe the Portland school district is unlike most city school districts in that it has very good schools in many areas of town.

Portland school board co-chairwoman Bobbie Regan and her family moved from the San Francisco Bay Area a dozen years ago and specifically chose to live in Portland because of its public school system.

Unstable state funding is continually frustrating, she said, but: “We still have good schools.”

Still, attitudes of some longtime Portland-area parents are shifting.

Talk to parents who have moved from Portland to, for example, Lake Oswego in recent years, and they often cite Portland schools as the primary reason for their moves.

“It was basically for the schools — that was the sole reason,” one mother said of her family’s move from Irvington in Northeast Portland to Lake Oswego last year. The woman asked not to be identified because she doesn’t want to offend friends who still live in Portland.

The woman and her husband have three preschool-age children, and they became concerned when Irvington Elementary cut its music program and received lower state report card ratings in some recent years, she said.

“It was just kind of sad,” she said. Some schools in Portland seemed to do well for a few years and then not so well, she said, and she and her husband wondered, considering when their children would enter school: “Are we going to time it right in Portland, or aren’t we?

“The more we looked into it, the more it seemed that the Beaverton School District and the Lake Oswego School District didn’t seem to have the highs and lows that Portland did,” she said.

Pam Sandall said the reason for her family’s move “was a combination of living in the city — a small city lot — and the (Multnomah County income and property) tax increases that seemed to be not well thought-out … and the school district itself. It was kind of a threefold thing.”

(JB: Death Spiral! Higher taxes than surrounding areas (to pay bloated locked in public sector), and worse schools with all the "urban underclass" concentrated in the PDX city district = DETROIT, here we come!)

Sandall said she was generally happy with her neighborhood’s Rose City Elementary School. But their oldest son was reaching middle-school age, and she was concerned about possible gang activity at the neighborhood’s Gregory Heights Middle School.

“I saw a lot of things going on at Gregory Heights Middle School that I didn’t want my child to be in the middle of,” she said. “I know it happens everywhere, but I think there was just more of it than I wanted.”

‘We risk being hollowed out’

The first and most obvious effects of the family demographic shifts show up in Portland’s school district.

As enrollment has declined, state per-student funding to the district has declined and the district has needed to deal with annual budget shortfalls. (JB: The idea of downsizing the looter class of public employees doesn't occur, and of course union contracts have locked in huge costs for retirees and such that can't be dodged) After some lag time, schools — especially small elementary schools — need to be closed. Which makes Portland neighborhoods surrounding the closed schools even less attractive to many families. (DEATH SPIRAL)

Which gets to a larger point: School district and city leaders say a declining number of families and children in the city will have repercussions beyond the schools.

“We risk being hollowed out of our families with children,” said city Commissioner Sam Adams.

If that happens, Adams said, Portland will lose more than schoolchildren and schools. The city and its neighborhoods will lose some of their vibrancy, even some of their passion, and civic-mindedness.

And, Adams said, a city with fewer children is a city in a dozen years where fewer people have the sort of connections people have to the place where they grew up.

“You become a city that is much more transient. You risk losing the sense of place,” Adams said. “You lose your history. Without kids, you lose your history.”

Speaking of both housing prices and families, Adams and Saltzman each talked about San Francisco — which housing prices have made a city largely made up of the very wealthy and the very poor, who find subsidized, transient housing.

“I love San Francisco, but it’s not a place I want to emulate,” Saltzman said.

Dueling trend watchers

What can Portland and its leaders do to slow the trend, or even reverse it?

The answer to the question depends on whether you’re talking to a demographer or a politician.

The demographers suggest that while the decline of families and kids in Portland may slow — and the numbers might even stabilize in several years — there is no real chance of reversing the trend.

City and school district leaders choose to be more hopeful.

Community leaders offer ideas to combat the trend; many of them are more basic themes than concrete proposals.

Among them: (JB: Please note all solutions are socialist central planning and tax give-away oriented.)

• Find ways for government to encourage more affordable housing. City commissioners point to their recent decision regarding the proposed Alexan apartment building in the South Waterfront area as proof that they care about affordable housing.

The apartment building’s owners were asking for a 10-year property tax abatement under a city program meant to encourage affordable housing. But the “affordable” apartment units were going to be 48 studio apartments — average size about 500 square feet — renting for $850 a month.

The City Council rejected the request, saying the units would not provide affordable housing for families.

“We need to have policies that encourage affordable housing that are larger sized,” Saltzman said. Adams also has encouraged more subsidized student housing for families near Portland State University and Oregon Health & Science University, and has said the city should encourage Portland General Electric to create a sliding rate scale — similar to programs in Seattle and Clark County, Wash. — that would provide lower electricity bills for low-income Portland families.

• Make remodeling homes easier. Adams has proposed that the city ensure that homeowners can more easily get permits to remodel and expand their homes — that simple permits be granted in five days.

• Create more after-school and other programs for children. A special property tax levy spearheaded by Saltzman three years ago provides funding for a range of children’s and education programs, including after-school programs. And the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods program, supported by city, county and foundation funding, offers after-school programs at more than 40 schools.

But, Saltzman and others say, “we need more after-school mentoring programs.”

• Keep strong neighborhoods with strong neighborhood-based businesses. That means, Adams said, the city could find ways to help small businesses conduct market research in neighborhoods so they can prosper. And it means supporting parks and other amenities that make neighborhoods attractive.

“A lot of it just goes back to being a place that people find to be very livable, in terms of a strong neighborhood with neighborhood businesses that serve their needs,” Saltzman said.

The ideas — although not always specific — underline views from city and school district leaders that Portland can win back families, or keep more families from leaving. For instance, city leaders often talk about young people ages 20 to 29 increasingly moving to Portland. Maybe the city can focus on finding ways to keep those people as Portlanders after they begin having children, Saltzman said.

“In sum, I just don’t believe we should throw up our hands and say, ‘We can’t fight these trends,’ ” he said. “I believe we can.”

When talks move toward reversing the trends, however, demographers tend to be spoilsports.

Yes, Portland can and should do all it can to make the city a family-friendly and kid-friendly place to live, said John Fregonese, a Portland planning consultant and former Metro planning director who does city planning worldwide.

But any changes probably won’t significantly change the forecasts: that the decline in kids in Portland will continue for the next few years and then level off at a much smaller number of kids than 10 or 20 years ago and even now. Forecasts show that the Portland school district enrollment, for instance, should level off at somewhere in the low 40,000 range, Fregonese said.

By then, only 18 percent to 20 percent of Portland households will have children in them.

“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s what cities are going to look like. That’s what Europe is like now.

“We’re unfamiliar with it because we grew up in the baby boom with lots of kids and we think that is normal,” Fregonese said. “This is the new normal.”