Where Did All the Children Go?

In San Francisco, Monica Burton, who now commutes from Sacramento, plays with goddaughter Zaria Ivory, Ajianah Daniels and granddaughter Tyria Burton. At right, Misty Richmond pushes a baby near the Golden Gate Bridge. (By Randi Lynn Beach For The Washington Post)

The middle-class exodus from California's coast is a complex story. While researchers and politicians say it could have negative implications for the communities along the Pacific, it is also a story about people selling their houses, cashing out of the remarkable housing boom and heading to greener, or at least cheaper, pastures. Housing prices in heavily black and Hispanic sections of southern Los Angeles, for example, grew 50 percent last year, the fastest in Southern California, prompting thousands of families to cash out and move. From 2000 to 2004, the Los Angeles metropolitan area lost 8 percent of its black children and 4 percent of its whites.

In San Francisco, so many middle-class families with children younger than 15 have left that the city has the lowest percentage of children of any major American metropolis.

Mayor Plans Action

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Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's popular mayor, has vowed to do something. "There's a quality of imagination that's very important for the spirit and the soul of the city to maintain," he said in a recent interview. "Children bring that to a city. A city without children has no future."

Newsom said a city needs boisterous schoolyards, young fans for local sports teams, and zoos and museums filled with children alive with wonder. It is as important as creating jobs for a city and, in fact, bolsters the economy, he said.

Still, families with children have been fleeing San Francisco and other major urban centers for decades. With the growth of nearby suburbs, San Francisco's big drop came from 1960 to 1980 when the number of children fell from 24.5 percent to 17.2 percent of the city's population. Newsom's mother moved him and his sister out of the city during that time. Since then, it has been a slow spiral down to below 14.5 percent.

Newsom said he is eager to study such cities as Chicago and Vancouver, which have taken measures to stanch the flow.

Late last year, Newsom appointed a well-known children's advocate, Margaret Brodkin, to head the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. He established a council of leading San Franciscans to study the issue and is pushing city developers to include more family-friendly and affordable housing in their projects. Still, Newsom is not promising anything.

"We're going to have a housing boom in the next five years the likes of which San Francisco has not seen since the 1906 fire," he said, "and it still won't even be a drop in the bucket to what we need."

Newsom reeled off a list of programs adopted by San Francisco to make the city better for families -- an extra, city-funded working-family tax credit; universal preschool; a school bond for arts, physical education and libraries; and health insurance for everyone younger than 24.

"And still they leave," he said. From 2000 to 2004, the city's child population was virtually unchanged, according to Frey's data, despite a wave of Asian immigrants and a baby boom that followed the dot-com bust. Kindergarten enrollment dropped by 6 percent between 2001 and 2004, and in January the city's school board decided to close or merge 14 schools because the public schools are hemorrhaging on average 1,000 children a year.

A 3:30 a.m. Start

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To make it to her job driving a train, Burton has to be on the road by 3:30 a.m. She finds herself driving to San Francisco almost seven days a week, still spending Sundays at the True Hope Church of God in Christ, near the old Candlestick Park. "My cleaners are there," she said. "My bank is there. I even do my shopping in San Francisco."

At her church, the Rev. Arelious Walker's congregation has dwindled from more than 400 to fewer than 250 in a few years. "I'm a natural optimist," Walker said, "but this exodus really is of biblical proportions."

Special correspondent Joseph Dignan contributed to this report.