Does your city REALLY want to attract & keep families living in your downtown & urban places? Then your city needs to get real about what it will really take.
These are the 3 KEYS, in THIS ORDER:
1) ensure family-sized homes (2-3 bedrooms)
2) build local daycare, schools & supports
3) design places & streets for kids
3a) Keep those spaces safe looking and feeling.
My former city of #Sacramento did a really great job of having lots of great public spaces, but right now they are filled with tents, needles and excrement. I understand why parents are buying SFH in the suburbs with fenced back yards.
If Sacramento residents are having to live in tents in parks then that also sounds like a housing problem, tbh.
@passenger @BrentToderian Totally a housing problem. While 90% of the counties homeless residents are within the city limits, FHA funding goes to the county where the Board of supervisors which spreads it out according to (housed / voting) population.
@antares @BrentToderian
Ah, that's a terrible situation. My heart goes to you.
Around here the local government is under pressure to make public housing pay its own way. This is obviously a terrible system and has many knockon effects, but the mantra of "cut costs" has been chanted for more than a decade now and neither party is interested in facing up to the idea that it's always been a failed policy. If you don't spend on infrastructure like housing, everything else will suffer, but that's not what centre-Right voters want to hear.