I live in Berkeley. My granddaughter Mena is about to start kindergarten here — at an excellent school. But a lot of people who live in Oakland are now really really jealous because they want their kids to go to an excellent school in Berkeley too. So why live in Oakland and risk going to a crappy school? Why not just move to Berkeley? Because the property values in Berkeley are some of the highest in America and, get over it, sometimes people just can’t afford to live here unless they gots big bucks.
Berkeley is no longer the sweet little hippie town out to save the world that it used to be http://berkeley.patch.com/groups/local-connections/p/berkeley-not-in-top-7-us-hippie-towns. Now Berkeley appears to be a yuppie’s dream come true.
How ironic — that those children of hippies who were raised here, and then rebelled, became yuppies and moved to the suburbs to get away from Berzerkeley? They would never be able to afford to buy a house here now. Heck, I couldn’t even afford to live here myself if I hadn’t lived in the same place for 33 years.
But back to my hypothesis: That people move to cities and towns where the schools are good — simply because the schools ARE good.
So which comes first? The chicken or the egg? Do property values go up because the schools are good in any particular city — or do the schools become good because property values have already gone up?
I’d like to suggest a good way to find out for sure. Let’s pull all of our myriad troops out of Europe and Asia and Africa and North and South America (and most likely Australia and Antarctica too) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35977.htm and spend all those wasted trillions of dollars that we’ll then save on giving just one low-rent city in America the best schools in the entire world instead!
Let’s take Detroit for example.
If Detroit was guaranteed beyond any doubt to have the very best school system in all of the world, would YOU move there? I bet that you would. Would Mena and our family move there too? I bet you anything that we would be sorely tempted (except for the snow of course — I hate snow) http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18133-when-schools-become-dead-zones-of-the-imagination-a-critical-pedagogy-manifesto
PS: And for all you sparkling new kindergarteners throughout the world this September: Happy first day of school! And I hope that you also have the best schools and teachers in the world as well — and that they teach you love and kindness and how to think for yourselves. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/23/the-banality-of-racism-in-israel-s-most-liberal-city.html.
PPS: Berkeley Camp Tuolumne, one of the most beautiful places in the entire world, just burned to the ground in the Yosemite Rim fire. Let’s take the money we save by not invading Syria and use it to bring Camp Tuolumne back to life again. Who cares about Syria besides oil barons? I care deeply and profoundly about my lost Camp Tuolumne paradise.
PPS: Berkeley Camp Tuolumne, one of the most beautiful places in the entire world, just burned to the ground in the Yosemite Rim fire. Let’s take the money we saved by not invading Syria and use it to bring Camp Tuolumne back to life again. Who cares about Syria besides oil barons? I care deeply and profoundly about my lost Camp Tuolumne paradise.
And here’s yet another example of how far from reality America’s corporate-owned government is now: Fukushima, apparently, is about to release enough radioactive waste to contaminate the entire planet — yet what is our “government” doing about this insane catastrophe? Getting ready to bomb Syria of course. A nuclear nightmare world-wide is brewing and corporate-owned America is claiming to worry about some fake-propaganda “chemical weapons” scam in Syria instead? That’s insane. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/08/130821-fukushima-latest-leak-how-is-it-different/
A deadly radiation tsunami is heading straight toward Berkeley — yet our corporate-owned government is only busy “fixing the information” and “wagging the dog” in the Middle East? It’s March 2003 deja vu all over again, only even more stupid.
