urbanMSP

I work next to the West Bank station, go to downtown Saint Paul after work twice a week, and head home (near Loring Park). I don't think the trip has once taken less than 150 minutes using the Green Line. I can save myself 90 minutes by busing home, getting my car, and driving to Saint Paul and back...

WHS, you posted a link and said suburban schools are demonstrably superior to city schools. Now that you've walked back to say that high-poverty schools perform worse than low-poverty schools, I can certainly agree. You could have just said that from the start, but you didn't and so we pushed back....

You have stated several times without any caveats that suburbans schools are far superior to central city schools. ...which they are. This is all derived from a discussion of affordable housing placement, and root causes notwithstanding, for the purposes of that discussion, the relevant fact is tha...

I mean, fair enough -- I guess I thought it was obvious I wasn't saying that suburban schools are magically and inexplicably superior regardless of their actual characteristics. Suburban schools ARE demonstrably superior -- because of those characteristics.

The actual problem is not the schools, it's poverty. If you can find a suburban school district and central city school district with similar levels of RFP students and demonstrate how the suburban school does better, I would like to see that. I get that certain individuals have their career invest...

Since everyone seems to think I'm arguing that suburban schools have some sort of inherent intangible quality that renders them more effective, perhaps as a result of their proximity to white picket fences, let me spell out what I'm saying here in very simple terms: -When a school is 10% poor kids, ...

When I compared a central city school with RFP student percentages similar to suburban schools, I could see nothing that would indicate that suburban schools did any better. You're literally making my point for me: concentrations of poverty reduce performance, and central city schools suck because ...

There are exceptions -- there are hundreds and hundreds of schools, so of course you're going to get outliers -- but finding a handful of high-performing Minneapolis schools or low-performing suburban schools does nothing to reduce the wide gaps in the aggregated numbers. It's distracting at best an...

Poor kids do better in suburban schools than poor kids in urban schools. So do special ed kids, minority kids, ESL kids, and any other cohort you can think of. This can easily be confirmed by examining the data link in my post above.

I hated my suburban high school too, but you know what? I graduated and went to college. And I'm not dumb enough to think it was some sort of inherent brilliance or drive to succeed that pushed me through. I was in an environment where these things were expected of me.

It's bizarre that I keep having to point this out, but it's incredibly easy to find comparative information about the performance of city and suburban schools, and the data leaves no question about which is superior: http://rc.education.state.mn.us/ But by all means, let's base our analysis of subur...

I don't have budget figures, but Minnetonka is 10.5% special ed, 1.6% ESL, and 6.9% free/reduced lunch. Minneapolis is 18.2% special ed, 24.6% ESL, and 64.8% free/reduced lunch. So there's a pretty big gap between the systems. With that said, even among special populations, there's absolutely no dou...

People with children live in the suburbs for usually the same common reason: better schools. I get what you're saying and I do think that schools motivate a lot of where families choose to live but I think this is another case of people being really uninformed about city schools and schooling in ge...

I'm not sure what kind of jobs you're referring to, but Met Council data shows Minneapolis has a higher ratio of low-income jobs (i.e., less than $41,000/year) to low-income workers than nearly any other community in the Metro, save Eden Prairie. http://www.metrocouncil.org/getattachment/1cd40188-d...

The data in the Star Tribune article was, if anything, presented in an unclear (if not misleading) way. According to the latest data from DEED (which is the authority on the matter...they report the data that is the basis of BLS estimates), Minneapolis and St. Paul contain about 29.5% of all metro ...

Snelbian, you sound quite silly. Most peoples' decisions about where and how to live are driven by circumstantial factors involving their personal needs and resources. "Cities or suburbs?" isn't a test of character.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the burbs, but a few factors distort residential preferences in their favor. First, implicit subsidies (through infrastructure spending and the like) and a failure to price in the environmental externalities related to sprawl artificially lowers the cost of subu...

If the people who could afford to build the suburbs are no longer going to be able or willing to pay for them in the future, how do we expect affordable housing capital to be a wise investment in the same place? If some suburban areas are going to be for salvage value only, the market will actually...

One could even say that they deploy their resources much more wisely and efficiently than the suburbs. ... The suburbs use more land and resources to achieve the same end as the cities. Going forward planning for land use that supports more than just single occupancy automobiles should be a goal fo...

I pretty strongly disagree that we should heap the poor into distressed neighborhoods just because it might somehow abstractly benefit the City of Minneapolis vis a vis the suburbs. Is there a better solution for distressed neighborhoods than access to jobs? I'm not looking for solutions for neighb...