SJ kids face fewer inequities, have chart-topping opportunities for success

Despite protestations of vast systemic unfairness from the local progressive left, guess what? National report says SJ kids have best chances of making money and being healthy. Erica Hellerstein reports in the San Jose Mercury.

Children who grow up in the San Jose area are better off than those raised in almost any other metro region in the country, according to a new report measuring which U.S. neighborhoods give children the best chance of achieving lasting economic success and good health.

Nationally, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro ranked second among the top 10 metropolitan areas nationwide, just behind Madison, Wisconsin. The San Francisco-Hayward-Oakland area ranked 9th in the study conducted by Brandeis University.

To define childhood opportunity, the study looked at a host of factors, including neighborhood poverty, employment, housing vacancy rates, air quality levels, and access to healthy food, schools and parks.

In San Jose, the data indicated that the difference in conditions in very low and very high opportunity neighborhoods is less extreme than many other metro areas, suggesting a child raised amid economic insecurity in San Jose may fare much better than one raised in a different part of the state. 

“On average, you would prefer to be a poor child in the Bay Area than a poor child than in Los Angeles or the Central Valley,” says Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, director of Brandeis’ Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy and co-author of the report. “Being low-income in San Jose might carry better child outcomes than in Los Angeles.”

The findings underscore a unique duality in the Bay Area: despite being home to a significant housing affordability crisis and the highest level of income inequality in California, the region seems to distribute resources and opportunity for children more evenly than other places in the state.

Read the whole thing here.

This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California

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