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San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

theguardian.com

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Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#131

Post by kalleboo »

UncleMeat wrote: post #113
kalleboo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that in developed countries, people are having kids older and older, so the grandparents are accordingly also older and more tired. That combined with multi-generational households being all but gone so now you're picking up and leaving off and all the kind of cooking and general housekeeping is also doubled.

If your parents had you at 25 and you have kids at 25 then your parents are 50 when you have a kid. Nowhere close to retirement age. People who are still working can't watch the kids five days a week.

FWIW the average age of first-time mothers in San Francisco is 33.6. It seems that still speaks against my theory. Maybe it's more that previous generations of women were less likely to have full-time employment at all?

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#132

Post by bryanrasmussen »

amirhirsch wrote: post #118
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first read it I thought wait, 3% of 6 is 0.18, but then I realized no I'm a dork because 6 is the age of the kid, whereas the number 100 is written as a word hundred, hence I decided to write "HN poster responds:" with quotes around my first non-coffee aided thought because I thought it was funny. I guess I should have just made that full statement, but I do have a tendency to rather oblique communication stra…

I gave your reply the most generous interpretation and read it in the ironic way as you point out in the edit

thanks!

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#133

Post by foogazi »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #55

In a lot of 3rd world and less well off countries, childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers), I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west. Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.

> childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers)

or the aunts, or siblings (mostly sisters), or neighbors (mostly women)

You get the idea

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#134

Post by foogazi »

johanvts wrote: post #117
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother's two boys both had kids. One of them, his wife, was going to go back to work after giving birth but had horrible feelings and cried when she took the baby to daycare after maternity leave. She quit and now stays home taking care of her baby. The other boy, his wife, also cried and was torn between going back to a job she loved but felt incredibly guilty about leaving her newborn to daycare. She was fortun…

Sure, it does happen but it’s not the normal model. Every mother feels horrible and cries when they institutionalize their kids, western society is based on most people doing this regardless. It is not scalable to educate women for 20 years just to have them become stay at home moms, just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens etc.

> just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens

But they eat the chickens and kill the male chicks

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#135

Post by senordevnyc »

ajay-b wrote: post #124

San Francisco’s measure will make childcare free for a family of four making less than $230,000 a year, or 150% of the area median income, and offer a 50% subsidy to families earning less than $310,000 a year, or 200% of the area median income. Previously, free childcare was available to families earning less than 110% of the area median income. But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,0…

This should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.

Uh, it is for them. Why should it be only for them?

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#136

Post by gundmc »

mapotofu wrote: post #121
socalgal2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"by American standards" is doing a lot of lifting. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give SF about a 4 compared to cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Seoul, Singapore, ...

I don’t understand the boosters saying BART and Caltrain are good systems. When I lived there, and part of the reason I left, those systems were frequently delayed, full of drug addicts, and they lacked comprehensive service throughout SF, requiring dependence on Muni, which is worse than the other 2. I don’t think those who say this is a great system have been exposed to how other places in the world handle these th…

I've never experienced any of these on Caltrain in the last ~10 years, for what it's worth.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#137

Post by mritterhoff »

dragonwriter wrote: post #75
veunes wrote: post #68

Subsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place

Housing is expensive because of lack of housing supply and because of high housing demand because of both soft (non-finance-driven) desirability conditions and a sufficient concentration of very-high-income, price insensitive buyers on prices. Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices. Increasing housing supply can…

Housing is expensive because homeowners have weaponized zoning laws to make it illegal to build housing the city needs.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#138

Post by teaearlgraycold »

mapotofu wrote: post #121
socalgal2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"by American standards" is doing a lot of lifting. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give SF about a 4 compared to cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Seoul, Singapore, ...

I don’t understand the boosters saying BART and Caltrain are good systems. When I lived there, and part of the reason I left, those systems were frequently delayed, full of drug addicts, and they lacked comprehensive service throughout SF, requiring dependence on Muni, which is worse than the other 2. I don’t think those who say this is a great system have been exposed to how other places in the world handle these th…

1. I live and work around BART stations so it works well for me 2. I just ignore the drug addicts 3. The delays are there but it all works well enough to be very useful

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#139

Post by teaearlgraycold »

lazide wrote: post #99
jnathsf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caltrain is no slouch - punctual, clean, safe, really good wifi, electric.

It also doesn’t get you around the city (and isn’t near any significant number of schools). It is good for getting in and out, assuming you already have a way of getting to the Caltrain station which isn’t exactly in the center of the city.

Eventually Caltrain will go to Salesforce tower

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#140

Post by tzs »

Kind of OT, but I heard an interesting thing on a radio program talking about childcare: the US almost got free universal child care in the early 1970s via the Comprehensive Child Development Act.

At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it.

There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party.

But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against.

Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.

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