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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcher who wrote (9154)	2/22/2003 2:34:02 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Schools are intimately attached to the subject of real estate where I live. Recently a friend had to make the same decision thousands of parents before him have had to make to either stay in his beautiful almost paid for city house and send his child to private school or move to a much more expensive suburb where he felt comfortable sending his kid to public school. He decided to move because he thought that as opposed to paying private school tuition there was at least a chance that he'd get back the increased mortgage payments when he sold the house and retired. Local schools and how parents perceive they are run can make a huge difference in housing value. Here in Baltimore the parents judge the schools using other metrics aside from standardized tests. Like how many students are alive at the end of the year in comparison to the beginning of the year? How frequently is a gun or knife confiscated? How many times is your child beaten up on his or her way home? Do any of the bathrooms have toilet paper or doors on the stalls? How many teachers have been accused of molestation in the preceding year? How many teachers have been attacked by students? etc etc etc The 40k empty derelict houses in the city stand as silent testimony to the condition of the city public schools. BTW test scores are rising I hear from the city school officials. I can tell you, for my friends it'll take a lot more then test scores to get them to send their children to the city schools. It'll take a perception that their children will be safe.