Caution: Children
One of the curiosities of living in San Francisco, as I do, is the incredible dearth of children. Anyone with a school age child -- and just about everyone with more than one -- leaves the City. This is not a unique scenario, of course. So-called white flight, where anyone who can afford to leave, does, happens in a lot of places. But usually, it's a lifestyle choice. People seek out the trappings of suburbia -- backyard, cul-de-sac, McMansion, little league -- in the name of raising children in healthy surroundings. In San Francisco, it happens far more reluctantly. In some ways, I can think of no better place to raise children than in an environment of extreme social tolerance and natural beauty. Show me a suburban backyard that compares to easy access to Golden Gate Park, Fort Funston, and Baker Beach; or a little league team that can socialize a child better than a weekly trip to the local Trader Joe's, where happy workers sport dreadlocks, tattoos, and spiked dog collars.

Most of the people who leave San Francisco, it seems, feel the same way I do. And yet they leave anyway, due to the combination of bad public schools and the exhorbinant costs of housing and private education. This is a seemingly irreconcilable problem, thanks to a 30-year-old California statute called Proposition 13, which caps property tax. Think of it as rent control for homeowners. Everyone starts out paying roughly 1.1 percent of their home's value in annual property tax, much of which goes, ostensibly, toward funding public education. But every year, that tax can only increase a few percentage points, no matter how high property values rise. I'm no economist, but this cap seems to have a double-negative effect. First, it causes property values to rise at artificial rates; second, it starves our public schools. When you first see a mortgage broker about buying a house, she'll lay out all your projected costs....mortgage payment, PMI, maintenance, property tax, etc. If the tax were to rise in proportion to the assessment, that'd be a whole separate factor to consider. It's a relatively minor aspect in the scheme of runaway home prices, surely, but lifting the cap would certainly loosen up the market and, I'd think, keep prices in check. Instead, we get situations where the owners of three identical homes can pay drastically different property tax bills. Heather and I pay $7k a year because we bought our home three years ago. The couple across the street that bought a similar home two months ago pays something closer to $11k. Our next door neighbors pay $400. As a result, they're starving public education and, because God knows (wait, my first mention of the Almighty!) they're not going anywhere, contributing to the housing shortage. So, schools get worse and property values go higher. Of course, I'm not one to kick out my neighbors. Let's grandfather the cap at X date, and stagger it so it has a disproportionate effect at the high end. And if the rest of Californians consider Prop 13 untouchable, as they clearly do, then we San Franciscans need to figure out some kind of localized retraction.

What does this have to do with Iceland? Well, not all that much, except that it's pretty refreshing to see the number of kids roaming the streets here: schoolage girls jumping rope happily alongside the lake, towheaded boys hanging by their knees from jungle gyms, and everywhere you look, a teen on a skateboard wearing a wool cap pulled down to his eyes. Granted, there aren't many places for families to flee to. Where are they gonna go, Greenland? But still, no one seems in any rush to leave. Whether or not you're a fan of children, having them around certainly increases vitality. Bonus: Icelandic parents have the good manners to keep their kids out of the bars and restaurants!