&gt; where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools<p>This all used to be easily achievable in urban neighborhoods. The elephant in the room people don&#x27;t want to acknowledge is that suburbia has mostly been a way to flee from and exclude social decay. This is why people freak out about public transit to a lot of neighborhoods. The requirement of multiple car ownership in an area is a deliberately constructed mechanism for excluding lower socio-economic people.<p>If you shut down the public school systems and made all schools private with total freedom to deny any student entry, and you empowered a very aggressive police force (lots of stop and frisk, aggressively enforced vagrancy  laws), then you&#x27;d see far more urban gentrification.