Despite the occasional dalliances with meggings, Gothamist's Jake Dobkin is my raised-in-the-city-and-now-raising-kids-in-the-city hero. In today's installment of Ask A Native New Yorker, Jake gives invaluable advice over whether to move to the suburbs now that you have a kid. And since you asked, the answer, of course, is yes, definitely:
Have you noticed that whenever a white kid gets murdered in LES, like nine times out of ten he's from Westchester? That could be because he never got the healthy fear that comes from repeatedly getting jacked on the train when he was just trying to get to Freshman biology lab.I endorse every single word here, except maybe the smoking dust in middle school part.But I digress, and anyway, by the time your kid is old enough to drive, everything will probably be in cyberspace or delivered via Amazon Prime, and he won't ever have to leave Hastings-on-Hudson or No-Poors-on-the-Sound or wherever it is you're moving. At any rate, you can stop reading here.
Now that this tourist is gone, I'd like to get real with the rest of you: people who can't imagine leaving and never will, but who, by choice or by accident, have found themselves with child. Here are my top five survival tips for middle income families, acquired over the last few years of raising kids on an average professional salary:
1) One bedrooms are much, much cheaper than two or three bedrooms. Use this to your advantage!
Ask A Native New Yorker: Now That I'm A Parent Should I Move To The Suburbs? [gothamist]
