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Car use is completely left out of this discussion. North/central/east sf have much much lower rates of car ownership and/or car dependency than south and west portions of the city. To have this conversation without also having a goal of protecting and/or improving green, pro-social non-car transport options is so bizarre to me.

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how about we use something like (https://www.safegraph.com/products/places) to figure out a distribution of where people at a given school come from? i thikn it would work pretty well.

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The DAC did ask for this data. I don’t think you attended those meetings or reviewed the video recordings (the most significant discussion was also suspiciously not recorded). They asked and SFUSD did not provide. They also questioned why planning department data was not represented in the data being presented to them. SFUSD told them they couldn’t get that data. People have since written to the planning department and received back letters confirming that yes they do work closely with SFUSD and that they do anticipate enrollment increases. Planning department even said that increasing enrollments at public schools is a major goal of the housing element.

But all that to say - I appreciate the work that went into getting this data out! Thank you!

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I'm glad to be wrong here. My habit is to fast forward through the videos until they are discussing a slide that's of interest so it's entirely possible I missed the request. It's still bizarre that the information was never presented to the DAC.

The problem with Planning is that stuff never actually gets built. The district's previous demographic forecast looked at every building project that was in the works and made detailed assessments of how many public school students each was likely to produce. It ended up being hopelessly optimistic because most of the stuff never got built.

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On whether it makes sense to place schools based on student density, there are at least three density figures you could use:

A) SFUSD students

B) School-age children (or under 18s if that's easier)

C) People (including both adults and children).

The superintendent's argument that density may respond to the map of schools applies to A for sure. And probably also to B (as people might decide to live near schools, even before they know whether they'll send their kids to public school).

But couldn't we use C without that worry? I mean, the number of people living in SF (and each area of SF) is pretty much limited by the housing stock, which the government has decided must not grow. Is there any evidence that the number of people per area changes over time, without any new building?

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The lessons from other districts, that the superintendent referred to, may not apply to San Francisco because we do not have rigid attendance boundaries. In other places, where you live determines where you go to school and the neighborhood school thus affects housing values and where people choose to live. That's just not the case in San Francisco. Some of the most popular schools have city-wide admissions and the popular schools that do have attendance areas are not located in the areas with the highest student density.

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