What else do these cities have in common?

Jim Miller discusses this article, about pleasant and trendy urban neighborhoods, that despite their amenities, have fewer and fewer children...

...What else do these cities have in common? With the possible exception of Miami, all of them have been governed by Democrats and often fairly leftist Democrats at that. Is it possible that leftist policies drove out families with children? I think that's not only possible, but likely. For example, San Francisco has been tolerant, even encouraging, toward its large homeless population. That parents see such people as threats to their children is no secret — at least to those who do not work for the New York Times.

Seattle offers an even more dramatic example. Although the city had never had segregated schools, it instituted busing for racial balance and continued it for years and years. Busing is even more difficult in Seattle, for reasons of geography, than it is in most cities, as I explained in this post. As soon as it was started, families with children began leaving the cities in droves. That was not secret, but it was something that could not be discussed publicly in polite Democratic circles, except to deplore it. Egan quotes Charles Royer, who tried to attract kids back to Seattle in the early 1980s, at length, but neither Egan nor Royer even mention busing...

As San Franciscans with children, we have no difficulty understanding what's going on. Public schools are the biggest issue. Standards are low, crime is too common, and the bureaucracy is massive and remote. And of course, busing. What do parents in a nice neighborhood want MOST? To send their kids to the neighborhood school! Close by, with other kids from the neighborhood..

And that's precisely what leftists HATE. It's called choice. It's called working hard so you can move into a nice neighborhood so your kids don't have to go to school with the scaly creatures that live in your crummy old neighborhood. And what leftists like is BULLYING. They give it other names, but it's always about experts in government pushing people around to get some desired result. And never allowing them to vote on what exactly it is that's desirable. Those things always "emerge," and are "sensed" by those who are "enlightened" and "sensitive," sort of like how the Supreme Court senses with delicate antennae that the consensus has changed on some issue, and then adjusts the Constitution without bothering to trouble the little people in the legislatures who don't understand what they need.