My husband and I are thinking of relocating from D.C. We are considering several Philly neighborhoods: W. Mt Airy, Matayunk and S Philly. We have not seen any of them.
Here's what is important to us:
1. We want to send our kids to public school, including high school (we like what we see of the magnet programs in Philly). We are looking to send our kids to school in a diverse school system and live in a diverse neighborhood. We want the schools to be good enough, but we are not people who will be preparing our child for Harvard from age 2, either.
What are opinoins on the public school system? Are the public schools diverse? If you have kids, do you send them to public school? If not, why?

2. We do want a neighborhood to be relatively safe. We have a baby on the way. We live now in a "transitional" neighborhood in DC which is just fine with us because although there is some minor drug activity there is really no gang activity, and the petty drug dealers don't really bother us. Is S Philly pretty safe? Where are the safest parts?

3. We want a truly diverse neighborhood, as distinguished from transitional or gentrifying, which is not the same thing.

I understand that S. Philly is a traditionally Italian neighborhood which is now seeing some diversity. Would you agree with that statement?

Thanks for your help.

SP Public schools are generally not an good option.

What are you looking to spend on a new house?

The more $$$ the better neighborhood.

-UC

From reading her other posts, she's looking in the 3-400K range.

To answer your question. With that kind of money you can afford to live anywhere in SP more or less. Bella vista, queens village and Grad Hospital are arguably the top neighborhoods. The first two are not diverse at all. They are mostly white with two housing projects sprinkled in. Grad Hospital is a gentrification boom area.

Pennsport and Passyunk square are the neighborhoods to the south of these areas. They are more diverse and less expensive. 300K will buy you one of the nicest houses in Passyunk Sq. There are still a lot of italians here but you will also find a heavy asian, mexican, young white professionals and blacks mixed in. I'd say that other than university city you can't find a better neighborhood if your a foody. Both areas are very safe in my opinion and even safer than many center city neighborhoods with the exception of a sliver running on 5th street from washington to snyder.

Concerning schools, I don't have children but I've done a small amount of research. half of Passyunk Sq is in the center city schools district. This allows residents within the boundry to be considered a secondary catchment to any center city school. I think centercity has the best public schools in the city (I maybe wrong). If your going to send your child to public school you'll want to be in this catchment area.

If your interested there is a forum called passyunk.org that you could ask many of these questions on. Just keep in mind that is is only a few weeks old.

Check out www.centercityschools.org

Get to know the enrollment procedures to get your kids in the best public schools. We have phenomenal public schools that have entrance criteria. You have to know those by heart.

But Philly is more flexible now about letting South Philly kids go to Center City schools with "preference" or the ability to not have to apply as an "outsider."

By doing your school research now completely before buying, you will save time and trouble and will narrow your search on the one criteria (schools) that is the least flexible, IMO.

What's a catchment? We don't have that in DC.

a catchment is an area served by a particular school.

Don't worry, we wouldn't buy anywhere without researching public schools.
We have been impressed by Philly's magnet high schools, most notably Masterman and Central. But just want to make sure that the elementary ones are good too- we are fans of public education.
S. Philly sounds great- but someone talk to me about safety.

i've never not felt safe here in south philly. i will say that my street gets more trafffic than some because there's a bus route on it, so there's more pedestrian traffic here than on a side street, but it depends what you're looking for. the side streets are quiet and quaint and you surely can get more for your money than a lot of places further north.

people seem friendly enough around here. there are still many 'old heads', as my husband calls them - one neighbor, a little old italian lady, made it clear when we first moved in that she was happy we were white. in the next breath she even offered to knit me a baby blanket if my husband and i were to have kids.:o

our next door neighbors are vietnamese, those next to them are young tattooed hipsters who went to art & design school. a few down from them, an older couple who's been here for years, and further down, a mother with her two sons. from what i can tell, there's a mixture of renters and owners. a mixture of all kinds of people.

one thing that i see more of here in south philly than when i lived in center city is the kids hanging out, sometimes late at night. this is logical, of course; there are more established families down here than in the young-professional area i lived in before we bought our place. i'm a crotchety old teacher at i need my beauty sleep; something i had to get used to was the kids hanging out pretty late at night on the street below my window. but to be honest, it isn't all that much and if that's my biggest problem, i need to hurry up and get over myself.

and here you asked about crime and i just sorta talked. i feel safe here; that's all i know... but then again it's a city and anything can happen anywhere and, well, we all know that.

someone had a police department online breakdown of crime in the area for the past several years, but i lost the link. does anyone have that?

Yeah, I mean, I don't need to live in Ft Knox, and we really want to be in the city, and I get the whole city thing- don't wear a walkman and count my money while walking down a dark alley at 3am. Got it. At the same time, I don't want to move into the DMZ with a baby coming. So somewhere in between Ft Knox and DMZ, that's what we are after.
Seriously though, like I said, minor drug activity, kids hanging out etc, not a problem for us. A preponderance of gang activity, that might make us think twice. The whole point for me of living in the city is to be able to walk to stuff- if I'm too afraid to walk that kinda defeats the purpose.
But I like the mix of characters you are describing.
We are also looking at Manayunk, but it seems less diverse and is 7 miles from downtown, which is less appealing to me.

my husband and i plan to start trying for a family within the next year or so. i should have mentioned that we wouldn't have bought somewhere if we felt unsafe walking around with a little one.

oh, and am i a dope? because i totally don't know what dmz is.

manayunk. i went to a private college in central pennsylvania, with lots of rich white kids. sororities and frats galore. sorry to those who live there, because i mean no offense, but i feel like i'm back in college when i go there. it's an adorable town with fun shops, but not a lot of diversity that i've seen. and something that makes me giggle about philly is that manayunk is still considered philly, yet it's 7 miles out.

for selfish reasons i hope you choose sp. my husband and i are happy whenever we see a young family living here.

oh, and the restaurants rock. but someone already said that.