Looking for a suburb of Detroit - good place to raise kids, semi-upscale but not snobby

[Geo-Aggie]

Originally Posted by Geo-Aggie

...Or... just decided it's a "crappy suburb" based on your personal interpretation of some half-decade old census numbers and that mountain of preconceived notions you hold strongly to?

Originally Posted by NOLA101

...Actually, yeah. That's exactly how I decided...

Cool, that's all everyone needs to know to judge your opinion on the matter

And I suggest you judge if a town is crappy or not by visiting it. A lot of reality can be lost among cold, hard statistics. They can help guide and give you a sense of feeling of the town's pulse, but you can't seriously claim to understand or accurately pass judgment on a city that you've not visited. This so-called "secret" isn't hidden in quantifiable numbers and metrics, it's the qualitative observations that allows you to define a place a crappy or not.

Unless you have a way to quantifiably assess if a place is crappy or not, you can't just go around rubber stamping places as "crappy suburb" without visiting them. Well, you can (and you do), but nobody will take you seriously. And for the record, most people give me crap about being too much of a "numbers guy" and even I understand that a community is more than its census data.

[Charles Proteus]

Originally Posted by Geo-Aggie

A lot of reality can be lost among cold, hard statistics.

Ignore Nola, he's a bitter New York City guy (lives "the life" in Brooklyn, FWIW) and has no real knowledge of this part of the country, other than seeing his brother live wonderfully in a big house just west of here. He just dumps on stuff he can't have.

[Ummagumma]

Originally Posted by NOLA101

It depends. West Bloomfield has majority-minority schools, and even a majority-black school. The district will probably be majority black within 15 years or so.

So, yeah, WB overall isn't super-diverse, but that's because there are tons of older white people. The school-age population is ultra diverse.

Also "white" in the Census includes Jews, Chaldeans and Lebanese. WB has HUGE populations of all three. Probably the majority of whites in WB are either Jewish or Middle Eastern.

And Sterling Heights is pretty diverse too. A HUGE proportion of the whites in Sterling Heights are Iraqi refugees. There's also a huge Chaldean population, as well as folks from all over the Middle East.

The schools in WB are "schools of choice" and a lot of these minority students are coming from Pontiac.

While this was a good move socially, it really brought the level of education down because these students can't get the necessary help from their parents - who themselves never had a chance to get good education - and are slipping, require much more help from teachers, and this results in an overall worse level of teaching. My friend is married to a WBl school district employee, and she says their biggest mistake was not at least limiting the schools of choice to kindergarten, and allowing kids in who were too far behind. I think they did just that a few years ago, but don't know how this worked out.

AFAIK these are still good schools, though. If you analyze the MEAP scores for the past few years, very few school districts stand out. B'Ham and Bloomfield are not that much better than WB and Novi.

Don't think it will ever become the "New Southfield" unless there's a lot of black professionals willing to buy up all those $700k and up homes, plus the supersized mansions with helicopter pads along Orchard Lake shore. Ever took a drive on Pontiac Trail between Orchard Lake and Halsted ? (Not that there's anything wrong with Southfield either, it's a regular - if predominantly black - middle class neighborhood).

The biggest problem with WB is the lack of any special attractions. Yes it's nice, safe, and very diverse (Chaldeans, Jews, Christian Whites, Indians, blacks, SE Asians) but it's all subdivisions and occasional parks. No downtown, no shopping district, just a residential suburb and some lakes & a few parks. I do love the West Bloomfield trail, even drive there a few times a week to bike after work. It's a good place for a family with kids, but not the best place for a young family who want to have fun.

If I had to choose anywhere in that area I'd go for Northville or B'Ham or RO if I could swing it.