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Sunday 7 September 2008

City Life

Childcare costs soar, house prices plunge, and the rich get sued by Mr Riches

Last week Mayor Gavin Newsom presided over San Francisco’s first legal same-sex marriage. The occasion was apparently quite poignant for Newsom: while officiating at the wedding ceremony of two women, one with advanced breast cancer, Newsom (whose mother died of the disease) was choking back tears, he told the LA Times. Four years ago, Newsom was considered a maverick for allowing same-sex marriages in San Francisco before they were legal in the rest of California. They became legal across California this month, but their long-term status is still in question: in November, the state will vote in a referendum on a state constitutional amendment that would ban them again. Local fashion house Wilkes Bashford is not waiting for the vote, however, but cashing in on the trend. Its windows are home to two gay couples tastefully featured on top of wedding cakes. In the all-male display, one partner wears a $6,000 Brioni tuxedo, the other a $4,000 Belvest tux. In the gender-balancing adjacent window, two women are featured, one in a black Roberto Cavalli skirt tuxedo at $3,655, the other in a $1,900 Catherine Regehr white dress.

Mayor Newsom himself will be tying the knot soon too — though he’s not at risk of having his marriage outlawed by a constitutional amendment. Perhaps his impending nuptials to actress Jennifer Siebel and the hope of offspring are behind another proposal this colourful politician is floating: his plan to give every child born in San Francisco $250 to invest. The city is a notoriously difficult place to raise children. With poor state schools and prohibitively expensive housing, many couples move out of the city once they start a family. According to the SF Gate website the ‘baby bank’ plan will cost the city a mere $1.5 million, and the invested money will become available to the children once they’re 18, as long as they have graduated from high school and are participating in some sort of public service. Newsom may well want to honeymoon in Britain and make inquiries into Gordon Brown’s Child Trust Fund scheme, unveiled in 2003, which sounds remarkably like Newsom’s own plan: it gives parents of children born in the UK a £250 voucher to be invested (plus top-ups) until the child is 18.

It is unclear whether parents of newborn children will be able to invest their progeny’s nest-eggs in Bay Area real estate. This does not currently look like a safe bet, but will perhaps bottom out soon. According to DataQuick Information Systems, the number of Bay Area homes sold in May fell to a 20-year low — a statistic achieved in eight of the past nine months. The median sale price was $517,000, down 21.7 per cent from a year ago. Marin County — a sought-after rural area north of the city and home to the likes of George Lucas and Sean Penn — saw the only price rise, up 5.8 per cent to $899,000, despite having the biggest drop in sales volume at 37 per cent. Young families escaping the city won’t be moving next door to George any time soon.

More articles from: Edie G. Lush | this section

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