Posted by Helen H June 30, 2007 in Asides
Does anyone know of a good house/apartment rental resource that allows one to search for housing opportunities by elementary school?
21 Responses to “Shameless blegging”
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Your best bet is probably to contact an apartment locator service. I hate to say that, because I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with them, but I doubt there are any online resources that allow you to search by elementary school.
I’ve never had to worry about it myself but most allow you to search by zip and will identify if an elementary school is in the neighborhood. I have used over the years:
move.com
apartmentguide.com
citysearch.com
homerentals.net
Usually, it’s just a matter of drilling down, checking out the associated maps and what have you. A lot of brute force in other words.
If you know what elementary school you want, find out its zipcode. You can use thaqt to find rentals. From the school district, find out its attendance area, which may be different than the zipcode. Try craigs list.
Relator-assisted rentals are very aware of school area. Cost more, however.
Locally I know the search results mention school districts but you can’t search by school. In other words, good luck to ya.
Children should be boiled up right good and eaten.
VHEMT
If there isn’t (and I think there isn’t) there should be.
That said, I’ve had good experiences with rental agencies. It depends on where you are, I guess - in Chicago, it won’t cost you a dime. I hear that’s not the case elsewhere.
Otherwise, I’d say a combination of google maps and a Saturday or two spent scoping out neighborhoods is your best bet.
Personally? I’d whip out ArcGIS and load up the tiger line data for the municipality (I thin they may actually also have a census file for Oregon with school districts - either through the Census 2000 or through an Oregon state GIS.
Then, I’d call the school district and ask for boundaries of the schools. Then I’d construct a polygon for the district and clip it out of the tiger line layer and export the clip as a data base table of street segments, their names and street numbers.
Then I’d map all addresses of interesting leads via a point file in excel (geocoded to the tiger line file).
So this probably not the right place to start a discussion of neighborhood schools and the recent Supreme Court decision in the Seattle and Louisville cases.
So I won’t.
Call me crazy (or, as is perfectly possible, underinformed), but the recent court decision, as bad as it (quite obviously) was, doesn’t have anything to do with the drawing of school boundaries - in fact Justice Kennedy specifically said that school boundaries was an acceptable method of ensuring school diversity.
We’re not looking to transfer - the (limit on which is the) particular remedy invalidated by the Supreme Assholes - we’re looking to move into a new neighborhood, one which happens to be much more ethnically diverse than the one we live in now.
Just saying.
Just saying.
Agree. My only relevant point for you (if I even had one) was that depending on the school assignment process in that district, being within a school’s “boundaries” does not necessarily mean attendance at that school (though that more often kicks in at the middle & high school levels).
Basically, I had just come from reading several blog discussions where the case had reawakened some back and forth on neighborhood schools in general, read your request that was tangentially related, had a thought - and then my Commenting Tourette’s kicked in.
Where exactly are you searching? It might be easier to ask people living there for some specific help with school attendance boundaries and school quality gossip.
If you look at the realtor.com multiple listing service, many homes for sale list the school district to which children would be assigned; if you can’t find an apartment locator that would help, just pick out a home for sale that’s close by, and you’ll get the right information.
huh. Most people who are willing to move to get their kid into a particular school do so as an exercise of privilege. which I assumed was your motive until I saw your comment about “more “diversity”". So now I’m puzzling over, does such a move for different reasons have the same implications? that is, if it’s messed up to do to get your kid into a “BETTER” school, which almosy always means more white, more economic privileges, is it ok to do for different reasons? And what will you do if the schools you find that are more “diverse” (a term which is meaningless without context) turns out to be problematic in other ways? Interesting.
(for clarity’s sake, I’m not challenging you; generally i trust where you’re coming from. I’m just interested in more of the thought process going on, especially as the mom of a soon to e kindergartener)
Check the school district’s website, which may explain what the school boundaries are for each elementary school.
And what will you do if the schools you find that are more “diverse� (a term which is meaningless without context) turns out to be problematic in other ways?
It is amazing how strongly the percentage of white students in a school correlates with how much resources are available to that school.
In Portland, I would tend to disagree with that assertion in blanket form. The particular school district we live in now is one we moved into temporarily from the very beginning, and is so overwhelmingly white that the “African-American” and “Multi-race” sections of the achievement test scores are starred for privacy purposes (i.e., the sample sizes are so low that reporting the numbers would “give it away.”)
Moreover, I have not (so far) found that rental prices correspond with school quality; we are actually looking at paying 75% the rent in the “exceptional” school area of what we’re paying now in the “good to strong” area; it’d be economic privilege to stay here, even if we wanted to.
Not saying that Portland has NONE of the “white==economic privilege” dynamic. Obviously.
getting the answer you want on line in a straight forward fashion may not be easy.
But some countys have amazing resources.
google:
first link is http://www.co.tompkins.ny.us/gis/
click on taxmaps to go to: http://www.co.tompkins.ny.us/gis/maps/property.html
then follow the “political” link to http://www.co.tompkins.ny.us/gis/maps/political.html
click on “school districts” http://www.co.tompkins.ny.us/gis/maps/pdfs/School_Map_24_36.pdf
take for ever for the down load.
read off the street names in districts you want, and then use that data to make very focused real estate searches.
that google parameter string, unquoted, should have been
tompkins county NY gis
ahhh, one of those days when I wish I had my own copy of ArcMAP- load the file with the county map, load the file with the school districts, overlay them, problem solved.
this, of course, is contengent on both of these files existing and being availible.
When I made my earlier comment, it had occurred to me that this thread might be a set-up of some sort, considering Amanda’s thread One step forward . . . . Still, I answered it straight.
Now I find you live in Portland (Maine?), where the black population is very small, so you looking for a residence by school district can’t reasonably have any racial component, but is simply one in which you are trying to do the best you can for Augustlet.
Still, I wonder if others might guess that you aren’t the only parent who goes “district shopping” not to avoid minorities, but to find the best school for your children.
By the way, if it is Portland, Maine, I used to live on Forest Street — when I was in the third grade. My mother was born in Portland, and her family lived in Old Orchard beach for a while.