Downtown Child Care?

Seeing this blog about a new child care center opening up downtown got me thinking.  The city may finally be starting to regain population, depending on whom you ask (but at least you can ask!)  But I wonder how the 18-and-under population as been trending.  I could not find any demographic trends for just children after some quick searching.  My feeling is that the trend has been going down.  One obvious sign is the growing list of vacant CPS buildings.

My feeling is that most of the people moving into the city are childless.  When they become not childless, they move outside the city limits.  Looking forward to starting my own family, the thoughts about raising a child in either the CBD or OTR that enter my mind are interesting.

Will there be same-aged kids on our street to play with?  Where will our kid go to school?  When I think about how I grew up in a subdivision, surrounded by kids my age, and spending hours of summertime wandering around in the woods, it takes a giant mental leap to imagine how it would be in the city.  I know that people are doing it (cf. CityKin).  Would we be capable of doing the same?

Would I be comfortable with sending our kid to a CPS elementary school, which will be mostly African-American (it's hard to be a minority in any situation), and likely underperforming on state standards.  There are only three elementary/middle schools in CPS with the highest state rating that I'm aware of, and there is only one high school.   That's a small basket to put all your eggs in, if you care about such things.

So another child care center opening up downtown encourages me.  Now, it probably has been long overdue just because of all the workers downtown.  But now, if you live downtown, and work downtown, and have a family downtown, you don't have to leave downtown before work just to take your child to daycare.