People with children should ignore your advice. 1/4 mile from where I live is another city with horrible schools. People living there will need to send their children to private schools, at about $20k/yr. Where I live, the public schools are top notch. I know several families that moved here and bought a house (there is very little rental available, and it's expensive). A family with 4 children will save about $80k/yr living here. That changes the equation quite a lot.
People with children in any state of the United States that does not yet have public school open enrollment might consider asking their legislators to enact public school open enrollment, which works well in Minnesota, Iowa, and perhaps other states. Public school open enrollment, which has been going on in Minnesota for more than twenty years, gradually encourages public school districts (which are usually local oligopolies who don't have to listen to clients very much) to compete on the basis of quality and flexibility of their programs to gain student enrollment. Public school open enrollment also decouples decisions about where to live from decisions about where to enroll children in school, which is good public policy on several grounds.
After edit: In relation to comments in other subthreads here, about the cost of paying a mortgage versus the cost of paying rent, the odd thing about the bubble economy in this town is that mortgage payments got to be MUCH higher, even at low interest rates, than prevailing rents for the same or very similar properties. It has been financially advantageous for a long while in this market to rent rather than buy, and perhaps still is for several years to come. The whole issue is fraught with public policy implications and sometimes very difficult economic assumptions.
I never said anything like that. I said in the place I live, there are few rentals available, so the decision is to buy in my town or live (rent/own) in the other town (with bad schools). My point was, the savings on private schools makes the "should I buy?" question much easier to decide.
