[munificent]

> What goods and services, exactly?

Good schools.

Many HN readers don't have kids so they don't realize what a profoundly important factor this is when choosing where to live for many people. Once you have kids, their well-being and opportunity in life typically becomes the dominant attribute you're trying to maximize.

Parents would live in an active lava field where it rained urine every afternoon if the schools in the area were top notch.

Schooling is generally expensive. Nothing compares to one-on-one attention from a skilled, experience teacher and that doesn't scale, so to have a better school, you really need to simply have more money to put into hiring more and better teachers. In the US, a lot of school funding comes from local taxes, which means the amount of money schools have varies widely [0].

You could argue that this shouldn't be the case and that schools should be funded more equally out of larger pools. But if you are a parent with some money, it is your logical incentive to want to use that to improve your own child's schooling, so money naturally tends to flow towards schools that have more wealth children.

Many of those local taxes are local property taxes, so often the places that are affordable to live are by the very same process places that don't have great schools.

There's a nasty feedback loop here. You want your kids to go to good schools. The best schools have lots of rich parents. Those parents can afford expensive housing. Thus, most of the places with good schools have expensive housing.

Good government can and does push against this instinct, but it is a difficult, uphill battle.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...

[lotsofpulp]

>Schooling is generally expensive. Nothing compares to one-on-one attention from a skilled, experience teacher and that doesn't scale, so to have a better school, you really need to simply have more money to put into hiring more and better teachers.

Teaching is important, but I would argue that even more important are the goals and resources of the other students, which correlate nicely with wealth/income of their parents, and hence the neighborhood, and hence the school they all attend.

This is all barely noticeable when everyone is not so far apart on the wealth/income ladder, but over the past few decades, as that gets wider and wider, the data gets clearer and clearer about the consequences.

[chrisco255]

There's diminishing returns on quality of K-12 education. There are A school districts everywhere. Between parenting your child right and giving them an above average education, combined with natural talent, they would have no trouble getting into state university (assuming they don't want to do perfectly acceptable blue collar work like plumbing, carpentry, firefighting, etc) I never took AP classes, for example, but make much more than many of my HS peers that did.

[CM30]

Are most good schools in large cities in the US? Because I definitely heard about how different neighbourhoods have different quality schools there based on the income of the people in the area, but I haven't heard anything about whether that correlates to the area's overall population.

It certainly doesn't seem to here in the UK, where quite a few of the top schools are old fashioned 'public schools' located in rural/semi rural areas.