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Kids not moving to Boston
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Other things are odder
According to the census estimates we've only added about 3500 units of housing. How do you increase housing count by 3500 and population by 35,000? And of those units - a good chunk are lux downtown condos - probably not a lot of kids or often even full time residents moving in there. Other units may be studios and one bedrooms - not a lot of room for kids in there. Add in the fact that our population is aging with fewer school age kids and voila - no additional kids.
Personally I think the census will be very interesting - highly dubious we are going to be at the 630k city hall claims and we may find that we've only grown by a few thousand - if that. One thing the city has pushed is counting college students (a real problem for the census because college kids often self report and then their parents claim them as living at home - the bureau tries to correct this statistically - but not easy). One bright note - a lot of talented people are unfortunately out of work but will be employed to tally the census next year - as a result the quality of the work is expected to be extremely high.
Housing Shortage
800,000 people used to inhabit this city. We didn't tear down 200,000 units of housing over the past 40 years. In fact, we built more. There is no housing shortage.
You are leaving out an important fact
Fewer people live in each house now. Currently we stand at 2.5 per household in Boston.
Used to be a lot higher - couldn't find the stats but would guess 3.5-4.0 when Boston's population peaked around 1950.
For Mass as a whole the population in 1950 was 3.64 - now it is 2.60.
Using those numbers as a guide, we could house 800k people in 230,000 homes (including a 5% vacancy rate). Now we have 255,000 homes for 600k people. In 60 years we have built perhaps 30,000 or so incremental housing units or about 500 per year - which probably explains in part why housing costs are so high.
Bit of a chicken and egg - you need jobs for people to stay, but people won't stay if there isn't housing they can afford by working in those jobs. In general I don't think there is a debate that the high cost of housing around here hurts our ability to attract and retain younger workers - a problem that could be remedied in part by building more moderately priced housing.
For every new kid coming to the city...
There's a family with a kid who was there the year before and chose to move out of the city because of our retarded busing/lottery/exam/whatever school system.
If this is surprising, you're not paying attention
Just about every policy undertaken by the state and city in the last ten years or so discourages families from living here. On top of that, it's too damned expensive to raise kids here.
Census Stats for Boston
I was just looking at the Census Statistics for work (and for co-workers reading this, I am writing this at lunch). The data for under 18s is fascinating.
I looked at the 0-4 population and the 5-17 population (amongst other things.)
Between 2008 and 2008, the 0-4 population grew by about 7,000 while the 5-17 population dropped by the same amount. Could this be a new baby boom? However, between 1990 and 2000, the 5-17 population grew by about 11,000 while the 0-4 population dropped about 4,500. What does this mean- both groups have larger populations today compared with 1990. Considering that the BPS had a worse reputation in 1990 compared with now, I don't think blaming the schools wholly is correct.
What does this all mean? Well, statistics themselves are pretty neutral, but I don't see much growth in the primary and secondary education field in the city itself.