Our stake dissolved one ward a couple of years ago, and our stake’s membership level is steady or slowly declining.

We have not noticed much of a move back into our area. Our ward has about three active young men, and some Sundays none of them are present (and the young men leaders attend their own priesthood quorums). We do, however, have 9 or 10 boys in our scout troop, most of whom belong to other faiths. The other seven family wards in our stake have similar numbers of youth (perhaps slightly more, but not much).

I would like to say to those who’ve expressed concern about a youth program and contemplating a move based on that concern – I do not think small numbers of youth necessarily constitute a poor program.

We’ve seen shifts in our wards here in this stake over the past few years where we’ve had small groups and REALLY small groups. I think our children have been extremely well served by the small size in numerous ways. There is a lot of leadership opportunity and the kids are encouraged to have their friends attend regularly (most of their friends are non-members). This helps normalize the church for their friends and families of those friends. We’ve found this to be a great tool to help people’s perceptions of the church.

In addition, because our kids are forced to seek out non-LDS friends, our children have found amazing non-LDS friends – friends I do not think they probably would have sought out had we lived in one the suburbs bursting at the seams with mormon youth. I honestly can’t think of anything that has been a downside to being one of only a few mormon youth in our area.

I admit though that we still have great school options in this area – we have open enrollment and so it’s easy to find a good school in the area. If that were not the case it might be tougher. However, we do have friends who send their kids to one of the worst inner city schools (but they do have an IB program there) – they think it is a character building experience for their children and 5 of their 8 kids have graduated from that school quite happy with their experience.

We live in an inner-ring suburb that is mostly white and mid to upper class. Our youth programs are decent but I worry that when my kids reach YM/YW age (starting in 5 years or so) that they will not have many folks in the program. Most of the families besides ours are (law and med) students with kids, who inevitably move back out West when their schooling is done.

It was to the point that we seriously considered moving, both intra-city and to another city. In the end we decided to move to another home in our same suburb (and ward)

In somewhat of an ironic twist, about a month or so after we bought that new house, they combined our ward with the struggling downtown branch and split us into 2 wards. So we ended up moving wards anyways :-)

The 2 wards are similar in makeup. They consist mostly of families with students / young kids, and more established families who (along with most of the leadership) live almost exclusively in our suburb. As an example, of the 6 bishopric positions in our new wards, 5 of the brethren live here.

I also hear the previous comments about all the youth going out to BYU. It’s one of my pet peeves – but it’s hard to be the “only” ones staying here I guess.

Anyways, like I said – we decided to stay here and stick it out. In the end, we decided that we couldn’t know what this ward or anywhere else would be like in 5-10 years.

Does anybody know how long ago Oakland still had three or four wards? I think there were at least two wards up until the early ’90s.

When I left Oakland in 1991, there were still three English-speaking congregations there–1st ward, 3rd ward, and 9th branch. The Polynesian wards and Asian branches were still in the Oakland stake then too.

Regrettably, those of us who are super-movers often dodge the waves of change that a stake experiences. We pick the bustling-est ward we can afford, then discard them when, 3-5 years later, we move to another city. My apologies.

I agree with Jennifer in GA. I wish we could get college-age kids to stay east of the Mississippi. When we count up all we’ve got in our ward, there are actually enough to have a really good young singles program–during the summer breaks.

I have read that families these days must make a choice between affordable housing in risky neighborhoods, and mega-expensive housing in safe suburbs. I ask myself, Are neighborhoods risky because children are less supervised? Is this part of the fallout we get from two-income families? Please don’t take this as criticism for mothers working. There’s something really attractive about using our talents in the workplace. But I wonder if we have lost some of the good things from the mom-at-home days.