Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at why some apartment buildings are replacing amenity spaces like common rooms with child care centers.
There’s an emerging alliance between real estate, one of New York City’s most powerful industries, and child care, one of its most beleaguered sectors. Why? There’s a shortage of preschool programs in New York City, and real estate developers have discovered that providing day care in their buildings can be good for business. I asked Eliza Shapiro, who covers the city’s affordability crisis, to talk about what brought such unlikely allies together. You wrote that there are mutual benefits from having David and Goliath on the same team. How so? For developers, incorporating child care into their projects achieves a few goals at once. First, there’s the big-picture problem that the lack of affordable, accessible child care is looking really bad for the health of the city’s economy. That’s obviously a problem for real estate, one of the city’s biggest industries. So where developers can help chip away at the problem, the idea is that it will ultimately make the city stronger and therefore bolster their business. There’s also the fact that child care is pretty popular, so if you have a community that is skeptical of a new building coming to the neighborhood, adding a preschool can really help win support. What about the child care operators? The calculus for them is even simpler: They really need space. Real estate developers have lots of it. The developers can offer them help building out playrooms and office space for staff, and perhaps offer rent deals until they get to full enrollment. The top official of the Day Care Council of New York even hopes that building owners will consider subsidizing the salaries of child care employees in their buildings. Many such workers make just over the minimum wage, and people are leaving the child care industry in droves. The Day Care Council’s argument is that the real estate industry can create all the space it wants, but if there’s no work force, it’s pointless. Will having preschools close by counter the population drain? Will putting preschools in apartment buildings provide as many places for kids as the city needs or stabilize the soaring cost of child care? There is no way that developers adding a few child care spaces here and there can solve the child care crisis or stabilize costs. But if a lot of developers start catching on to this trend, it could make a dent. I think the broader issue here is that the private sector’s getting involved in what is seen as a public sector problem is pretty significant. I think it may plant the seeds for more developers to get in on the game, which could in turn inspire philanthropy to get involved, and then perhaps bring in finance and other big city power players. It’s always worth paying attention when the industries that have the most money and power start worrying about the industries that have the least. Can adding child care in fancy new buildings really win over neighborhood opponents? I think it can, in some cases. For example, there was a big controversy in Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn, about whether a developer should be allowed to build new apartment towers in a largely low-rise community. At the last minute, local elected officials and the developer struck a deal to include a child care facility on the ground floor. There’s little doubt in my mind that helped soften the blow of the fact that these new buildings were moving ahead. It’s something that local officials can credibly claim as a win and then help sell to their constituents. The real estate industry and a powerful union agree on something here. What, and why? You don’t often see the Real Estate Board of New York, the real estate industry’s lobbying group, and District Council 37, a union with lots of low-paid child care employees as members, in the same sentence. But their teaming up to push local politicians to help streamline the creation of new child care centers shows just how much both sides can really benefit when child care and real estate join forces. Both groups have real power with local elected officials in their own right, and I’ll be watching to see what their campaign can accomplish. What about existing buildings? You wrote about a developer who spent $100,000 to convert the common space in his new apartment house into a preschool. Does that mean that common rooms and amenity spaces buildings haven’t caught on with tenants? This issue is really just emerging now in existing buildings. I found a developer who converted existing common space in one of his rental buildings into a preschool. He did that because no one was really using the fancy lounge space he’d included when he built the building. And as I talked to developers and people in the real estate industry, many of them told me that they really see amenity spaces being underused in existing condo buildings. So we may well see other developers thinking about converting spaces that just aren’t being used into amenities that can help the whole neighborhood, including preschools and child care facilities. WEATHER Expect a partly sunny day with a high temperature in the low 60s. The evening will feature showers and potentially a thunderstorm, with a drop to about 50. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Suspended for Passover. The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. METROPOLITAN DIARY Loose vegetables
Dear Diary: I was in New York City for a summer program at NewYork-Presbyterian. I would often go downtown after classes ended for a late lunch in Chinatown and to buy some groceries before taking the Q and the 1 back to my Upper West Side apartment. One sweltering July day when I had been extra-ambitious in my grocery shopping, I waited 45 minutes for a 1 train and then had to squeeze into a completely packed car. As the train left Times Square, I struggled to balance myself while unsuccessfully corralling my grocery bags around my feet. By the time we left Columbus Circle, my tomatoes had rolled over several pairs of feet, my lettuce was under someone’s seat and I was more frustrated than I had been in a long time. A gentle tap on my arm pulled me out of my self-pity. It was a young mother sitting nearby. She called her toddler on to her lap and then nodded at the newly empty stroller in front of her. From there, we traveled uptown in companionable silence as her stroller overflowed with a watermelon, two cantaloupes and three bags of vegetables. Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
|
