General News
Manhattan BP: School construction fails to keep up with home construction
Apr 24, 2008 3:32 PM
UFT President Randi Weingarten speaks at the press conference called by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (right).
Mammoth high rises are going up all over the city, and nowhere so numerous as in Manhattan. With middle-class families choosing to stay in the city, that new housing is a necessity. But where are the new schools to complement the new housing?
“Crowded Out,” a new report by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, lays out the stark disparity between Manhattan’s building boom and the school construction bust.
The report cites census data showing a 32 percent growth in the number of children under the age of 5 living in Manhattan since 2000, but a negligible increase in school seats in four of the borough’s 12 community planning districts. The areas impacted the most are lower Manhattan, the Upper East Side, Greenwich Village and Soho, and the Midtown/Flatiron/Madison Square region.
Had school construction kept pace with housing starts, the city should have added from 1,639 to 2,323 new elementary and middle school seats to these neighborhoods. Instead, just 143 were added, and in only one area: lower Manhattan.
Ironically, developers of high rises are required to provide parking. No such requirement attaches to school construction.
At a press briefing to unveil the report, attended by UFT President Randi Weingarten, City Comptroller William Thompson Jr., Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Councilman Dan Garodnick and Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, Stringer blasted the Department of Education for not planning for growth.
He called for the city to plan ahead, tying new schools to new construction, as well as planning at the neighborhood level, not just in terms of seats allocated to the already large school districts. He also called for a more aggressive five-year capital plan for fiscal years 2010-2014, “with enough seats to relieve existing overcrowding, plan for future growth and reduce class size.”
Weingarten congratulated Stringer “for such an easily readable report, which makes crystal clear what we’ve all been hearing and seeing for years. And if we can see a building boom, why can’t the DOE and the School Construction Authority?”
Thompson, whose office is working on a citywide study comparing new housing and school capacity, said more students without more schools “means uneven and unfair levels of education.” He also criticized “poor planning and a lack of coordination between the DOE, the SCA and the other mayoral agencies.”
Rep. Maloney, whose East Side district had a huge increase in high-rise housing in the last decade, said, “Our schools are at a point where the quality of education is at risk. Some are serving lunch at 9 a.m. The DOE can no longer stick its head in the sand and hope the problem goes away.”
Haimson called the DOE approach “nonplanning.”
Garodnick offered the positive example of a local community board initiative in his East Side district that he said was a model for solving the housing-school seats mismatch. In the former Con Edison property, just south of the United Nations, six new residential high rises are going up. Thanks to community pressure on the builder, he said, “the site will also feature a 600-student K-5 school.”
While Stringer later acknowledged that part of the problem with school start-ups in Manhattan is the soaring cost of acquiring land — one reason the DOE rejects some sites as “inappropriate” — he insisted the main barrier is that “the DOE doesn’t even recognize there is a land-use problem.”
