r/nyc

Nearly 60 years after the publication of E.L. Konigsburg’s book about two kids running toward the city and away from their suburb-living parents, there are increasing signs of the complete opposite occurring: Parents are taking their kids out of the New York City school system, and out of New York City entirely, and heading for the burbs, thanks to the increased cost of raising a child here. Families with young children are leaving New York City at more than twice the rate of households without them, and the public school system is shrinking as a result.

A decade ago, the city had over 1 million public school students, but this year it has 885,000, City Comptroller Mark Levine said in a social media post on X—and he expects another 150,000 fewer over the next decade. The drop has left 219 schools with fewer than 200 students each, he said, some too small to field a sports team. “This is not sustainable,” he wrote in the post, and the city will have to consolidate schools with sharply declining enrollment, Gothamist reported.

Levine said in a statement to Fortune that cost is part of the story. “Raising a family in New York City is increasingly difficult as the cost of living rises, and declining student enrollment is one troubling sign of that challenge,” he said. “Affordability is a major factor, but not the only one, and we need to better understand every driver of this trend to respond with viable, data-driven solutions.”

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/07/new-york-city-public-school-enrollment-drops-affordability/?utm_source=reddit/

Probably one of the biggest urban changes happening in New York City is the building boom in Gowanus - What do people think of the new Gowanus? Would you live there while the canal and toxic sites are still a work-in-progress?

"Jamie Courville and her husband, Chris Reynolds, moved to Gowanus in 2009, a year before the canal was designated a Superfund site and the federal clean-up process kicked off. As filmmakers, they were drawn to the unexpected beauty of the desolate, postindustrial landscape. “You couldn’t take a bad photo of it,” says Courville. Besides all the visual stimulation, those warehouses and defunct factories also made for excellent studio spaces, and while there wasn’t much housing other than the NYCHA projects, apartments tended to be cheap and spacious, if a bit rundown. Courville and Reynolds rented a well-size 1,100-square-foot apartment in one of the older residential buildings for around $2,000 a month, where they also worked. At a time when other industrial neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Long Island City were being remade into shinier, more generic versions of their former selves, Gowanus still felt mysterious and full of possibility. “There was a lot going on behind closed doors,” says Courville. It felt feral and gross and hopeful and free.

Of course, there was a reason why Gowanus was still a haven for artists in 2009, when so many of the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods had gentrified: the noxious, flood-prone canal running through it, filled with sewage, toxic sludge, and pretty much “every imaginable pathogen.” “I used to say I would never raise kids here,” said Karen Gibbons, an artist who moved there in the early 1980s. But she and her husband did — three of them, plus numerous cats and dogs. As with a lot of life decisions in New York, real estate was part of it — they ended up with two sprawling lofts, one protected under loft law, one a shared studio space — and, like Courville and Reynolds, had fallen under the spell of the place.

Almost anywhere else, a Superfund designation would have spooked real-estate developers, but in Gowanus, it amounted to open season, signaling to investors that the federal government would soon be cleaning up the century-old cesspool that had hindered previous development schemes. Not long after, Whole Foods announced that it was opening a gigantic store with a rooftop greenhouse on a bleak, windswept corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street. Other of-the-moment businesses soon followed: Lavender Lake, a bar with a huge outdoor patio that served local draft beer and kale Caesar salads, opened in 2011, Dinosaur Bar-B-Q in 2013, and Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club in 2014. Developers who’d been buying up land for decades started applying for spot rezonings to build luxury housing..."

New York City officials did not come to grips with the toxic dust until months after the terrorists attacks, newly released documents show. They allowed residents to return home, supplying little more than advice to clean up the dust with wet mops.