BY YANNIC RACK
The developers filling Downtown with residential towers should foot the bill for the additional classroom space needed for the new families they will bring to the neighborhood, according to one Lower Manhattan legislator.
Assemblymember Deborah Glick thinks the solution to Lower Manhattan’s school overcrowding crisis may lie in Albany, where she has just introduced a bill that would impose a “school impact tax” on any new non-senior residential developments or conversions in the city, with the funds devoted to K-12 school construction.
“The city unfortunately does not have a lot of authority over its own taxing policy — it really can only deal with property taxes — and so this would allow them to raise the money needed for new schools,” said Glick.
The idea has long been popular with members of the Lower Manhattan School Overcrowding Task Force, a forum for local elected officials and Downtown school advocates that Glick co-hosts every month, and her bill was praised by local parents who say that the city is too slow in building schools to cater to Downtown’s population boom.
“It only makes sense. Right now, the city can’t keep up,” said Wendy Chapman, a parent and member of Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee.
School advocates have long warned that the rapid development of new and converted residential buildings south of Canal St. is already outpacing the current need for school seats — despite a new 476-seat elementary school that is planned to open within the next five years in the Financial District.
“It’s not enough, that school was funded three years ago,” said Eric Greenleaf, another Downtown parent and a professor at NYU who calculates that up to 600 additional elementary school seats would need to be funded right now just to keep up with current levels of development in the area. “Since then, 3,000 to 5,000 new apartments have entered the pipeline, so another new school is already needed,” he said.
Exacerbating the problem is that the city uses a factor of 0.12 children per apartment to calculate the need for seats when any new development is built or proposed — which critics deride as too low.
The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation by press time.
Although the bill is sure to face heavy opposition from the real estate industry, Glick hopes that the ubiquity of new development — and ensuing school scarcity — across the city will help get her fellow legislators on board.
“I believe I can make a good case for it,” she said. “Many of the members of the Assembly majority come from the city and are facing the same issues of insufficient school seats in the district. We’re not the only ones. That’s why I hope I’ll have buy-in from other members.”
A spokesman for the Real Estate Board of New York said he couldn’t comment on the legislation yet.
Even if the bill is passed and the city gets more money for schools, Chapman said the next challenge would be to find the space to build them Downtown, since the real estate frenzy in the neighborhood also means that few suitable sites are left.
“It’s still going to be incredibly difficult to find space for schools — that will always be a problem, especially in Lower Manhattan,” she said. “But of course the other problem is that it’s so expensive.”
Greenleaf added that cities like San Francisco already collect similar development impact fees that directly benefit schools, and that there was no reason why New York shouldn’t ask developers to pitch in as well.
“It’s not a radical idea,” he said. “It’s a matter of the city having to catch up.”
