The New York City Department of Education is the largest public school system in the world. It has over 1.1 million students and more than 1,800 schools.
There are also 95 private schools in New York City. One of the highest ranked is Trinity, one of the country’s oldest schools – founded in 1709. The acceptance rate for kindergarten at Trinity is around 2%! If you’re lucky enough – and wealthy enough – to get your kid in, it’ll cost you around $60k per year. A sound investment because there’s a 40% chance they’ll go to an Ivy League-level college.
As a father, I can attest that 99% of the biggest (and smallest) decisions my wife and I make are made directly or indirectly with our children’s well-being in mind. They have been the driving factor in every home we have ever bought or rented. And school choice almost always led the way. During their younger years, we were lucky to live in the West Village, which offered great opportunities for them to attend public school. (A shoutout to PS3!) But we all can’t live in the West Village. There should be more options. You don’t have to send a kid to a private school to get an excellent education because there are plenty of great public schools, but we could use newer options.
Real estate agents aren’t allowed to talk too much about schools, but we must know about them.
In early 2002, I was hired to sell one of the first condo conversions in the Financial District at 150 Nassau. The building was in the process of adaptive reuse into residential condos. Built in 1895 as the headquarters of the American Tract Society, 150 Nassau was one of the first skyscrapers built from a steel skeleton and was one of New York City’s tallest buildings when it was completed.
I was the third broker on the job. The previous two brokers could not figure out how to attract a buyer for a building overlooking City Hall Park, surrounded by mostly office buildings filled with financial tenants.
As an agent, I knew that one of the primary reasons why people were moving to neighboring Tribeca was because it had one of the top-rated public schools in the city. PS234. I also knew the school’s boundary extended to City Hall Park and 150 Nassau! At the time, your average 3BR apartment in Tribeca was well over $3M. One of the first things I did when I took over the project was to adjust some floorplans and create a $2M three-bedroom apartment. As I’ve said more times than I care to remember – buyers don’t give a shit about square ft. They care about how the apartment feels and if it fits their needs within their budget. It’s that simple! $ per SF is a data point created by analysts who know nothing about intrinsic value. So we created an affordable 3 BR in a beautiful building in one of the best public school districts in Manhattan.
Traffic spiked, and we started selling.
There were quite a few interesting moments when I showed these apartments when a parent would look over to their kid and ask, “do you like it”? The fate of my deal rested on whether the 5-year-old client wasn’t too hungry, tired, cranky, or needed to pee. The parents write the check at the closing, but the kids often influence which apartment is bought.
Eighteen months and 125 closings later, 150 Nassau was a resounding success blazing a trail for residential condos in the Financial District and breaking pricing records. (The building still has one of the most beautiful penthouses I’ve ever seen). A once defunct office building became home to 125 families.
With a shortage of great schools and an abundance of office buildings, it is a no-brainer to turn some office buildings into schools. These empty monuments to antiquated law firms and banks of the 80s could become schools for the next generation.
And it’s starting to happen. An Ice Factory From the 1900s is now a spectacular new school in the Bronx designed by David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect. What once was a dilapidated empty shell will now accommodate 1,300 students in pre-K through 12th grade. And it is magnificent.
We have some beautiful, underutilized buildings in our city, and it’s inspiring to see how some of them are being reenvisioned and adapted to life in the next century.
Let’s do this!
-Shaun