The February 5 meeting of the School Overcrowding Task Force, a joint panel convened by elected officials representing Lower Manhattan, was the forum for discussing some good news and some bad news. On the positive side, this session marked the opening of a dialog with City officials about expanding plans for the recently announced new elementary school (to be located on Greenwich Street, in the Financial District) from its initial size of 476 seats. But this was balanced by sobering news: Even this new school will leave Lower Manhattan hundreds of seats short of the school capacity it already needs.
Manhattan Borough president Gale Brewer began the meeting by saying, “we’re here today to keep the discussion going and make sure that we have what families need in a growing community.” She recalled an experience in which, “we worked sometimes nicely, sometimes not, with Department of Education [DOE] and the School Construction Authority [SCA] — usually nicely. We have often built larger schools than what SCA and DOE wanted, but they always turned out to be needed.”
City Council member Margaret Chin said that even with the newly announced school, and multiple new schools opened in Lower Manhattan in recent years (such as Peck Slip, Spruce Street, and P.S./I.S. 276), “we don’t have enough. We’re having more kids and we have to build more schools. I’ve already heard from the parents that the new school is not big enough. This work has to continue.”
State Assembly member Deborah Glick said, “the rate of expansion of residential communities Downtown makes it clear that we have an ongoing job to do, which is why we’re here.” She added, “the City’s formula for determining how many schools seats are needed it totally outdated. We have requested a full review of the CEQR standard,” the City Environmental Quality Review process that determines (among other things) which communities need new schools of what size, and when. “We look at developers and say, ‘you’re putting up a building how big with how many bedrooms in each apartment?’ Let’s not make an assumption that you’re going to have 1.2 kids in a three or four bedroom apartment. The real estate industry is way ahead of us. They know what the demands are. So we need to have a more realistic assessment.”
Schools Overcrowding Task Force member Eric Greenleaf: “the consequences of these numbers” are that “we need another new, 500-seat school, in addition to the one that was just announced.”
State Senator Daniel Squadron, who hosted the February 5 meeting (a duty that will rotate on a monthly basis among the other elected officials who are partners in the Task Force), said, “this forum has been a good one for a design conversation that doesn’t, frankly, always happen.” He urged officials from DOE and SCA to, “use this task force for design in the way it was done in the past with Peck Slip and Spruce Street. This forum, which is monthly, has been a good one for bringing sketches and conceptual drawings.”
Diana Switaj, the director of planning and land use for Community Board 1 (CB1), reviewed population growth projections for Lower Manhattan, which hinge on the creation of new residential units, either from new construction or the conversion of existing office buildings. “We take the number of new units and multiply this by average household size, which is 1.94,” Ms. Switaj explained. CB1’s research indicates that 1,744 new residential units in 13 buildings will come online in Lower Manhattan in 2016 (for a total of 3,383 new residents), with an additional 4,376 units in 25 buildings now planned for 2017 and the years that follow (which will bring an additional 8,489 new residents to Downtown). “What we know from this data,” Ms. Switaj continued, “is that there’s no indication that residential conversions and residential development are slowing. It just seems to keep growing and continuing, at least at a steady increase.”
CB1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes pointed out that much of the data that has informed previous campaigns to lobby for new schools in Lower Manhattan may soon become unavailable. “As you all know, the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center was downsized over the last couple of years.” This was a reference to the State office that was responsible for helping to manage the logistics of local development in the years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The agency once coordinated many local construction projects, seeking to maximize both physical safety and environmental safeguards, but was shut down in 2014, over the objection of community leaders and elected officials, with most of its functions absorbed by a newly created office within the City’s Department of Transportation. “That group is being phased out this month,” Ms. Hughes noted, with its coordinating functions for Lower Manhattan construction projects spread among several other offices. “So we’re concerned not only about construction safety and oversight, but we’re also concerned about getting the data. And right now, we don’t have any commitment for getting information about sites for the 90-plus major construction projects in the 1.5 square miles of Lower Manhattan. So this could be one of our last documents like this.”
Dire though the projections sound, they may, in some cases, err on the side of optimism. Paul Hovitz, a member of the Overcrowding Task Force who also serves as the co-chair of CB1’s Youth and Education Committee, pointed out that the CB1 projections call for 125 apartments in a planned apartment tower at 80 South Street. But the City Planning Commission has recently approved the transfer of almost half a million square feet of air rights to this site, which would allow developers to erect a building containing more than one million square feet. (Because the lot at 80 South Street is approximately 8,000 square feet, this could translate into a structure that might reach 125 stories, and a height of well over 1,000 feet.) “It’s going to be a very large building,” Ms. Switaj acknowledged, in response to Mr. Hovitz’s query. In four other cases, the CB1 projections offer no estimate of the number of apartments that will be contained in a building, because no information is yet available.
Eric Greenleaf, a Tribeca parent who has long served on the Overcrowding Task Force (which was founded in 2008 by then-State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver), directed the attention of those present, “to the consequences of these numbers.” He noted that the City’s CEQR standard, “says that a community needs 12 schools seats for every 100 apartments. So the projections for new apartments in Lower Manhattan for 2016, 2017, and beyond mean that we need another new, 500-seat school, in addition to the one that was just announced.” Indeed the 6,120 new apartments now planned to debut in the near future appear to require slightly more than 730 new school seats for Downtown.
Mr. Greenleaf added, “and that’s if you accept the CEQR standard, which DOE and SCA use for Manhattan as a whole, but which we actually believe is too low for Downtown.” The reasons for this skepticism, he explained, “are what we’ve seen in Lower Manhattan — more family-sized apartments than elsewhere, with larger families, and a greater tendency to send kids to public schools, because we have such great schools here. But even going by the CEQR guidelines, we need another 500 school seats, at a minimum.”
Wendy Chapman, a Tribeca parent who is also a co-founder of Build Schools Now (a grassroots initiative that seeks to ease Lower Manhattan’s chronic shortage of classroom seats by advocating for construction of more schools), said to DOE and SCA officials, “the needs are so great. If there’s anything we as a community can do to lobby for more money or whatever you need, we want to be the squeaky wheel. The next school site is going to be really expensive and really hard to find. If there’s something we can do to make [the planned Greenwich Street school] a bigger space, and help to build elsewhere, we want to do it.”