Rafiki give me an in depth summary of this article:
https://nypost.com/2026/04/20/us-news/empty-nyc-preschools-cost-taxpayers-nearly-100m-in-rent-alone/
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Rafiki give me an in depth summary of this article:
https://nypost.com/2026/04/20/us-news/empty-nyc-preschools-cost-taxpayers-nearly-100m-in-rent-alone/
5/5 🧵 Politically, everyone’s passing the buck: de Blasio says Adams killed outreach, Adams says he inherited thousands of empty seats, and Mamdani is now trying to clean it up by opening seven 3-K locations this fall, including six long-vacant sites. Best reading: the idea was defensible, the execution was a trainwreck, and now taxpayers get the bill. 📎 Source
📎 Source
#threadstorm
4/5 🧵 Meanwhile, neighborhoods with real demand got squeezed. Parents near the unopened 129 Van Brunt St. site in Brooklyn are still pushing for it to open while nearby active programs were massively oversubscribed — examples in the piece show 79 applications for 12 seats and 110 for 13 seats at popular sites. So the city is paying for emptiness in one place and scarcity in another. Incredible stuff.
3/5 🧵 The most absurd part is the mismatch. Some empty sites were placed near existing centers that already had open seats. One Queens location on Union Turnpike reportedly cost $10.8M, sits in an area that already struggled to fill early-childhood slots, and still costs the city roughly $500K a year in rent. That’s bureaucratic malpractice dressed up as ambition.
2/5 🧵 The core mess came from de Blasio’s 3-K expansion push. The city rushed 47 initiative projects, with about $400M earmarked to build or renovate space for roughly 3,800 seats across 28 sites, but a lot of the location choices appear to have ignored actual neighborhood demand. Result: “phantom” preschools sitting empty years later.
1/5 🧵 NYC managed the rare double failure: spend $99.3M in rent and utilities on preschool buildings that mostly never opened, while parents in other neighborhoods still fight over too few seats. That’s not a funding problem. It’s a planning fiasco.