East 65th Street, in one of New York City’s wealthiest ZIP codes, offers a bounty of goods for its residents to enjoy.
There’s the $34 double cheeseburger with thick-cut bacon at the popular local restaurant the East Pole, the $2,250 leather shoulder bag lined in lambskin at the Versace outpost on Madison Avenue and a $28 million four-bedroom condo with private elevator available in the Giorgio Armani Residences a block from Central Park.
And, this fall, a new child care center for 3- and 4-year-olds will open down the street with space for about 130 local children, a development recently announced with much fanfare by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The charge: free for all.
There is perhaps no street in New York City where the promise and peril of Mr. Mamdani’s vow to expand the social safety net for all New Yorkers is on starker display than this stretch of the Upper East Side.
The mayor’s allies argue that child care should be a collective good, akin to Social Security or public education, and that making it available to all New Yorkers will create the kind of buy-in that will help the system flourish.
They also say that wealthy New Yorkers, who pay some of the highest taxes in the nation, should be able to see a return in the form of more free services. That, in turn, could persuade them to stay in the city and continue to contribute to its financial health.
But others question whether a city facing a major budget deficit can — or should — be using taxpayer money to fund free services that some families could pay for themselves, especially because City Hall does not have enough money to fully fund a child care expansion that would make the system truly universal.
Mr. Mamdani, who lives about a mile north of the new center at Gracie Mansion, marked its long-delayed opening last month with a celebratory news conference.
“Good morning, neighbors!” he said with a smile, greeting residents of an area that voted decisively against him in last year’s election.
The Upper East Side is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States, and more than 40 percent of the households in the ZIP code that encompasses the child care center make more than $200,000 per year, according to census data.
But the neighborhood is also more socioeconomically diverse than its stereotype. It is home to many renters and city workers, and it contains the gradations of wealth that make the city’s current affordability crisis so complex.
There are plenty of residents who could easily pay for child care, no matter what it costs, and many choose to hire nannies. Then there are others who make decent salaries yet are not able to live as comfortably in one of the world’s most expensive cities as they hoped or expected to.
That range of income helps inform Mr. Mamdani’s argument that social services should be available to everyone: rich, poor and those in the middle. He has also vowed to make buses free across the city, which would mean that Upper East Siders could zip across Central Park on crosstown buses without swiping a transit card, and to freeze rents for all New Yorkers in rent-stabilized units.
But the city will inevitably have to make choices about who gets services as the mayor struggles to decide how to plug a $5.4 billion budget hole.
“Upper East Siders have long called for the early childhood resources the neighborhood needs, and yet year after year, those calls were ignored,” the mayor said, referring to the fact that the administration of former Mayor Eric Adams had left the building on East 65th Street dormant even after the construction of the child care center there.
“Today,” Mr. Mamdani added, “we are righting that wrong.”
‘Universal Means Universal’
The notion that Mr. Mamdani — a democratic socialist elected on a tax-the-rich platform — would end up being the mayor to answer the Upper East Side’s pleas for more child care illuminates a fact about his administration that neither the mayor nor his critics seem eager to acknowledge.
If he is able to deliver on his promise to make New York City more affordable for struggling New Yorkers by adding a slew of new, free services available to all, he may end up making it easier for the wealthy to live here, too.
It’s not exactly the stuff of populist campaign slogans.
Dora Pekec, a mayoral spokeswoman, noted that Mr. Mamdani had announced the creation of new child care seats in a number of low-income neighborhoods as well, including some seats for children as young as the age of 2. Mr. Mamdani is hoping to simultaneously expand the city’s universal preschool system for 3- and 4-year-olds and create a new tranche of seats for children younger than 3.
But she said that Mr. Mamdani’s commitment to free services for all New Yorkers, including more affluent ones, reflected his belief that “city government’s job isn’t to decide who deserves dignity — it’s to guarantee it for everyone.”
“We already treat essential services as public goods: The F.D.N.Y. answers emergencies, the city collects trash and every child has access to a safe, rigorous education. Child care should be no different,” she said in a statement.
Upper East Siders readily acknowledge that their neighborhood is not the most obvious place to begin to roll out free social services. They also point out that the city’s affordability crisis is affecting New Yorkers up and down the income ladder.
“Nobody in my neighborhood was saying we should come ahead of really needy neighborhoods,” said Valerie Mason, the chair of Community Board 8, which represents the Upper East Side, “but in my book, universal means universal.”
The new city-run child care center on East 65th Street will be available not only to Upper East Side residents but also to public school families across District 2, which includes wealthy neighborhoods like Hudson Yards and the West Village but also more socioeconomically diverse areas like Roosevelt Island and parts of Chinatown.
But the center will be most convenient for families who live nearby.
Many of the area’s private child care offerings can cost as much as $40,000 or even $50,000 per child, much more than the citywide average of $23,000 a year.
Those prices could help explain why District 2 has seen consistently high demand for free prekindergarten seats.
“I can’t tell you the number of parents who personally contacted our office over the years who said they left New York City over the high cost of living, and because child care had not been an option,” said Julie Menin, the City Council speaker, who represents the Upper East Side.
Free for the Rich and Free for the Poor
For Mr. Mamdani, the ideal scenario would create a kind of feedback loop: He hopes that broadening the child care services available to all New Yorkers will help him generate support and momentum for his proposed tax hike on those making more than $1 million a year. Those tax dollars would then help to pay for a citywide child care expansion.
That scenario is still entirely hypothetical; City Hall faces significant logistical and operational hurdles on the road to universal child care, and any tax increase is unlikely to pass this year.
But as Mr. Mamdani continues to push for one, he has found some support for the idea that offering free child care to everyone should require the rich to pay more in taxes.
“If you have a progressive tax code, then wealthy families are paying more, they are paying their fair share,” even if they have access to free child care, said Julie Kashen, the director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank.
“My bottom line is that child care should be a right for every single child, the same way public education is a right for every single child,” she added.
That argument is complicated by the fact that the free services enjoyed by wealthier New Yorkers often differ from those available to poorer ones.
The Upper East Side’s public schools, for example, are among the highest performing in the city, with parent-teacher associations that can bring in over $1 million a year. Research has shown that the quality of free pre-K — though generally high citywide, at least compared with national standards — tends to be better in wealthier neighborhoods.
There is also enormous interest in free pre-K spots in those neighborhoods. Students who live in low-poverty neighborhoods made up a higher share of pre-K enrollment than children in high-poverty areas of the city, according to an analysis of 2022 enrollment data by the Independent Budget Office.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio built a “war room” of pre-K sign-up specialists who would go door to door in public housing projects and visit playgrounds in low-income neighborhoods to recruit families. The Mamdani administration may also face pressure to find ways to encourage more needy families to apply for pre-K.
For now, at least, the administration has argued that offering access to everyone helps create buy-in for a benefit that could be cut or mismanaged if families with financial and political capital aren’t involved.
The problem with that line of thinking, critics say, is paying for it.
Reihan Salam, who runs the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, recently warned on social media: “Unlimited welfarism for the near-rich won’t pencil out.”
Those skeptical about universal child care are concerned not only about the cost but also about whether offering free seats to all families could end up sidelining the most vulnerable ones.
Bruce Fuller, a retired professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a critic of universal pre-K in New York City since it was created in 2014. He has argued that free child care is most effective when reserved first for low-income children, then perhaps eventually offered to middle-class families on a sliding scale, as California has done.
“It’s nice if we use tax dollars for wealthy Upper East Side families, but there’s a trade-off there,” Mr. Fuller said. “The mayor is so laser-focused on the affordability pitch that he’s yet to face these trade-offs.”
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
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