Banking Boom Keeps Families In Manhattan, New Kids On The Block
BloombergMarch 2 (Bloomberg) -- Bill and Erica Kierstead bought the apartment next to theirs on West 88th Street in September and can't wait to break down the dividing wall. The deal means they won't have to go to the suburbs, and Bill, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker, will still get home in time to see his three boys.
``We felt like we won the lottery when the neighbors decided to move,'' says Erica, 40, a freelance writer. ``It just seemed the way to have the best quality of life as a family was to stay in the city.''
In Manhattan, where record profits at Wall Street firms including Goldman are fueling a booming economy, people with children and time-consuming jobs are turning their backs on the suburbs where many of them grew up. The under-5 population rose 26 percent from 2000 to 2004 while the borough's overall growth was 1.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The stroller crowd is changing the urban landscape as shops, restaurants and housing developers cater to families. Programs from pre-ballet to junior soccer fill up months in advance, and private pre-schools charging $7,500 or more for 2-year-olds turn away hundreds of applicants. Madison Avenue's Carlyle Hotel, art deco home to politicians and executives since 1930, hosts children's birthday parties.
``There is a generational shift,'' says Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor with the Council on Contemporary Families. ``Parents want to blend a child-centered life with an adult-centered life. They see the city as a place to stay rather than to leave.''
Staying Put
The jump in kids under 5 years old is dominated by a 40 percent rise in white children, whose families were once quickest to depart for New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County and Long Island.
Manhattan's surging pre-school population is outpacing gains in American cities including Philadelphia and Washington, where the number of kids under five grew 7 percent in the same four years. The increase was 8 percent in Boston, 9 percent in Houston and 24 percent in San Francisco. In all five New York City boroughs, the increase was 16 percent.
Parents say they're staying in part because Manhattan is safer, with the crime rate down 71 percent in 2005 from 1990. Murders in the borough plunged to 25 from 124, and burglaries fell to less than 3,000 from 16,000.
More of Everything
Living in the heart of the biggest U.S. metropolitan area also means more of just about everything. New York boasts six zoos, 39 theaters and 18,000 restaurants, according to NYC & Co., the city's official tourism marketing organization. Manhattan has 26 hospitals and the largest Chinatown in America.
Manhattan parents find blending work and family easier with urban amenities, including take-out versions of almost any national dish and the Web-based FreshDirect grocery service, which started in 2002. Manhattan dry cleaners and video stores deliver; doormen receive packages; and apartment-building superintendents come by to fix leaky faucets.
And with access to the biggest U.S. mass transit system, three of four families get around without owning a vehicle.
``We can work and don't have to get in the car to see our kids,'' says Hillary Nayman, 38, a wholesale wine distributor with a 2-year-old son. She insisted on living in Manhattan when agreeing to marry a lawyer from Toronto, she says.
``The system is so easy,'' she says. ``There is so much to check out, even just riding the bus.''
A thriving economy has created jobs in fields as diverse as banking, health care, law, media and the arts, which attract ambitious Type-A men and women and provide the incomes that make it affordable to live in Manhattan with growing families.
Daytime Movies
In New York, home of the world's five biggest investment banks, financial services provide 4.5 percent of all city jobs and 19 percent of all pay. Firms including Goldman and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. paid out year-end bonuses totaling more than $20 billion.
Matthew Rosenblum, 35, took his 4-year-old twins to a movie on a recent Wednesday morning, while his wife looked after the couple's other two toddlers. Rosenblum, who grew up on Long Island, works for a hedge fund and has flexible hours.
``There is a functional, cultural lifestyle here,'' says Jennifer Rosenblum, 34, who is from Philadelphia and has no plans to leave town. ``What would I do? Drive my Escalade to the strip mall?''
At Kidville, NY, which opened on East 84th Street 13 months ago, 52 open strollers jammed an indoor parking area next to the 12-table café and toy shop on a weekday morning.
Miso Soup
More than 3,000 pre-schoolers are now signed up for Kidville classes such as ``Bach to Rock'' and ``Big Muscle Playtime.'' The $3 million club also offers $2,195 birthday parties and $745 cooking classes for 2-year-olds to try their hand at Indian flatbread or Japanese miso soup.
``Kidville was profitable from the day it opened,'' says owner Andy Stenzler, who started the business with his wife, Shari, after their first child was born. Investors include Laurie Tisch, daughter of former Loews Corp. Chairman Preston Robert Tisch, and married tennis players Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, who have two children.
Kidville had about $9 million in revenue in its first year, and an Upper West Side location is opening in May, says Stenzler, who grew up in Westchester and was a co-founder of Cosi Inc., a chain of sandwich shops that went public in 2002.
The Museum of Modern Art, home of Van Gogh's ``The Starry Night'' and Picasso's ``Les Demoiselles D'Avignon,'' has a 200- name waiting list for its March workshops for 4- to 6-year-olds, says program director Susan McCollough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art invites toddlers to drop in on Saturdays and scribble their own versions of a sphinx or African mask.
Suburban Dream
In Morningside Heights, home to Columbia University, Deluxe Restaurant on Broadway at 112th Street just bought extra high chairs for families lured by the kid's menu, says manager Rachad Carter. Waiters are instructed to be patient with children ordering their own chicken fingers, he says, because it may be their first attempt to speak in public.
Manhattan couples for decades headed to the suburbs after having a baby, NYU's Gerson says, searching for the space and greenery that symbolized a wholesome environment for kids.
Suburban growth was fueled after World War II by highways and tax breaks for housing and shopping-mall developers, and the notion that wives would be happy staying home. That idea was shattered by women including the late Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book ``The Feminine Mystique'' articulated the boredom and loneliness of suburban homemakers.
Dads Involved
The postwar trends ``were bound to be short-lived,'' Gerson says, and growing numbers of women moved into the workforce in the 1970s. Now, men are more involved with their children than ever and also aim to cut the travel between work and home, she says.
``Living in the city is essential for us,'' says Craig Balsam, 44, who co-founded Razor & Tie Entertainment, a music production and distribution company, in 1990, and has three kids. The company produces Kidz Bop, the top children's audio brand in the country.
Balsam, whose wife is a lawyer, remembers noting the suburban-dad commuters when he was a child in Millburn, New Jersey, and wanted a different life. He likes being able to work long hours and still pick up a sick child from school in the middle of the day.
``It's a very different mentality than it used to be,'' says Balsam, whose office is in Greenwich Village.
Some Manhattanites have added up the property taxes, car insurance, commuter passes and home-repair bills and decided a bedroom-community address doesn't cut expenses.
Connecticut Costs
The average cost of a house in Darien, Connecticut, 55 minutes on the commuter train to Grand Central Terminal, was $1.6 million in 2005, according to Doug Werner, a broker at William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty. Property tax on a home in that price range is about $10,000, he says.
Still, living in Manhattan has never been cheap.
The state and local tax burden for a family of four with a $150,000 household income was 15.1 percent in 2004, the highest in the nation, according to a study by the government of the District of Columbia. Bridgeport, Connecticut; Philadelphia and Los Angeles rounded out the top four.
A three-bedroom apartment, meanwhile, cost an average $2.8 million in the final three months of last year, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Prada in Soho
Rising costs and the injection of Wall Street wealth are squeezing some residents long-prized for contributing to the city's cultural and ethnic panorama. Soho, the neighborhood that once housed poor artists working in sunlit lofts, for instance, is now lined with retailers including Milan-based Prada SpA and Paris-based Chanel SA.
Some families supported by incomes in the arts, social work or teaching are making do by reworking the space they're in.
Susan Bohan, a real-estate broker at Brown Harris Stevens Inc., has clients putting twin girls in their only bedroom and a son in a small alcove. The parents will sleep in the living room.
With one publishing-industry salary, the family had no chance buying in a cooperative building where they looked at more space, says Bohan, a six-year broker who raised her four children in Manhattan. They're staying because ``people so love the energy of the city for their kids.''
Pet Grooming
Extell Development Corp. is building two towers of more than 30 stories on the Upper West Side at 99th street, offering two-to five-bedroom apartments in complexes with swimming pools, basketball courts, playrooms and pet-grooming salons. The apartments are listed between $2 million and $4 million.
``There is tremendous demand for larger-sized apartments,'' says Extell President Gary Barnett, who also has residential projects on Fifth Avenue and on 18th Street. ``All of these things are designed to build great spaces for families.''
The surge of young children is burdening Manhattan nursery schools, where some families now apply to 12 programs to secure a single spot, says Cynthia Bing, head of the school advisory service at the Parents League of New York, a nonprofit membership organization of private schools and families.
``The pressure has been increasing year by year,'' Bing says. That's true too at private schools for older kids, some of which will charge more than $30,000 for high school next year, the most ever.
Public Schools
The kid boom and rocketing cost of private school may be good for New York's public school system, the biggest in the country with 1.1 million students, says Clara Hemphill, director of Insideschools.org and author of ``New York City's Best Public Elementary Schools: A Parent's Guide.''
While popular public schools on the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and in Tribeca now have classes of 30 kids or more by 5th grade, schools in Harlem with good facilities and energetic principals have empty seats, she says.
As more upper-middle-class parents stay in the city, some will end up bringing their affluence and political clout to these neighborhoods, Hemphill says.
Kim Halsinger, 43, and her husband, Mike Bauer, 38, have three children, including a daughter born yesterday, and recently moved to a $3,500-a-month, two-bedroom rental unit on 74th Street. From there, the children can automatically attend the coveted Public School 87, an elementary school.
Halsinger, an anthropologist and linguist who grew up in suburban Akron, Ohio, is determined to stay in Manhattan because she loves the wide-ranging discussions with other parents in the playground and plans to go back to work in a few years.
Like many New Yorkers, she also wants perks she won't find elsewhere.
``I speak Wolof,'' she says, referring to one of six national languages of Senegal, which Halsinger learned when living in Africa. ``In New York, I can walk down the block and speak Wolof with the guy selling stuff on the corner. That excites me.''
To contact the reporter on this story:
Lisa Kassenaar in New York at lkassenaar@bloomberg.net.
``We felt like we won the lottery when the neighbors decided to move,'' says Erica, 40, a freelance writer. ``It just seemed the way to have the best quality of life as a family was to stay in the city.''
In Manhattan, where record profits at Wall Street firms including Goldman are fueling a booming economy, people with children and time-consuming jobs are turning their backs on the suburbs where many of them grew up. The under-5 population rose 26 percent from 2000 to 2004 while the borough's overall growth was 1.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The stroller crowd is changing the urban landscape as shops, restaurants and housing developers cater to families. Programs from pre-ballet to junior soccer fill up months in advance, and private pre-schools charging $7,500 or more for 2-year-olds turn away hundreds of applicants. Madison Avenue's Carlyle Hotel, art deco home to politicians and executives since 1930, hosts children's birthday parties.
``There is a generational shift,'' says Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor with the Council on Contemporary Families. ``Parents want to blend a child-centered life with an adult-centered life. They see the city as a place to stay rather than to leave.''
Staying Put
The jump in kids under 5 years old is dominated by a 40 percent rise in white children, whose families were once quickest to depart for New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County and Long Island.
Manhattan's surging pre-school population is outpacing gains in American cities including Philadelphia and Washington, where the number of kids under five grew 7 percent in the same four years. The increase was 8 percent in Boston, 9 percent in Houston and 24 percent in San Francisco. In all five New York City boroughs, the increase was 16 percent.
Parents say they're staying in part because Manhattan is safer, with the crime rate down 71 percent in 2005 from 1990. Murders in the borough plunged to 25 from 124, and burglaries fell to less than 3,000 from 16,000.
More of Everything
Living in the heart of the biggest U.S. metropolitan area also means more of just about everything. New York boasts six zoos, 39 theaters and 18,000 restaurants, according to NYC & Co., the city's official tourism marketing organization. Manhattan has 26 hospitals and the largest Chinatown in America.
Manhattan parents find blending work and family easier with urban amenities, including take-out versions of almost any national dish and the Web-based FreshDirect grocery service, which started in 2002. Manhattan dry cleaners and video stores deliver; doormen receive packages; and apartment-building superintendents come by to fix leaky faucets.
And with access to the biggest U.S. mass transit system, three of four families get around without owning a vehicle.
``We can work and don't have to get in the car to see our kids,'' says Hillary Nayman, 38, a wholesale wine distributor with a 2-year-old son. She insisted on living in Manhattan when agreeing to marry a lawyer from Toronto, she says.
``The system is so easy,'' she says. ``There is so much to check out, even just riding the bus.''
A thriving economy has created jobs in fields as diverse as banking, health care, law, media and the arts, which attract ambitious Type-A men and women and provide the incomes that make it affordable to live in Manhattan with growing families.
Daytime Movies
In New York, home of the world's five biggest investment banks, financial services provide 4.5 percent of all city jobs and 19 percent of all pay. Firms including Goldman and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. paid out year-end bonuses totaling more than $20 billion.
Matthew Rosenblum, 35, took his 4-year-old twins to a movie on a recent Wednesday morning, while his wife looked after the couple's other two toddlers. Rosenblum, who grew up on Long Island, works for a hedge fund and has flexible hours.
``There is a functional, cultural lifestyle here,'' says Jennifer Rosenblum, 34, who is from Philadelphia and has no plans to leave town. ``What would I do? Drive my Escalade to the strip mall?''
At Kidville, NY, which opened on East 84th Street 13 months ago, 52 open strollers jammed an indoor parking area next to the 12-table café and toy shop on a weekday morning.
Miso Soup
More than 3,000 pre-schoolers are now signed up for Kidville classes such as ``Bach to Rock'' and ``Big Muscle Playtime.'' The $3 million club also offers $2,195 birthday parties and $745 cooking classes for 2-year-olds to try their hand at Indian flatbread or Japanese miso soup.
``Kidville was profitable from the day it opened,'' says owner Andy Stenzler, who started the business with his wife, Shari, after their first child was born. Investors include Laurie Tisch, daughter of former Loews Corp. Chairman Preston Robert Tisch, and married tennis players Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, who have two children.
Kidville had about $9 million in revenue in its first year, and an Upper West Side location is opening in May, says Stenzler, who grew up in Westchester and was a co-founder of Cosi Inc., a chain of sandwich shops that went public in 2002.
The Museum of Modern Art, home of Van Gogh's ``The Starry Night'' and Picasso's ``Les Demoiselles D'Avignon,'' has a 200- name waiting list for its March workshops for 4- to 6-year-olds, says program director Susan McCollough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art invites toddlers to drop in on Saturdays and scribble their own versions of a sphinx or African mask.
Suburban Dream
In Morningside Heights, home to Columbia University, Deluxe Restaurant on Broadway at 112th Street just bought extra high chairs for families lured by the kid's menu, says manager Rachad Carter. Waiters are instructed to be patient with children ordering their own chicken fingers, he says, because it may be their first attempt to speak in public.
Manhattan couples for decades headed to the suburbs after having a baby, NYU's Gerson says, searching for the space and greenery that symbolized a wholesome environment for kids.
Suburban growth was fueled after World War II by highways and tax breaks for housing and shopping-mall developers, and the notion that wives would be happy staying home. That idea was shattered by women including the late Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book ``The Feminine Mystique'' articulated the boredom and loneliness of suburban homemakers.
Dads Involved
The postwar trends ``were bound to be short-lived,'' Gerson says, and growing numbers of women moved into the workforce in the 1970s. Now, men are more involved with their children than ever and also aim to cut the travel between work and home, she says.
``Living in the city is essential for us,'' says Craig Balsam, 44, who co-founded Razor & Tie Entertainment, a music production and distribution company, in 1990, and has three kids. The company produces Kidz Bop, the top children's audio brand in the country.
Balsam, whose wife is a lawyer, remembers noting the suburban-dad commuters when he was a child in Millburn, New Jersey, and wanted a different life. He likes being able to work long hours and still pick up a sick child from school in the middle of the day.
``It's a very different mentality than it used to be,'' says Balsam, whose office is in Greenwich Village.
Some Manhattanites have added up the property taxes, car insurance, commuter passes and home-repair bills and decided a bedroom-community address doesn't cut expenses.
Connecticut Costs
The average cost of a house in Darien, Connecticut, 55 minutes on the commuter train to Grand Central Terminal, was $1.6 million in 2005, according to Doug Werner, a broker at William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty. Property tax on a home in that price range is about $10,000, he says.
Still, living in Manhattan has never been cheap.
The state and local tax burden for a family of four with a $150,000 household income was 15.1 percent in 2004, the highest in the nation, according to a study by the government of the District of Columbia. Bridgeport, Connecticut; Philadelphia and Los Angeles rounded out the top four.
A three-bedroom apartment, meanwhile, cost an average $2.8 million in the final three months of last year, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Prada in Soho
Rising costs and the injection of Wall Street wealth are squeezing some residents long-prized for contributing to the city's cultural and ethnic panorama. Soho, the neighborhood that once housed poor artists working in sunlit lofts, for instance, is now lined with retailers including Milan-based Prada SpA and Paris-based Chanel SA.
Some families supported by incomes in the arts, social work or teaching are making do by reworking the space they're in.
Susan Bohan, a real-estate broker at Brown Harris Stevens Inc., has clients putting twin girls in their only bedroom and a son in a small alcove. The parents will sleep in the living room.
With one publishing-industry salary, the family had no chance buying in a cooperative building where they looked at more space, says Bohan, a six-year broker who raised her four children in Manhattan. They're staying because ``people so love the energy of the city for their kids.''
Pet Grooming
Extell Development Corp. is building two towers of more than 30 stories on the Upper West Side at 99th street, offering two-to five-bedroom apartments in complexes with swimming pools, basketball courts, playrooms and pet-grooming salons. The apartments are listed between $2 million and $4 million.
``There is tremendous demand for larger-sized apartments,'' says Extell President Gary Barnett, who also has residential projects on Fifth Avenue and on 18th Street. ``All of these things are designed to build great spaces for families.''
The surge of young children is burdening Manhattan nursery schools, where some families now apply to 12 programs to secure a single spot, says Cynthia Bing, head of the school advisory service at the Parents League of New York, a nonprofit membership organization of private schools and families.
``The pressure has been increasing year by year,'' Bing says. That's true too at private schools for older kids, some of which will charge more than $30,000 for high school next year, the most ever.
Public Schools
The kid boom and rocketing cost of private school may be good for New York's public school system, the biggest in the country with 1.1 million students, says Clara Hemphill, director of Insideschools.org and author of ``New York City's Best Public Elementary Schools: A Parent's Guide.''
While popular public schools on the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and in Tribeca now have classes of 30 kids or more by 5th grade, schools in Harlem with good facilities and energetic principals have empty seats, she says.
As more upper-middle-class parents stay in the city, some will end up bringing their affluence and political clout to these neighborhoods, Hemphill says.
Kim Halsinger, 43, and her husband, Mike Bauer, 38, have three children, including a daughter born yesterday, and recently moved to a $3,500-a-month, two-bedroom rental unit on 74th Street. From there, the children can automatically attend the coveted Public School 87, an elementary school.
Halsinger, an anthropologist and linguist who grew up in suburban Akron, Ohio, is determined to stay in Manhattan because she loves the wide-ranging discussions with other parents in the playground and plans to go back to work in a few years.
Like many New Yorkers, she also wants perks she won't find elsewhere.
``I speak Wolof,'' she says, referring to one of six national languages of Senegal, which Halsinger learned when living in Africa. ``In New York, I can walk down the block and speak Wolof with the guy selling stuff on the corner. That excites me.''
To contact the reporter on this story:
Lisa Kassenaar in New York at lkassenaar@bloomberg.net.
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