Baby Boom Conspiracy
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When it comes to having children these days, in a certain slice of the city, three is the new two. And with absolutely no statistical evidence behind me, I am convinced this baby boom is the true source of many New Yorkers’ problems, from the high cost of real estate to Midtown traffic woes.
In the 1970s and 1980s, New Yorkers complained about how frequently their cars were broken into. Squeegee men gathered at major intersections, homeless people lined the streets, and fourth-graders were mugged on their way home from school.
But these aren’t the problems most New Yorkers face today. For many of us raising our families in the Big Apple in the 21st century, our complaints sound something more like this: “Is the price of real estate ever going to come down?”
There are many reasons to explain the rise in the prices of apartments in the city. Sure, interest rates have come down, the cost of renting has gone up, Wall Street and investment banks are booming. But there are also so many parents who’ve decided to raise their children in the new and improved version of the city instead of the suburbs. And those parents seem to be having more children than their predecessors.
“Certainly, one of the reasons for the rise in prices of New York apartments is the rise in the number of kids New Yorkers seem to be having,” a vice president at the Corcoran Group, Steven Cohen, said. “I especially see this in specific neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. Things get snapped up often by people who already live in the building. So many families are looking to combine their apartments to make them larger to accommodate their growing families. There is such low housing inventory, and as a result, you see these high prices.”
Several friends of mine looking for apartments say the market is softer than it was six months ago, but the prices are still very high, and there is no reason to expect them to fall much further. “Right now you don’t see bidding wars as much,” one friend said. “Properties are sitting around for a bit longer. But bonuses on Wall Street and at the banks this year are apparently going to be crazy. … The demand in New York is so high, and the supply is so low. Everyone wants to be in the same place.”
They also want to be in the same schools. The same people who are moaning and groaning about how expensive it is to buy a 2,500-square-foot apartment are also discussing how difficult it is to get their children into kindergarten or nursery school.
“I sat next to a board member at Trinity the other night, and he said that between the siblings and the legacies, Trinity doesn’t have any kindergarten spots,” a friend with two children said. “It’s all those people with three children. There aren’t any spots for new families.”
An admissions director at a select nursery school said she feels terrible because she has to tell most parents that it’s not even worth their while to submit an application. “I feel so bad about the whole thing, but we are scrambling to find ways to accommodate the existing siblings in our school. People are having three, sometimes four, and even five kids. We just don’t have the spots,” she said
The final complaint that I hear these days – regardless of where people live or whether they have children – is about the traffic. There has always been whining about the traffic during the holidays, but now it is a year-round woe. Twenty years ago, there might have been a few predictably congested blocks. Today, the city is one jammed block after another.
“It’s those damn chauffeur-driven SUVs,” a single friend of mine who lives on the Upper West Side said. “You would think the chauffeurs would have the common sense to at least pull into hydrants or even nearby free spots. But I think they feel they need to be right outside the schools or lunch spots, waiting in the most convenient spot possible.”
Between the delivery trucks, garbage trucks, and chauffeurs, it’s not just Midtown that is a nightmare to navigate. Uptown, downtown, and in between, there is a vast expanse of clogged streets. Don’t even bother trying to go down streets where there are nursery schools and elementary schools during the drop-off and pick-up hours – not if you’re in a rush, anyway.
With four children myself, however, I’m hardly one to complain about the trickle-down effects of larger families. I covet the one-bedroom apartment next to me and am always hatching plots to convince those neighbors to move. I drive a car almost as large as my living room, and have been known on occasion to double-park the beast to pick up a child.
That is, until I started getting $115 parking tickets. Could those absurdly expensive fines be yet another consequence of the city’s larger families? You never know.