For years, New York City has been bleeding public money to lease more than two dozen buildings that were supposed to house preschoolers. Instead, they've become expensive monuments to the failure of big-government social engineering. According to a New York Post report, rent alone has run up a jaw-dropping $99.3 million tab, and the meter is still running.
Even a former city Department of Education insider couldn't spin it. "I don't think it's corruption. It's incompetence," the official told the Post. For taxpayers footing the bill, that's hardly a comforting distinction.
A Progressive Promise, a Predictable Disaster
The de Blasio administration launched 47 so-called "initiative projects" as part of its "3-K For All" program, a classic tax-and-spend fantasy that promised free pre-K for every three-year-old in the five boroughs, regardless of whether families wanted it or needed it. City Hall earmarked a whopping $400 million to build or renovate 28 locations meant to serve 3,800 children, with doors scheduled to open between 2020 and 2025.
The result? Empty buildings. Empty classrooms. And a drained city treasury.
A handful of the sites have been quietly repurposed for charter schools, the one bright spot in this saga, but the overwhelming majority sit dormant, with zero 3-K seats filled.
Central Planning Meets Reality
One particularly telling misfire: a $10.8 million site on Union Turnpike in Queens, dropped smack in the middle of an orthodox Jewish community where families overwhelmingly prefer religious education for their children, a fact any competent planner could have discovered with a single community meeting.
"They realized [afterward that] it wasn't a good location," the former school official said. "If they didn't think the need was there, why did they pick the site in the first place?"
That question cuts to the heart of the progressive governing philosophy: spend first, plan later, and send the bill to someone else.
Deflection from de Blasio, Reality from Adams
True to form, de Blasio refused to take responsibility for his own failed program, instead blaming his successor. "Sadly, the Adams administration ended those efforts and took a step backwards on early childhood education," he told the Post, while conveniently predicting that demand will magically materialize under Mamdani.
Mayor Eric Adams, to his credit, offered the kind of grown-up assessment that has become rare in New York politics. He said he "inherited a system with thousands of empty early childhood seats" and chose to prioritize "stabilizing providers and increasing enrollment, rather than simply expanding capacity." In other words: fix what's broken before building more of it.
Mamdani Eyes Another Expansion
Now comes the truly alarming part. Rather than treating this $100 million disaster as a cautionary tale about government overreach, newly installed socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is eyeing the same empty buildings to fuel his own pre-K expansion plans, doubling down on the very approach that created the mess in the first place.
For New York City taxpayers already staggering under some of the highest tax burdens in the nation, the message from City Hall is clear: when progressive central planning fails, the answer is always more of it.
The $100 million already spent won't be coming back. The only question now is how much more will be wasted before voters demand an end to the cycle.
