Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at what New York City’s affordability crisis means for families with three or more children. We’ll also see (and hear) a violin that belonged to Mozart.
New York City is expensive, but especially for households with three or more children. The number of such households has dropped by nearly 17 percent in the last decade, according to one analysis of census data. I asked Eliza Shapiro, who covers the city’s affordability crisis, to analyze how the difficulty of raising children in New York is affecting demographics — and politics. The exodus of parents with young children has accelerated over the last few years — more than in other big cities. How so? I can’t overstate how important this shift is for New York City. The trend of families with young families leaving the city started to show up before the pandemic and was reflected in the slowly declining enrollment of the city’s school system, but sped up dramatically in 2020. Some families left amid the chaos of the pandemic, but what we’ve seen in the five years since is that New York has far fewer young children than it did a decade or so ago. That is really changing the city’s demographics, the makeup of its schools and the city’s politics and culture. You write that the reality of having a large family in New York is colliding with the Trump administration’s push for Americans to have more children. What has Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and front-runner in the race for City Hall, said he would do to help families if he’s elected? Mamdani has a very ambitious child care plan that I think is evidence of how much voters are clamoring for serious changes to the city’s existing child care infrastructure. He wants to create a free, universal child care system for infants as young as 6 weeks. That would mean creating free options for infants and toddlers, making the city’s prekindergarten program for 3-year-olds truly universal, and maintaining the city’s pre-K program for 4-year-olds. Building this system would be extraordinarily logistically complex and expensive. The Mamdani campaign estimates that it would cost about $6 billion. What about other elected officials? There’s been an outcry from parents — including a lot of middle-class voters — who are being priced out of the city in part because of the cost of child care. That is changing how politicians respond. For example, Mayor Eric Adams faced a major backlash after he cut funding for pre-K earlier in his term, and has now reversed some of those cuts and sought to expand funding for child care. How difficult is it to find an affordable apartment for a family with three children? What if they want to buy? This is one of the most difficult times in the city’s recent history to find an affordable apartment to rent or buy that has three or more bedrooms. The statistics are really striking: The median asking rent for apartments with three or more bedrooms across the city is $4,800, according to StreetEasy. And the median asking price for homes for sale is $1.8 million, and an astonishing $4.15 million in Manhattan, the city’s most expensive borough. How does that reflect the imbalance in apartments that developers build? One thing that surprised me while reporting the story I wrote was how much the incentives for developers have contributed to the current lack of affordable three-bedroom apartments. We all know New York City is in a housing crisis, and developers and elected officials want to show that they are building as many units as fast as they can. That leads to a rush to build studios and one-bedrooms, rather than family-sized units, which tend to offer lower value per square foot. WEATHER Expect a sunny day with temperatures nearing 63. Tonight will be partly cloudy with a low around 55. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Monday (Columbus Day; also called Indigenous Peoples’ Day). The latest Metro news
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The violinist Lun Li said that when he was asked to perform on a certain 261-year-old violin, his first reaction was: “How is Mozart’s violin still playable?” The answer turned out to be that it has been well cared for, most recently by the International Mozarteum Foundation in Mozart’s hometown, Salzburg, Austria. It sent the violin to New York, and Li, who won the Young Concert Artists international auditions in 2021, played it at a gathering for the Mozarteum’s American affiliate, the American Mozarteum Society, on Wednesday. “It felt insane to put my hands on something that Mozart had touched and practice and performed on,” Li said. But the violin that he plays regularly is even older, a 1735 Stradivarius on loan from a Japanese foundation that lends priceless instruments to performers. The Mozart violin turned out to be “brisk” and “incredibly resonant,” Li said. “It’s got this luminous quality that glows in the sound.” You can hear what he’s talking about. Click here to hear (and see) him playing it at a rehearsal. The violin was on its first trip to the United States. It had a chaperone, Linus Klumpner, the director of Mozart Museums for the International Mozarteum Foundation. He said he had not bought a seat for it, the way some cellists buy a seat to safeguard their instruments from baggage handlers. He put it in the overhead bin by itself, so that no other luggage that could slide into it and do damage if the plane ran into turbulence, which it didn’t. Klumpner said the instrument was the work of the violin maker Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa, who had learned his trade in Venice but was living in Treviso, Italy, when he carved and assembled the instrument Mozart acquired.
After Mozart’s death in 1791, Johann Anton André, a 19th-century composer and music publisher who was one of the first to publish Mozart’s music, said that he had bought it from Mozart’s widow, Constanze. It wasn’t the only thing André had purchased from her. He bought a trove of papers that included the music for two operas, “The Marriage of Figaro” and “The Magic Flute.” The gathering on Wednesday served as a warm-up for the American Mozarteum Society’s celebration of Mozart’s 270th birthday next year, and the violin was the center of attention. “I think the musicians were expecting it to sound sort of old and a little bit creaky and groan-y,” said Andrew Hawkins, the president of the American Mozarteum Society. It did not. But, he said, “there is a little bit of the Holy Relic thing about it.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Wo hop
Dear Diary: It was a late-summer night in the 1980s, and we were catching a bite to eat with another couple at Wo Hop on Mott Street, sharing our food while packed in like sardines. As we wound down our meal, the woman at the next table asked if I liked my dish. I said yes, and she proceeded to reach over with her chopsticks and start eating off my plate. When I finally found my voice, I told her we had been planning on boxing up our leftovers. Oh, she said, I thought you were done. — Barb DeLisle Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Davaughnia Wilson, Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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