Last week, the Center for an Urban Future published a report titled, "5 Ideas for Retaining NYC's Young Families." You can read the highlights and download the full report here.

As soon as it was released, I immediately read it. (Then, of course, I uploaded it to ChatGPT to make sure I didn't miss any key moments.)

The crux is this: New York City has long been a magnet for young adults, but an increasing number of people leave the city as they become parents. The early pandemic years in particular, from 2020 - 2023, saw a 18.3% reduction in children under five, which has wreaked havoc on both enrollment rates in schools and also the city's economic vitality, civic engagement, and neighborhood efforts.

The researchers at CUF spent time understanding the shape of this problem and came up with five practical ideas to help make NYC more family-friendly for the next generation.

As someone who is attempting to not only raise a family and start a business in NYC, I can attest to why this feels like a near-impossible task on most days. (see: solo parenting weekends). So I was really excited to see a deep dive into this problem space, and a few actionable tips for the city at large.

Here's an overview of what they found, and some hot takes from one city parent who's stubbornly trying to have it all.

This study hit home for me.

Five years ago, I was nine months pregnant with my first baby as the pandemic unfolded. My daughter was born on April 8, 2020, a day when, tragically, more people died of COVID in New York City than babies were born.

But those early months of parenting were nothing like I’d imagined. No one—not even my own parents—met my newborn for months. The city was eerily quiet, and much of my maternity leave was spent walking empty streets, listening for sirens. Ironically, it wasn’t until I left the country in 2021 that I finally started to feel like a mom. I shared a bit about those early days of pandemic parenting in this essay in June 2020. And while the lockdowns have long ended, the ripple effects of parenting a "pandemic baby" are still unfolding.

Since then, I’ve watched nearly all of my pre-pandemic friends with young kids move away, either to the suburbs or back to hometowns where extended family could help share the load.

This anecdotal observation was echoed in the CUF report with this stat:

"Families with children under six were more than twice as likely to leave New York City since 2020 as were households without young children, with movers citing housing quality and affordability as the top concern."

A lot of the reasons why people left rhyme with reasons called out in the CUF report. I daydream frequently about how more affordable childcare would completely change the game for me and my peers, and I've already begun stressing about how to survive elementary and middle school with two girls sharing a room the whole time. I particularly love the idea of getting creative with three-bedroom units city-wide and think there's even more to do.

I wish I could tell people that it's a walk in the park to raise a young family in NYC, but that's certainly not the case. While there are major benefits to having young kids in the city (read: you can walk everywhere, there's always a kid-friendly event nearby, there's always another babysitter to call, there's always a playground or a park around the corner), the financial and logistical elements can sometimes feel impossible.

About a year ago, we had an emergency in our apartment when I moved a dresser and discovered toxic black mold covering the wall and furniture. We were told from a mold toxicity specialists to vacate immediately, leaving us with one week to find new housing before the start of the month. We looked at every two- and three-bedroom apartment listed on the Upper West Side, plus some in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Brooklyn.

This was by far my worst week as as New Yorker. I couldn't believe that, as a dual-income household with two adults who’ve collectively spent 20+ years building careers in this city, we could be priced out and forced to move under duress. It was the only time I ever considered a suburban transplant as an emergency backup option.

Luckily, (finally), we stumbled upon an oddly-shaped, poorly advertised two-bedroom apartment with an oversized living room, a minuscule kitchen, and oodles of outdoor space. After six months of creative space rearranging and apartment hacking, we've found a way to make it work for us.

In the end, with few options amidst a hyper-inflated housing market, we ended up having to accept a 70% increase in rent just to stay in the city. (By the way, this rent is in addition to our childcare costs, which, with two kids in preschool, costs us nearly 20% more than our annual rent.)

All in all, this was a terrible situation with a "hat trick" happy ending. But not everybody is so lucky.

Since that runaround, I'm even more committed than ever to NYC—and to the Upper West Side in general—that I relaunched our block association last summer and fall, now called the Manhattan 75. We’re going to build community, brick by brick, and scrape by to make this city work for us.

But "scraping by" shouldn’t be the standard for New York families. It shouldn't take bracing through pandemics, near-eviction, mold infestations, and months (or years) of hustling just to secure a livable space for your family. It shouldn’t take that much determination to stay in a city we’ve not only loved, but invested in—both economically and civically—for years.

Needless to say, we have so much more work to do to make NYC livable, equitable, and welcoming for families like mine, and to stop losing the incredible ones we’ve already lost. I hope this CUF report sheds light on that, and brings about some much-needed change.