According to a New York Post exclusive, nearly $100 million later, New York City is still paying for classrooms with no students — a costly relic of an ambitious preschool expansion that never fully materialized.
The staggering tab, now at $99.3 million and climbing, stems from 28 leased buildings originally intended to house 3-K programs under former mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal preschool push.
Years after the rollout, many of those facilities remain empty.
City taxpayers continue to cover rent and utilities on the unused spaces, even as the buildings sit idle — a situation one former Department of Education official bluntly described as “incompetence,” not corruption.
The effort traces back to de Blasio’s “3-K For All” initiative, an expansion of early childhood education designed to provide free, full-day care for 3-year-olds across the city.
To meet that goal, officials fast-tracked 47 construction and renovation projects, aiming to deliver roughly 3,800 seats across 28 sites between 2020 and 2025.
But the execution faltered.
According to a former DOE insider, planning decisions failed to account for actual neighborhood demand, leaving some facilities built or leased in areas where seats were already going unfilled.
One example stands out: a $10.8 million site on Union Turnpike in Queens, placed in an area already struggling to fill existing early education slots.
Despite that mismatch, the city continues to pay roughly $500,000 a year in rent for the unused location.
“They realized afterward that it wasn’t a good location,” the former official said. “If they didn’t think the need was there, why did they pick the site in the first place?”
A handful of the buildings have found temporary uses — housing charter schools, preschool overflow, or administrative functions — but most remain shuttered, with no 3-K students enrolled.
The broader $400 million capital plan behind the initiative has come under renewed scrutiny, with critics questioning how such a large-scale effort could miss the mark so significantly.
More over at The New York Post:
Empty NYC preschools cost taxpayers nearly $100M in rent alone: 'Terrible execution' https://t.co/F90fS083Mc pic.twitter.com/6FHjwNSO8S
— New York Post (@nypost) April 20, 2026
