The middle class millionaire's troubles

He lives rent-free in an Upper East Side mansion, owns two homes in a prime Brooklyn neighborhood and earns a six-figure salary supervising hundreds of thousands of employees.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio is now facing a hurdle familiar to many of his constituents: navigating the financial aid process to pay for his children’s college educations.

Mr. de Blasio’s son, Dante, a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, is currently mulling offers from a short list of exclusive schools, with Yale and Brown among the front-runners, according to people familiar with his options.

And with Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, still attending college in California, not even the mayor of New York is immune, it seems, to seeking relief from the high cost of higher education.

“There’s going to be a big challenge in figuring out financial aid and visits and all sorts of stuff,” Mr. de Blasio said, when asked about Dante’s plans at the end of an unrelated interview in his office last week.


Mr. de Blasio said he did not expect his son to decide on a school until later this month. Aides to the mayor declined to elaborate further on Dante’s intentions or the family’s financial considerations, saying they were private matters.

The soaring cost of college is often seized upon by Mr. de Blasio’s fellow liberals, who call it both a symptom and a cause of the nation’s rising inequality.

But the college process has cast Mayor de Blasio as a curious test case: His family is now affluent by most standards. Mr. de Blasio is paid $225,000 as mayor and the family receives tens of thousands of dollars in rental income from two properties in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

And yet, the de Blasio family’s argument for aid would not be unreasonable, according to financial aid experts — a striking testament to the increasingly extreme costs of higher education.

The mayor’s daughter, Chiara, attends Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit institution where tuition, room and board is roughly $55,000 a year. If Dante were to attend Yale, for example, tuition, room and board would come to about $60,000 a year.

Particularly with two children in college, the six-figure income “is not going to disqualify him from demonstrating need,” said Kalman A. Chany, president of Campus Consultants, a firm based in Manhattan that advises families on financial aid.

And sky-high tuition has squeezed even upper middle-class families, said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of edvisors.com, a financial aid website.

“When you have colleges that are charging 50, 60, $70,000 a year, everybody is going to struggle to pay for college,” he said.

But, Mr. Kantrowitz added of the mayor, “We’re still talking about someone whose income is pretty close to the top 1 percent.”

In 2013, the mayor and his wife, Chirlane McCray, earned $52,200 in rent from a modest duplex they own in Park Slope, a home once occupied by Mr. de Blasio’s mother. And the family rowhouse down the street, which the de Blasios left for Gracie Mansion in Manhattan, was rented last year at $4,975 a month. The combined value of the homes will reach an estimated $2.8 million in the upcoming tax year, according to the New York City Department of Finance.

That additional income, however, might be offset: On his tax return last year, for instance, Mr. de Blasio declared a $6,493 loss on one house after accounting for mortgage costs, depreciation and other expenses. Ms. McCray draws no salary as chairwoman of the city’s nonprofit arm.

Measured by median income, Manhattan and (especially) Brooklyn are much poorer than you think. Manhattan’s median annual household income is $66,739, while Brooklyn’s is a mere $44,850. Its less fashionable neighbor, Queens, outearns Brooklyn at $54,373 per year. New York City’s most suburban borough, Staten Island, is also its richest, with a median household income of $70,295...