Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll answer one of your questions about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from a few weeks ago. We’ll also find out why Mayor Eric Adams says public school students should take a deep breath. And another. And another.

In April, we asked what you would do about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — what you think should be done to improve the subways, buses and commuter railroads in the New York area and the huge agency that runs them. We printed some of your responses a few days later.

I left out one idea that came up more than once: Real estate.

The M.T.A. has a lot of property adjacent to subway and train tracks, these readers said, so why not sell it off? Wouldn’t that go a long way toward raising revenue for the perennially troubled agency? Wouldn’t that eliminate the need for congestion pricing on drivers entering Manhattan, or at least keep the tolls from being stratospheric?

And why doesn’t the M.T.A. have a real estate department that could have unloaded all those excess acres already?

I left out the real estate idea out because I thought it was a subject that needed answers from the M.T.A. Here’s what officials told me.

The authority already has a real estate department, it turns out.

But it does not have a lot of property that it could sell off, because it does not own what we think it owns.

The vast majority of the land around subway tracks is owned by New York City and leased to the M.T.A. under an agreement called the master lease. It dates to 1953, when the New York City Transit Authority was set up to take over what had once been privately run subway and bus lines.

In the 1960s, that authority was itself taken over by the M.T.A., a state agency that had also assumed control of the commuter rail lines to Long Island and the suburbs north of the city — two other “legacy systems” that were struggling financially. “They sold off as much as they could to stay afloat,” said Robert Paley, the M.T.A.’s senior director of transit-oriented development.

The M.T.A. reviewed what was left about 15 years ago. “We scoured the city for master-lease properties to see what we could sell,” Paley said.

They found exactly seven, “of which only two had any real value,” he said.

One was a triangular-shaped lot on East Houston Street in SoHo where the M.T.A. parked emergency vehicles. The M.T.A. valued the deal to sell it, to developers for a six-story multiuse building, at $38.8 million — $25.8 million from the sale and $13 million for a new lot on East 20th Street that was deeded to the agency.

The agency is working on a deal for land adjacent to a Metro-North bridge over the Harlem River in the Bronx and has done other deals that involved selling development rights, including air rights. It took in $17 million in a deal for air rights adjacent to the Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan, a subway-and-retail complex that connects lettered and numbered subway lines. The M.T.A. says that deal gave the developer SL Green additional floor area for 185 Broadway, a new building across Dey Street. But the M.T.A. retained additional development rights that could be worth millions later on.

The M.T.A. also consolidated its offices into 2 Broadway, vacating two buildings. One was 347 Madison Avenue, its longtime headquarters. It is has already received an initial deposit of $15 million for the site after designating Boston Properties as the developer and is negotiating a ground lease.

It also left 370 Jay Street in Brooklyn, which had been the headquarters of New York City Transit, the division that runs the subways and buses. The M.T.A. had “master-leased” the Jay Street building from the city; the agency turned it back to the city in a three-way deal. N.Y.U. moved in and paid the M.T.A. $50 million to cover moving out. So for the M.T.A., it was essentially a break-even deal: There was no added revenue that would benefit passengers worried about future fare increases.

Perhaps the most visible real estate deal in recent years involved Hudson Yards, the site developed above a rail yard on the far west side. The M.T.A. officials noted that the yard had been redesigned in the 1980s to make development — along with real estate revenue for the agency — possible.

The M.T.A. officials said they had also worked to take advantage of zoning rules that provide incentives to developers who connect their projects to transit systems. They credited that effort with putting $220 million worth of elevators, escalators and stairs under the One Vanderbilt skyscraper adjacent to Grand Central Terminal, tying in the subway, Metro-North and the new Long Island Rail Road connection.

“It’s a huge, huge benefit to the riding public, and it’s something that we could not have undertaken on our own,” Paley said. “We could never have acquired that property. It would have been way too expensive.”

Weather

It’s a partly sunny near 80, with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. At night, showers and thunderstorms may persist, with temps in the mid-60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

Suspended today (Eid al-Adha).

The latest New York news

Jeffrey Epstein’s death: Nearly four years after the financier charged with sex trafficking was found dead in a cell, an inspector general’s report found that jail staff and leadership had created an environment in which Epstein had every opportunity to kill himself.

Civil case against Ivanka Trump thrown out: A New York appeals court dismissed the New York attorney general’s civil case against the former president’s daughter.

DMs from NYC: Beneath the signs in New York that say things like “no parking” or “uptown only” are incredibly specific handwritten missives: direct messages from New Yorkers.

Ready, set, breathe

An announcement from Eric Adams made me think of a joke I heard from an editor years ago. The joke went like this:

There was a guy who always wore headphones, no matter what he was doing. Even when he went to bed.

He met the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. They got married.

She asked him to take off the headphones. He said he would die if he did.

She persisted. He took them off and died.

After the funeral, she put on the headphones. This is what she heard: “Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.”

The joke came to mind because Mr. Adams had announced that public schools would soon provide two to five minutes of daily “mindful breathing practices,” something he called “a valuable, low-cost tool that is proven to improve mental health and well-being.”

“Two to five minutes,” he said. “Think about that. We’re not talking about hours.”

My colleague Troy Closson writes that Adams’s announcement came as some advocates and families are calling for a more dynamic approach to mental health for young people. One concern is the proposed elimination of funding for a program that connects high-need schools to mental health clinics and offers mobile response teams for students in crisis.

Adams’s announcement about breathing lessons, at Public School 5 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, also came as school districts elsewhere sharpen their focus on student well-being to address higher levels of anxiety, depression and self-harm.

Here in New York, the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, found that in the 2021-21 academic year, city schools were underprepared for the youth mental health crisis. Since then, education officials have made several changes; every school now has access to a social worker or a mental health clinic. Adams and the schools chancellor, David Banks, have also said that high school students will soon be able to obtain virtual mental health support.

But about the breathing.

“We think that it’s just, air goes through your nostrils,” Adams said. “No, there’s a science to breathing,” he continued, before closing his eyes and following a student-led breathing exercise.

He said the two to five minutes in school were being “billed as a requirement” but would not be “not forced on anyone.” But he predicted that students would learn something they could teach their parents.

“They’re going to watch their parents experience a level of stress, and then they’re going to say, ‘Mommy, daddy, just breathe. Sit down, mommy. Take these breaths and just breathe.’”

METROPOLITAN diary

Terrific coat

Dear Diary:

I was on a crosstown bus on my way to meet a friend at Lincoln Center for a concert when I noticed a woman wearing what I thought was a terrific coat.

When I got to the theater and took my seat, I noticed that the woman with the terrific coat was sitting nearby on the other side of the aisle.

I smiled at her, noting the coincidence in my head when she smiled back. We started to chat and continued until my friend arrived.

I just got tickets for another event. I’ll be going with my new friend with the terrific coat.

— Samantha Modell

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Johnna Margalotti and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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James Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist who writes the New York Today newsletter. In 2020 and 2021, he wrote the Coronavirus Update column, part of coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. He is the author of two books and was the editor of “The New York Times Book of New York.”

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