My cousin and his wife had a baby last October. They gave birth to baby Ryan at a hospital in upper Manhattan, which is about a 1.5 hour commute from their Park Slope condo — actually, it’s more like 2.5 hours with the disgusting Manhattan congestion. In their new neighborhood of Bensonhurst, there are no real playgrounds, no grass or even dirt for little Ryan to roll in. Even in that lower income neighborhood, daycare costs are exorbitant. The air might be cleaner in Brooklyn than in Manhattan, but given all these things, the idea of raising children in New York is absolutely hideous to me.