NYC's Department of Education has spent over $5 billion renting buildings from private landlords since 2010, often locking into long-term leases at above-market rates while gaining no ownership equity—a finding from a New York Post investigation of city contracting records. In 2024 alone, the DOE paid $236 million across 132 active leases, and one Bronx property illustrates the pattern: the city spent $52 million in cumulative rent on a building now valued at $29 million. The core figures are sourced and verified, but the headline frames this as taxpayer waste without acknowledging the practical constraints on NYC school facility capacity or whether renting was genuinely the inferior choice to capital spending—a context gap that omits the trade-off analysis needed to judge whether the DOE's decisions were actually wasteful or pragmatic given budget constraints.