The Child-Care Challenge
The Child-Care Challenge
To expand child care, New York needs more space, more caregivers, and more government workers. It can only happen if the city works closely with existing (and aspiring) providers.
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Like playgrounds, changing tables, and choking hazards, day cares are easy to ignore until a baby shows up. Then, as the cliché goes, everything changes: when you’re a parent, child care becomes the organizing principle of your life, along with playgrounds, changing tables, and choking hazards.
Unlike these other things, child care is not simple. In New York City in particular, the way we take care of kids is less a system than a patchwork of very expensive solutions glued together with Band-Aids, popsicle sticks, and prayers.
This presents a massive challenge for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who has pledged to make child care universal and free for everyone from six weeks of age. There is no blanket solution that will solve this part of the affordability crisis, no matter how much revenue he raises to throw at it (right now the bill looks to be around $6 billion a year).
Even on the left, not everyone agrees about what Mamdani’s priorities should be; as of this writing his plan for pulling off universal child care is fuzzier than those for his other policies. The good news is that the $6 billion estimate may be on the higher end of the spectrum. The Fiscal Policy Institute’s Nathan Gusdorf, who joined one of Mamdani’s transition committees, said in an interview that his think tank estimated the cost at about half that, based on how things have played out in other OECD countries, with the bulk of the funds going to enrolling more kids and better compensating workers.
The first socialist mayor of New York in decades still has hard choices to make about what universality really looks like in a city that has not prioritized anything like it since the Second World War. As tempting as it might be to tear the whole thing down and replicate state-centric models like Germany’s or Sweden’s, it would be a logistical nightmare that would take years to implement, interrupt care, and put existing centers run overwhelmingly by immigrant women out of business.
To achieve affordability and universality in the time he has, the new major must instead familiarize himself intimately with our chaotic collage of solutions and put resources into making them more affordable, resilient, and dignified. Much like his advocacy on behalf of bodega owners and cab drivers, that will involve working closely with small (and larger) child-care businesses that, against many odds, make the city run every day.
“Parents are tourists in this industry,” said Jaime-Jin Lewis, a longtime child-care advocate who won the David Prize in 2021 for her COVID-era child-care hotline. Lewis now runs the start-up Wiggle Room, which aims to streamline administrative burdens for day cares. “Providers are the locals, and if you want to build infrastructure that keeps families from leaving the city and gives them access to affordable care, we have to support the supply of care,” Lewis said. “That’s the piece I don’t hear as loudly as I’d like to hear.”
Lewis, whose mother ran a day care for thirty years, believes preserving the city’s small, home-based programs is key because these institutions are culturally and linguistically diverse, serving and employing the very communities the Mamdani campaign worked so hard to reach. The new administration must cultivate trust with these providers and, crucially, make sure they benefit from whatever funding expansion occurs—even if they’re small, scrappy, and under the radar.
That’s obviously not the easy route. It will be tempting (and probably more efficient) to implement citywide changes by enlisting the biggest child-care providers—schools, large day-care centers, and organizations that already receive funding—to lead the charge. But as that happens, the administration should not forget smaller providers, who have played a huge role in keeping the city running and who support and employ women from immigrant communities in all five boroughs. To help families, providers, and kids in our piecemeal system, funding must make it all the way to the bottom.
It might be too obvious to state, but child care is important because without it, people can’t do their other jobs—whether they involve construction work, teaching, or spending nine hours a day sending emails. Child care is important because without it, women tend to leave the workplace, and not by choice. It is elemental to an equal, feminist society. It’s also important because it creates a place for children to learn, play, and thrive as they grow. Child care is infrastructure; it’s also community.
Currently, parents spend an average of $22,500 a year on care in New York City (that’s for one kid, by the way). A couple would need to bring in upward of $300,000 for it to be deemed affordable. There are assistance programs to help New Yorkers making under 85 percent of the state median income cover the cost, but they’re means-tested, constantly imperiled by cuts, and don’t go nearly far enough.
It’s not just the middle class getting squeezed, or working moms not going back to their careers because of the price tag. Have you ever wondered why the women selling candy on the subway have kids strapped to their backs? That’s also a child-care problem. There is nowhere safe, reliable, and affordable for these children to go.
According to the state’s Office of Children and Family Services, child care for kids under five outside the home encompasses 2,262 “center-based” child-care facilities providing care for 143,276 kids, 5,569 “group family” day cares in residential units serving 84,851 children, 74,323 public pre-K and 3-K spots in school settings, and another 234,214 spots in standalone preschools (some are funded, others aren’t). A small handful of even smaller day cares serve another 5,000 children.
Some of these institutions are part of child-care networks that offer logistical support; others rent space from the city and risk not having their leases renewed; a handful belong to equity-backed chains; and more still are smaller local chains with several locations under one umbrella. The economics are tough. Margins in this sector are notoriously small; child-care workers are among the lowest-paid professionals in the city; and the rules around who can take care of kids, where they can do it, and how they can become qualified are onerous, sometimes to the point of deterrence. In other words, Mamdani is inheriting an unwieldy, expensive system.
Bill de Blasio’s pre-K expansion is often used as an example of what’s possible in New York. After five years of Eric Adams, it seems like a miracle. There’s absolutely no question that this achievement was desirable and positive for parents and children. According to Lewis, though, the flipside of the expansion was how hard it made things for smaller providers. When older kids transitioned out of day care settings and into schools, that meant even less revenue for the day cares. “Universal 2-K would be a death sentence to day cares,” Lewis explained, referring to an expansion in public school settings.
Currently, toddlers aged two and up actually subsidize infants, who require more hands-on attention. “I liken it to restaurants: the premium is at the bar, and the food you’re selling at cost. If New York said you can’t sell booze, restaurants will say we can’t run just selling food,” Lewis said. (Think of babies as the vegetarian pasta dish, and an older toddler the top-shelf martini.) The next administration should take note, not least because public schools aren’t equipped to handle constant diaper changes and naptimes as well as their counterparts.
What’s more, said Lewis, it’s important to think about “what is a unit of child care.” Is it a half-day? A nine-to-five? A night shift? The answer can vary. As is, the school day for pre-K students ends early, typically between 2 and 3 p.m., so parents must either work shorter days or find a stopgap. This is difficult enough for school-age kids; public school may be free, but some after-school programs can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.
The biggest logistical question, of course, is where to put children—literally. Mamdani has spoken a lot about needing to freeze the rent, but the fact is that many home-based day cares pay market-rate and are subject to the whims of landlords who would rather have a quiet single person renting than a gaggle of rowdy kids eating, playing, screaming, and napping in the building for eight to ten hours a day. Mamdani should consider introducing special renter’s protections for tenants operating home-based day cares, like a longer lead time before an eviction; incentives for landlords to support them; and subsidies they can apply for to ease the rent burden.
The real estate question doesn’t end with finding an apartment, though. Finding a suitable unit that checks the many boxes the state requires of day cares, like fire safety requirements, tiny toilets, outdoor space, and emergency exits, is difficult and expensive, whether you’re working in a commercial or residential space. Retrofitting, permitting, and building problems can seem insurmountable given New York’s sclerotic city bureaucracy (especially for a small business), but there are models the city can build on to support day cares that want to grow to accommodate more children. Already, Mamdani is conscious of the administrative burden on businesses like bodegas; day cares are subject to all of these pressures too, and then some, and they could use help navigating the complexities of licensing.
Nora Moran, the director of policy of the community group United Neighborhood Houses, said that the material side of a child-care expansion will require all hands on deck with public agencies, but that it’s been done before, most recently with the pre-K expansion. “That effort involved very close coordination. . . . The alphabet soup of agencies—DOE [Department of Education], DOH [Department of Health and Mental Hygiene], DOB [Department of Buildings], FDNY—all had to work together to [expand] capacity quickly in a way that’s safe and responsive to providers and gave them the tools so they’re ready to go day one,” she said. “They’d dispatch staff together to go to day-care centers to make sure toilets were the right size, check the labeling of fire exits, all the things that can trip a center up from a health and safety perspective.”
“It feels like some of these problems are intractable, but we’ve addressed them before,” she said. “Government employees have an important role to play, and we can’t skimp on them.”
“When the city wants to prioritize getting a public building open, they’ll take an approach unavailable to any mom-and-pop childcare business: integrated project delivery,” said Eli Dworkin, the policy director at the Center for an Urban Future. “All the different agencies will get a temporary onsite office [where] you’ll have the DOB, FDNY, the DOH solving problems every day. And it works! When the city uses this method, they can meet budgets and cut time in half.”
That brings us to the money. It is simultaneously true that day-care workers are paid a pittance and that families pay far too much for care. This suggests that the free market does not, in fact, serve most people. As of this writing, Governor Kathy Hochul and Mamdani have been discussing how to pay for child care; a corporate tax hike might be in the cards, and the Democratic Socialists of America have been organizing canvassing campaigns to tax the rich. Wherever the money comes from, it must be delivered in a way that makes sense for providers and parents.
Mamdani has said he wants to raise wages across the board, but unless child-care workers are prioritized, there simply won’t be enough of them to support the expansion he has in mind. “It’ll be impossible to expand if child-care worker is literally the worst paid job in NYC’s economy, with median earnings of under $30,000 a year,” Dworkin said. “That really is the number one challenge of growing our child-care sector.”
Rebecca Bailin, the director of New Yorkers United for Child Care and a member of Mamdani’s transition team, said using existing child-care networks and expanding contracts for day cares to provide subsidized pre-K and 3-K can help fund child-care centers directly, which can both raise wages and lower fees. “We’re not starting from scratch,” she said.
Bailin added that no-interest loans for future providers; increased staffing at government agencies overseeing child-care centers, like the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; and easing the path to obtaining early childhood education credentials with loans, night school, and free classes “are easy things to address the pipeline so more people come online,” she said. “If you want to participate and the city says we want to invest in you, there are models for that.”
Mamdani’s expansion is likely to be phased in gradually because there is so much to do. To expand child care, the city needs more space, more caregivers, more government workers overseeing licensing matters, and a robust information campaign to make parents aware of their options.
This can only happen if the city works closely with existing (and aspiring) caregivers to add seats and space for the littlest New Yorkers to thrive. This initiative must be led by the city itself and include robust help for day cares navigating administrative matters, because the skills and competencies that make a great preschool teacher might not translate into filling out forms. “My mom is so gifted at teaching young people, and has endless patience for a three-year-old talking about a banana,” Jaime-Jin Lewis told me, but that patience hit its limit when she had to sit in front of the computer. “It’s a calling. To honor people doing this work for thirty years, we need to be looking at a system to mandate preserving the existing incumbent workforce and giving them their fair share.”
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist and Dissent editorial board member. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
