Title: Solving New York’s Child Care Crisis

Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW. I'm Janae Pierre. For a lot of New York parents, childcare costs are shaping big life decisions. Today, we'll look at what New York State and the city are doing to make care more affordable, but first, here's what's going on. Mayor Zohran Mamdani says now at least 16 people have died outside in New York City during this period of extreme cold. He's urging New Yorkers to keep an eye out for their neighbors and anyone who might be vulnerable to the elements.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Conditions that people are living through. They are conditions that none of us should be comfortable with, and so we're going to use every single resource at our disposal to continue to build on this work to open up more shelters, open up more beds, and ensure that New Yorkers are staying warm.

Janae Pierre: Mamdani says officials believe hypothermia played a role in 13 of the deaths. He says the other three appear to be overdose-related. City medical examiners are working to determine the official causes of death. Authorities say they have helped more than 900 people move to shelters or other indoor locations over the past two weeks. Mayor Mamdani is pushing for higher taxes on New York's wealthiest residents to close what he described as a multi-billion-dollar budget gap.

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal warns the politics in Albany are tough, but he says the mayor does have a point. He notes the very top earners in the city of New York pay the same effective tax rate as the bottom 40%.

Brad Hoylman-Sigal: The top 1%, they earn $7 million to $9 million a year. That is a disparity that the mayor is pointing out.

Janae Pierre: Hoylman-Sigal told CBS New York that new corporate taxes could be one area where Albany leaders in City Hall might find agreement even in an election year. February is Black History Month, and the city is marking it with some free events across the boroughs. On Saturday, February 14th, you can join a guided tour of Seneca Village in Central Park that was once home to a thriving Black community. For a list of other Black History Month events, visit our news site Gothamist. Stick around. We'll be right.

The cost of child care is at the center of Governor Kathy Hochul's political agenda this year. You may remember during her 2025 State of the State address, the governor vowed to make child care universal and affordable across New York.

Governor Kathy Hochul: I want to partner with the Legislature to put our state on a pathway toward universal childcare. That really matters.

Janae Pierre: During this year's address, Governor Hochul doubled down on that.

Governor Kathy Hochul: One year ago, I stood on this very stage and placed our State on the path to universal childcare. Today I stand before you with a clear roadmap to show you how we'll get there.

Janae Pierre: The Hochul administration has pledged a series of investments to expand low-cost options for children under five. One of those pledges is a partnership with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to fund a free program for two-year-olds in the city and expand existing 3K and pre-K programs. Now these policies still need to be passed by the state legislature, but for parents like Jason Barney and Kendra Hughes, they look like relief on the horizon. How much do you think you're spending annually on Child Care?

Jason Barney: $20,000.

Janae Pierre: $20,000?

Jason Barney: Yes, I know it.

Kendra Hughes: No, more than that.

Jason Barney: Oh, yes, more.

Kendra Hughes: Yes, more than that.

Jason Barney: Just daycare itself, $20,000.

Kendra Hughes: $25, 000, I think.

Jason Barney: Then on top of it, when the daycare's closed because daycare is closed portions of the year, summertime.

Kendra Hughes: Probably $25,000, I think. $26,000.

Jason Barney: Maybe it's about $25,000.

Janae Pierre: This 3K program can really help you all.

Kendra Hughes: Totally, yes.

Jason Barney: Oh, yes. It'll save $25,000.

Kendra Hughes: We're very tight right now, so we'll be looking forward to--

Jason Barney: First one at the scene.

Janae Pierre: Jason and Kendra have a two-year-old daughter, and they'd love to see that $25,000 back in pockets.

Jason Barney: It's awesome that it's coming as a cost-saving measure because we do need to save, and it's very hard.

Kendra Hughes: Very much looking forward to not paying.

Janae Pierre: I wanted to know what these policies would actually mean for parents. I walked around Bed-Stuy at 7:00 in the morning, hoping to catch some parents when they had just dropped off their kids. We are talking about child care. Would you mind chatting with us?

Shania Francois: Oh, yes.

Janae Pierre: That's Shania Francois. It's a cold morning.

Shania Francois: Yes. Goodmorning.

Janae Pierre: What kind of work do you do?

Shania Francois: I'm a school crossing guard.

Janae Pierre: You have a little one?

Shania Francois: I do. He is two. His name is Seven.

Janae Pierre: Oh.

Shania Francois: He just turned two, actually.

Janae Pierre: I'm guessing that he's going to have a really big birthday party when he turns seven.

Shania Francois: Yes.

Janae Pierre: Cute name. Shania is a single mother. Her son, Seven, isn't in daycare yet, but she still pays for someone to help watch him while she's at work. She receives some help from the state through the child care benefits program, but she says it's not enough. How much do you think you spend on childcare every month?

Shania Francois: I say about $300 to $400 because I have the transportation every day, and then the food. That's during the day, and then after, when I come, plus his milk. Definitely pampers all that, add up. Then I don't even think she's getting paid enough.

Janae Pierre: I'm told that your childcare is supposed to be about 7% of your income. Do those numbers line up for you?

Shania Francois: No.

Janae Pierre: I got that 7% number from one of my colleagues, WNYC reporter Karen Yi. You'll hear from her later in this episode. She told me that childcare isn't supposed to take up more than 7% of your check.

Shania Francois: You also got to think, regardless if you work in a city job, a career job, anything, you're not making the amount to cover your expenses, your rent, your bills, and bills trickle down to a bunch of other things. You got the phone bill, you got the WI fi. Then your child also is another bill too with their expenses. No, it would never.

Janae Pierre: The parents I talk to, they're definitely paying more than 7%. You're saying to me that you're paying $2,500 a month. That is more than 7% of your income.

Orit Smith: Just so you know, that's on the lower end of what the prices are around here because we looked for more, and there's other places that go up to $3,600 a month.

Janae Pierre: That's Orit Smith. Right now, her and her partner spend $2,500 a month on childcare for their 20-month-old daughter.

Orit Smith: There's programs like Head Start for low-income families, but not everybody qualifies for that. Even if you're two working parents, you're still going to pay a lot, especially if you don't have help from family. We don't have help from family.

Janae Pierre: You don't have a village here.

Orit Smith: No.

Janae Pierre: That sucks. I'm sorry to hear that.

Orit Smith: That's okay.

Janae Pierre: No village and no extra money falling into their account, she tells me. Orit says bills are so tight that she and her partner are reconsidering expanding their family.

Orit Smith: I would love to have more kids, but it's very, very hard when you have rent, car, all those things, and then you still want to pay for the childcare. We don't have a choice. Unless we stop working, but in that case, then we can't afford anything else.

Janae Pierre: There's a lot riding on the cost of childcare for New York parents. All money comes from somewhere, and the money you spend on childcare could be going towards a bigger apartment, or a summer vacation, or groceries and gas, but for every single one of the parents I spoke to, it's also affecting how they think, plan, and dream about growing their families. Here's Shania Francois again.

Shania Francois: Funny story. I want to have five kids.

Janae Pierre: You do you.

Shania Francois: I don't know if that's actually going to happen, because in this economy right now, no. Even with my job, I'm like, I'm making it work because growing up, you know how to make things last and save and make it work for you. You understand? Right now, no. I don't think right now, having another child for me is not a smart idea.

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Janae Pierre: After the break, I'll talk with WNYC reporter Karen Yi about what you need to know about Governor Hochul's child care expansion plan. Stay close.

Karen Yi: We pay $13 an hour, but when I enrolled my son, I actually went to look for daycares when I was pregnant because I had heard that you had to get on a wait list, and it was just very hard to find a spot. At the time, it was $12 an hour, but by the time we enrolled my son, it went up to $13 an hour. It would have been 25k at that rate, but I think it's actually more. I'm actually scared to do the math because I don't want to think about it.

Janae Pierre: No, do the math. Do the math. Welcome back to NYC NOW. I'm Janae Pierre. I'm back in the studio with WNYC reporter Karen Yi, talking about childcare and just how expensive it is. You're doing the math now.

Karen Yi: I'm scared. $13 an hour times eight times five times 52 weeks.

Janae Pierre: Oh, yes.

Karen Yi: $27,040.

Janae Pierre: $27,000.

Karen Yi: No wonder my bank account looks the way it does. No wonder this is such a triggering question for parents when I ask them. They're like, "Well."

Janae Pierre: We triggered some folks. Can you relate to any of the parents that we heard from?

Karen Yi: Yes, absolutely. The cost of childcare is just-- I knew it was a lot when I was a reporter before I turned into a parent, but I think once I became a parent, I really, really got it. I really, really understood it because it's actually quite a lot to navigate as a parent, because the system is like Frankenstein. It's all these little pieces, and there's Private pay, and there's free care, and then there's all these programs you may or may not be eligible for, and then you got to find one.

I think the other side is, as a parent, it is unaffordable, but as a provider, it's also unaffordable. As much as I pay for my child, that's $13 an hour. That's still less than minimum wage. The three women, they're wonderful women who take care of my son. They're doing God's work. They're taking care of this 16-month tiny tyrant who is a handful, and they're doing it for multiple kids. Arguably, this conversation that we're having is very important, but the most important job is raising my child, and they should be compensated fairly. There is a huge gap between "I can't afford to pay you more, but I know that you deserve to be paid more."

These workers should be compensated for the really important and valuable work they're doing to raise the next generation of humans. Then, when you get hit with that bill every two weeks, it just drains your bank account. I can totally relate to everything everybody was saying about family planning, having future kids. We cannot afford another child even if we wanted one. Children are just expensive. They just accrue all of these costs that you don't even think about, in addition to just the basic cost of care.

Here I am doing really hard work every day, mostly to use my paycheck to give it to other women to take care of my child. I think it's hard to accept that.

Janae Pierre: It's definitely hard. A few weeks back, we talked about affordability here in New York City, but specifically housing affordability. You're not even talking about your rent right now. This is just childcare.

Karen Yi: Childcare is like another rent. It's an untouchable. You issue your rent check so you have a place to live, and you issue your childcare check so you can go to work to make money to pay your rent and then pay your childcare. It is a huge portion of our budget. I'm scared to do the math, but we pay-- What did we say earlier?

Janae Pierre: $27,400.

Karen Yi: Oh my God. $27,040. Sorry, give me the $300 back.

Janae Pierre: Take your $400.

Karen Yi: $27,040 a year. What is that every month? My rent is a little bit under that, actually, a couple of hundred dollars under.

Janae Pierre: Wow. What does child care look like for you these days?

Karen Yi: We have our child in what's considered a family home-based provider. These are smaller spaces. The art provider only takes 10 kids, and anywhere from infants to toddlers. What I like about it is it's like mixed-age learning, where I think if you have a more commercial daycare space, if you think about the big daycare centers, they divide kids by age. You have the one-year classroom, the two-year classroom, the infant classroom. My son is in the room with two-year-olds, and now that he's older, he's in the room with infants.

That's really nice because when we first took him in, he was six months, and he was the baby. He wanted to be like the big kids. He would come home, and I'd be like, "Where'd you learn that? I didn't teach you that. I haven't been with you all day." He would just come home, just learning all these milestones so quickly because he was exposed to these big kids, and he wanted to be just like them. I swear he's a different child at the daycare. He does not behave that way at my house.

Janae Pierre: Earlier, you talked about the fact that you were actually looking for a daycare while you were pregnant.

Karen Yi: Yes. The advice we heard from a lot of our friends who had had kids was, "Get a daycare spot early." I think I was maybe six, seven months pregnant. I made a spreadsheet, and a lot of them were like, "We don't have space for another year and a half. We'll put you on the waitlist."

Janae Pierre: A year and a half?

Karen Yi: Actually, one place told me, "We'll put you on the waitlist for 2026." My son is a year and a half now. Now I could have gotten that position, that spot. A lot of these places are booked because the demand is so high. We found a great location, one that was, if you can believe it, middle-tier. It wasn't the most expensive in our neighborhood, and it wasn't the least expensive. There was one that was a little bit cheaper, but the logistics of drop off and pickup, which is a whole other world, it wouldn't work for us if we have to get to work and come back from work.

Janae Pierre: I want to ask about that. When you're out looking at daycares, what are you looking for?

Karen Yi: My experience is probably different than many other parents because I had been reporting on childcare for a while, so I was a little bit nuts. I knew how to look up licensing for these centers. I knew how to look up their violations. I knew how to background check.

Janae Pierre: You knew a little too much.

Karen Yi: That's not the norm, but I think for most parents, what you're looking for, they usually will give you a tour of the space. It depends what works for your family. There may be cultural or language things that you're looking for. We liked that our center spoke Spanish, so our son can be bilingual and pick up Spanish as well as English. We liked that it was smaller and felt a little bit more comfortable as a home setting, because you are leaving your child there, often very young, for most of the day.

I was talking to other parents about this, too, and it's like you just go off vibes. We really liked the place we toured because they had all the kids sitting around a table, and they were playing nicely, and there was classical, or maybe it was new age music. I was like, "This feels nice. They have it under control." They just seemed like they ran a pretty tight ship there, this very disciplined but out of love MO that we really appreciated.

Janae Pierre: Before I went out to Bed-Stuy to talk with a gang of parents, you gave me a really good pep talk about the questions that I should be asking. You also led me to this federal guidance that let me know that childcare should be 7% of the household income. In my reporting, Karen, I didn't meet a single parent who's spending 7% or less of their household income on childcare. Everyone, including you, it seems, everyone's spending more. What does that tell us about affordability in New York City?

Karen Yi: I think I laughed out loud when I saw this statistic when I learned about this, because it is so far from reality, from what most parents pay. I think at this point, every single parent that I've spoken to, no one pays within this range. I think what it says is that childcare just is unaffordable. It's this system that we, as a country, I think this is a national problem, not just in New York City and a New York State problem, haven't really figured out how to invest in it.

We've decided that for some reason, the public education of a child begins at kindergarten, begins at five years old. I think two different frameworks that I think it's helpful to think about childcare in is why isn't early childhood education considered that--- If we can subsidize public education beginning K through 12, why don't we subsidize early childhood education? It is something that needs to be high quality, that we need to pay people for, and that is very important to a child's development, and considering that as one framework. Then the other framework that I heard recently is think about it as infrastructure.

We don't all necessarily have to individually pay for the roads we drive on or the trains we take. Similarly, child care as this service that we all need, it's for the sake of our economy. We need child care in order to go work and do our jobs and actually help drive and grow our local economy. Yet to work, we have to pay other people to take care of our children. I think those two frameworks are really helpful to think about, why should child care be something that is subsidized and universal?

Janae Pierre: Also, a lot of people that I talked to said that the cost of childcare is impacting the way they think about their future. This guy, Jason Barney, who we heard from at the top, he was actually drawn to tears when I asked him and his partner if they wanted more kids.

Jason Barney: I just got a little emotional with the question, just because you can't have more kids. It's hard. It's really hard to have more kids. It actually factors into your decision-making, which I think is crazy.

Janae Pierre: Parents make it happen, right, Karen? When we talk about having more kids, does that 7% hold if you have multiple kids?

Karen Yi: That, I don't know. I need to find out, but you do what you need to do for your kids. A lot of the parents that I've spoken to this really factors into their family planning. Maybe when 3K was announced in New York City, which is free care for three year olds, then that means, "Okay, maybe I don't get pregnant until my son or my daughter now is two, so then when I give birth, they can go to free 3k and then I'll only have to pay one child's care for my infant."

It's a lot of baby math that goes into figuring out how much longer you have to pay for this. Even in my own family, my son is a year and a half now, and I'm like, "Okay, we only have to pay childcare for another year and a half before my son can go to 3K."

Janae Pierre: Countdown.

Karen Yi: Yes, it is a countdown. How many more months? How much longer? I think it factors into other things, too. Do you take a job that's maybe a little bit lower paying? Do you maybe not take certain big trips those months? Do you think about how you buy groceries because it is such a huge part of your budget that affects everything else in your life, especially as you see all these other things go up in price? Food, rent, utilities, gas, if you have a car, subway fares.

Janae Pierre: It's a lot.

Karen Yi: Then I think ultimately if you can't make it work, you see families leaving New York City and New York State. There's been reports that have said families cite housing and childcare as the reasons for leaving New York City, particularly families with children under five years old. Like I said, you do what you do for your kid. If that means moving to Pennsylvania, or Florida, or Texas, or New Jersey, you have to do that.

Janae Pierre: You talked about baby math and parents considering, "Hey, my kid is two, maybe I can think about having another kid," but now with the first 2-Care program launching in the fall, that baby math can change for some folks. When that launches in the fall, there will only be 2000 slots, and advocates say that's only a fraction of the need. What does a truly universal 2-Care program look like?

Karen Yi: I think ideally, universal care means free care. The way the city has rolled out care for three-year-olds and four-year-olds, Pre-K and 3K, is a school-day, school-year program. What that means is the program goes until 2:15. I wish my workday ended at 2:15.

Janae Pierre: Me too.

Karen Yi: It does not. Ideally, universal care is the care that you need to do your job and have someone take care of your child, which means eight to ten hours a day. Right now, we don't have enough funding to do that for 3k and pre-K. That's a really big question that we have. Will 2-Care be just for the school day, or will it be for the entire day, what they call extended day, and will it be for summer?

Janae Pierre: Will it be for summer?

Karen Yi: Then you get into the whole-- I haven't gotten to this part yet, of parenting on a personal level, but the summer camp, the Hunger Games to get your kid into the summer camp slot. I don't know what that's like, but that math too. Even if you finally make it because your kid turned three, you got into a program that works for you, maybe I got to pay extra for the kid to be there until 5:00 or 6:00, then I got to pay extra for the summer months. The cost doesn't always fully go away. Like I said, it's like this Frankenstein system.

Maybe you get placed in a seat that doesn't even offer extended day because they don't have the resources, and so you got to pick up your kid at 2:15. Maybe you got a part-time nanny that can pick up your kid and other kids until you get home from work. Maybe you figure out how to work from home those days or alternate if you have a partner or if you have a family member. It is a lot of logistics, planning. I think ultimately in an ideal world, universal childcare would be a much more comprehensive system where again, the burden isn't on very exhausted parents to figure out how to make the baby math work out for their budgets.

Janae Pierre: Let's get back to the governor's expansion plan. What can you tell me about it? What does this plan actually look like for New York and for New York City?

Karen Yi: This was a plan to expand universal childcare to two-year-olds in New York City by this fall. There will be 2000 slots for two-year-olds, and they're going to start in "high needs neighborhoods" to start the rollout of 2-Care.

Janae Pierre: Wait a minute, what's a high need area? I could argue that New York City is a high-need area.

Karen Yi: Unclear. They could pick it based on various criteria. Maybe high needs because there's a lot of two-year-olds there, or high needs because there's an affordability crunch there. I don't really know the answer, too. That's one of the big outstanding questions we have for the administration.

Janae Pierre: Very vague.

Karen Yi: Yes. New York City will decide what are these neighborhoods? Then it'll roll out eventually over four years until full implementation. The governor says eventually it'll serve 30,000 two-year-olds, but there's questions about whether, eventually, it could serve more. She's going to fund the first two years of the program. It's going to be $73 million in the first year, if state legislatures agree and pass her budget, and then $475 million in the second year. I think there's still a lot of questions like we talked about. Is it going to be a full day? Is it going to include summer months? What are the neighborhoods?

Then another piece, we've been talking a lot about the parent affordability side, but there's also the provider side. They're struggling too. They're not making ends meet. They're not making a lot of money out of this business. A lot of them do it because it's a labor of love, and they've been in this for many, many decades. Will they also be able to get a share of these city contracts? There's different kinds of providers, some in school-based settings, some in center, commercial spaces, and then some in homes.

The question is, how will the city make sure that they're contracting with these smaller providers, so there's both continuity-- If my neighborhood is selected, I would love for my son to stay in that program. I don't necessarily want to pick him up, put him in another program for 2-Care, then maybe put him in another program for 3-Care, and then move him eventually to school. That's a lot of disruption for a tiny child.

I think there's a continuity question, but there's also a disparity question, like will these smaller providers that are overwhelmingly run by women of color be included in this contracting process, and will they make enough money to continue to stay open and survive, because many of them are struggling financially?

Janae Pierre: I want to get back to childcare workers in a bit, but before then, I have a question about just how sustainable the governor's expansion plan is. You mentioned that the state will fund this for two years. Mayor Zohran Mamdani was on a talk show recently, and they asked, "Where is the money for this going to come from?" I have the same question. Looking beyond two years, where is that money coming from?

Karen Yi: That is an ongoing question. I think Hochul, obviously, she's up for reelection. She does not want to raise taxes. She says she has enough money to launch this program with better-than-expected revenues, but I think it is going to be a tough question about if you have a bunch of two-year-olds enrolled in free care, you can't just take that away. That's not going to be good for her or Mamdani. They're going to have to figure out a way to continue funding this.

I think raising taxes is going to be one of the key issues and potentially the only way to make this a long-term sustainable program that goes beyond the two-year-olds and eventually maybe younger or eventually maybe reaching more two-year-olds. Hochul has said estimate this will reach about 30,000 two-year-olds, but I know there's other reports that has estimated it could be up to 55,000, 60,000 two-year-olds. That's almost double. That's just more money. A lot of more money is going to be needed for this.

Janae Pierre: What's going to be the biggest hurdle for child care expansion?

Karen Yi: There is a couple. I've mentioned this several times, and it's a very fractured system. It's very wonky. We've built childcare in a way where we've just added different appendages over time. You have de Blasio announcing pre-K, then 3K, now 2-Care. There are multiple streams of funding, federal, state, city. There's also issues with the Fed cutting back some of their funding. You have this very Frankenstein system that's reliant on different multiple funding streams. Then I think what's happened is the burden really is on the parent to navigate what they're eligible for, whether they can qualify for this subsidy or that subsidy.

We have a voucher program that currently has a massive, massive wait list of 15,000 families, if you can believe it. A lot of those programs overlap. Maybe you're eligible for a voucher, but you're also eligible for another federal program. Maybe you're eligible for an extended day program. It's just very complicated. I think the Mamdani administration is almost going to have to address some of the complicated, fractured nature of this to truly get a universal system that works for both providers and workers in the long term and pays them a wage that is fair and decent, and for parents.

I think the one piece that is missing from all of these announcements and all of this celebration we've seen in the last few weeks is worker wages. The fact that home providers, their take-home pay is $6 an hour is pretty shocking. This is usually the owner. They own their home, they're paying rent, their take-home pay is very little. Then they have to turn around and hire assistants to make sure that there's enough of an adult-to-child ratio. Those assistants make minimum wage.

Sometimes you have the owner making less than their hired assistants. Mostly these are women in the field working minimum wage, which is arguably, like I've said at the beginning, very important work. You are taking care of the development of children. That again needs money. You cannot have a universal childcare system if you do not have a fairly compensated workforce because no one's going to want to go into this business when maybe they can go work at Starbucks or Amazon, better health benefits, et cetera. You need to create an incentive for people to want to join this work as well.

Janae Pierre: As we wrap up here, Karen, the governor's expansion of childcare is one part of a multi-pronged plan to increase state support for childcare. As we look forward, what's next from here?

Karen Yi: The 2-Care plan is just the first step. The governor has also announced she wants to do universal pre-K across the state by 2028, or we can be in a bubble here in New York City, but not all districts across the state have free care for four-year-olds. She's also announced some initiatives for creating that pipeline of childcare worker. Helping them get degrees and certification, and training, but again, no one's going to want to go through that if at the end of the day they're just looking at a minimum wage job.

That's going to be really key moving forward to see if that becomes part of her budget, to see if in the future years to come, the raising taxes question if that's going to happen. Then I think the devil's in the details. We're going to have to see how 2-Care is rolled out, what that's going to mean for parents, how they're going to message this. Who is eligible? How do you apply? Can you stay in your current provider?

Then the other, I think big, big challenge is the governor has said $73 million for the first year of 2-Care for 2,000 kids. I think the challenge will be for the city, they're going to have one pool of money, which is the $73 million that the governor has promised in the first year. Now, if they decide to give providers more money to subsidize their wages, that means there's going to be less money to go around, which could mean fewer seats, and they've promised 2,000 in the first year. That's going to be the tension as we see 2-Care being rolled out across the city.

Janae Pierre: Paying providers more means that that money doesn't stretch as far.

Karen Yi: Right. It may not cover as many kids initially, but it may be good for the long term because then you're creating a much more sustainable system.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Karen Yi. Karen, thanks so much for joining me.

Karen Yi: Thanks, Janae.

Janae Pierre: What does child care look like for you? Let us know. Hit us up at NYC NOW at nyc.org. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening to NYC NOW. I'm Janae Pierre. See you next time.

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