This story was published by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
Nestled within New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sweeping universal child care plan is a little-talked about step: In September, the city will open what appears to be the nation’s first free child care center for municipal workers.
The center, called The little appleis a pilot program that could prove to be a model for cities across the country that are curious about child care, but not ready to make the big universal move.
Housed in a renovated space on the first floor of the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Manhattan, home to more than 2,000 city employees, the Little Apple will provide free care to the children of full-time staff. All workers in the Department of City Administrative Services (DCAS), an agency supporting city government, can also benefit, regardless of where they work.
The center will be small – just 40 places for children aged six weeks to 3 years. To finance it, the city has budgeted around $1.5 million, or $35,000 per child.
“This is what Wall Street might call a good investment,” Mamdani said during a press conference announcing the new center. “We know that after housing, it’s the cost of child care that’s driving working families out of this city. »
DCAS Commissioner Yume Kitasei told 19th that the solution was born from a retention strategy, responding to the shared needs of workers. In surveys, workers welcomed the idea enthusiastically. One worker described access to free child care as “life-changing.”
This is probably not hyperbole. Child care affordability is a national problem that has only gotten worse. Childcare costs on average more than $13,000 per year nationally; in New York for an infant in a center closer to $21,000 on average. The cost of daycare now competes with housing costs because the first constraint on family budgetsso much so that some parents had to move or leaving the labor market.
The cities, for their part, were who have difficulty retaining their workers since the pandemic. Benefits like child care, which some cities and private companies have tried, can help address quality-of-life issues that push workers out of work.
“This is a great time for us to think: How can we make our jobs even more attractive to people and also retain the municipal workers we have?” » Kitasei said. “It’s a piece of this puzzle.”
Kitasei added that a “healthy” number of employees have applied for La Petite Pomme and that the department hopes to fill its 40 child care spaces. Anyone who does not get a place will be placed on a waiting list.
There is an appetite across the country for child care solutions that could help reduce costs for some workers, and cities are already adopting creative solutions.
Many already have daycare centers in municipal buildings or for municipal employees, notably Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia And Grand JunctionColorado, although none of them are as free as New York. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the county school district and nationally known local daycare center to create stable child care models joined forces with providing childcare for teachers in unused school classrooms. Boone County, Missouri is build a daycare exclusively for the children of first responders.
In the private sector, Google, General Mills And Siemens They closed the longtime child care centers they operated on their campuses in recent years, but efforts continue elsewhere. Patagonia operated a daycare at its California headquarters since the 1980s, a move it says has reduced the turnover rate of employees who use the site by 25 percent. Overstock.com also has a daycare on site at its Utah headquarters. Both are subsidized and not free.
“As cities in every region of the country compete with the private sector and other municipalities to attract and retain workers and elected officials, ensuring access to child care provides local governments with the opportunity to build a representative workforce and invest in the future of their communities,” said Quincy Midthun, outreach specialist with the Mayors Innovation Project at the High Road Strategy Center, a think tank focused on solutions to social problems.
The Little Apple, and New York City as a whole, reflect a changing political tide when it comes to childcare.
Announcements for universal child care in New York and in New Mexico over the past year has received a tremendous amount of attention across the country. Both places took an idea that for many years had been considered a pipe dream — treating child care the same as public education — and turned it into reality. In New York, it’s one of the few issues on which Mamdani, a democratic socialist, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, can agree on.
Voters are also hungry for solutions: poll after poll says spending money on child care is a solution. GOOD investment.
Emmy Liss, who runs Mamdani’s child care office, said child care is at a “political tipping point.”
“We are in a time where people across the political, socioeconomic and demographic spectrum recognize that child care is essential, that child care is something that families struggle to access, and know that the market economy of child care does not work without public investment,” Liss said. “We’re seeing a recognition of that.” »
With Little Apple, New York is testing what its promise of free health care for all looks like, but by doing it for its own employees first.
“If we’re asking people to report to work in person in parts of the city where child care is expensive, as it is across the city, I think we need to recognize that child care is an important part of how we keep people in the workforce,” Liss said.
Mamdani and Hochul have been working to make child care universally accessible to the city’s children through a phased rollout expected to be completed in four years. For children aged 2, the mayor announced that 2,000 free places will be available in the fall in four largely low-income neighborhoods across the city. Another 12,000 places are planned for 2027. For children aged 3, around 2,000 new places will also be added in the fall. The city has a universal child care program for children ages 4.
Universal child care, as Mamdani envisions it, will cover children ages 6 weeks to 5 years with a price tag of about $6 billion a year, making it the most expensive pillar of his affordability agenda. Mamdani should push to fund the program with higher taxes on the rich, a Hochul strategy was not on board because, although the State is bringing in $4.5 billion. Mamdani has not yet revealed what its universal child care program for infants and young children would look like.
How New York City’s program rolls out and its sustainability are closely watched by supporters of universal coverage, who argue that it is also an anti-poverty measure.
“We know other places are looking at us as we try different things, including working in Little Apple,” Liss said.
In New York, 21% of working parents experienced child care challenges in 2024 that forced them to forgo care or rely on inadequate child care, particularly families living in poverty, single mothers, and Black parents. according to a recent report from Robin Hood, an anti-poverty organization, and the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University.
On average, 3,400 children aged 2 and 3 were pushed into poverty between 2022 and 2024, in particular due to the cost of childcare, a separate report of the same organizations found. It is estimated that 4,100 2 and 3 year old children would escape poverty each year if they had access to universal 2nd and 3rd year education. This would reduce poverty for this age group by 9 percent.
Rebecca Bailin, executive director of the parent organizing group New Yorkers United for Child Care, said the issue has reached such a fever pitch that thousands of parents began organizing around the issue in 2023 and helped advance the agenda that was at the heart of Mamdani’s election.
Bailin, who has a 1-year-old, said she can now count on a 3-K program when her child turns 3 and probably a 2-K program as well — a savings of about $100,000. The 2-K program Mamdani is rolling out will also be full-time child care rather than part-time child care that ends around 2 p.m. like the existing 3-K program, meeting significant demand from parents.
“People are excited,” Bailin said. “People feel like they can stay in the city. »
The Little Apple is only a small part of a larger effort, but “if we want to retain people, we have to,” Bailin said.
“This is something we want to see grow. If municipal workers can’t afford to live here, that’s a real problem,” she continued. “It’s really critical. And we need this for everyone.
The article Under Mamdani, New York Will Be First to Open Free Daycare for City Workers appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
