Could New York Become the First Major City to Offer Universal Child Care?

New York City could well become the first major city in the country to enact a universal child care program, as candidates in the mayoral race line up to support it and advocates roll out a concrete plan to achieve it.

Four candidates attended an event last November where the nonprofit New Yorkers United for Child Care launched a five-year plan for expanding care: City Comptroller Brad Lander, State Sen. Jessica Ramos, State Sen. Zellnor Myrie and State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. Ramos has put the issue at the center of her mayoral run. 

Two other candidates have also embraced the issue. Former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has rolled out a plan to cap the cost of child care for the city’s families, and in a previous run for mayor he called for universal child care. Michael Blake, a former aide to President Barack Obama, has also said he supports it. 

Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who recently entered the race, is promising to make the city’s 3-K program fully universal; as governor, he secured state funding for New York City’s groundbreaking universal pre-K program and convened a task force on child care affordability before he resigned in the wake of multiple sexual harassment allegations.

“There’s a strong argument that New Yorkers United for Child Care has already won the New York City mayor’s race,” Lander said. 

New Yorkers United for Child Care got its start about a year ago. Rebecca Bailin, its executive director, realized there was no group dedicated to the single issue of child care. “It felt really insane that we didn’t have a constituent base ready to build power around this very critical issue,” she said. 

The group had its work cut out for it. Instead of working toward creating new early education programs, it found itself immediately leading the opposition to Mayor Eric Adams’s funding cuts to what was supposed to be a universal 3-K program. While the program is still not universal — despite Adams’s promise that every family would get a seat who wanted one this year, plenty reported being waitlisted — the mayor last year restored some of the funding he threatened to cut.

A Plan for Universal Child Care

Now New Yorkers United for Child Care is going on the offense with its five-year plan to achieve free care for all children at a cost of $12.7 billion a year, or 6 percent of the state’s current budget, once the plan is fully implemented. The plan would launch in the city and spread across the state, using state funding, perhaps through taxes on capital gains, corporations or high-income earners. 

The idea is to create an early childhood education system for children from infancy through age 4 that mirrors the K-12 system. The plan calls for a free, full-day program, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., to accommodate parents’ work schedules. Spaces would be within 15 minutes of families’ homes “because you cannot bus a toddler or a baby,” Bailin said. 

The first year of the plan would be spent ensuring that 3-K and pre-K programs in the city are “truly universal” and expanding them to other areas of the state. Year two would guarantee universal access statewide while growing access for 2-year-olds, and then later years would be spent on younger ages. 

Bailin isn’t waiting for lawmakers to come around. In January, her organization brought advocates, parents and elected officials to New York City’s city hall to launch a campaign for free care for New York City 2-year-olds, which it’s calling “2-Care.” They ultimately want to serve 60,000 toddlers at a cost of about $1.3 billion annually. Ramos and Lander both support that campaign, too.

Support from City and State Leaders

Indeed, the push for universal child care has found fertile ground in the current mayoral race. Both Ramos and Lander have children and dealt with the problem firsthand. When Ramos had her first child 13 years ago, she had to put together a “hodgepodge” of child care coverage “and it was just really, stressful to do,” she said. But then when her child was 4 years old she worked in the administration of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio setting up universal pre-K, and both of her sons got to attend. “That was really eye opening,” she said.

So when she was elected to the state Senate, one of the first bills she introduced was universal child care legislation that would create a funding stream to cap families’ child care costs at 7% of their income and pay providers at least $45,000 a year. That legislation has not yet passed. She’s also worked on expanding eligibility for child care subsidies so they are now available to families earning 400% of the federal poverty line, or $128,600 for a family of four. The state has nearly quadrupled spending on child care over the past four years, although it still only devotes less than half a percent of its budget to it.

“My campaign proposal is really building off of, or taking from, my state plan to implement a city system,” she said. If elected mayor,  she’s promised she would streamline the bureaucracy of the existing system, open more facilities, invest in providers, and, ultimately, achieve universal child care. As with Bailin’s plan, she would start by “really mak[ing] 3-K work,” and then move down to create a program for 2-year-olds and “get as close to newborns as possible.” She would start “on day one.”

Lander said enacting universal child care would be one of his top three priorities if elected. His other priorities are tackling homelessness and building affordable housing, but he said those initiatives would take a long time to come to fruition. Universal child care, on the other hand, “is the single biggest thing we could do to have a near-term impact on the affordability crisis that is facing New York City’s families.”

Lander’s first step would be to ensure the existing 3-K program is universal, something he says can be done in his first year with existing city funding. Then he would work with New Yorkers United for Child Care to expand universal, free care to age 2 and, eventually, all the way to 6 weeks old. 

“If you want to have a functioning democracy, if you believe in any meaningful way that every kid ought to have as close to equal opportunity to thrive as you can provide, and if you want a city where you can have a thriving economy with families working, publicly provided early childhood education is a linchpin,” Lander said in an interview. 

New York City can’t create universal child care on its own; both Ramos and Lander acknowledged funding will have to come from the state government. Bailin agrees, though believes it will eventually pay for itself as universal child care has been shown to do in Quebec, Canada. 

There are signs of interest in Albany. State Senate Majority Leader Andrew Stewart-Cousins called for “universal, affordable child care” in 2022. In December, Sen. Samra Brouk and Assemblymember Michaelle Solages published an op-ed also calling for free, full-day universal child care, and Sen. Andrew Gounardes included it in his priorities for 2025.

In her state of the state address this year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called for putting the state “on a pathway toward universal child care.” So far, nothing concrete has passed, “but before they weren’t saying anything,” Bailin noted. 

If a candidate who supports universal child care wins, Bailin said parents like those in her group will have to make it clear this is a priority. “This is what their constituents are clamoring for and demanding,” she said. “It’s our job to make sure that our elected officials are hearing from them.”